500$ to buy whatever GPU you want. What would you get?

[Nezacant]

Hello everyone!

Lets say you were given a $500 gift card to Amazon and you were willing to spend about 50$ of your own money to get the best single GPU card you could get. That is the situation I am in. (It's a good situation) :lol: What would you get and why?

I am replacing a 5870 Crossfire (MSI Lightning versions) setup. I want to go to a single card with enough VRAM to mod Skyrim into "Oblivion". (Pun intended) I also run Eyefinity in some games with my current settup. I want to avoid Crossfire and SLI setups due to issues I had with Skyrim and Crossfire. ENBs tend to dislike multi GPU setups as does the game itself.

Here are the two I was looking at. Feel free to make other suggestions as well:

Sapphire Radeon Vapor-X HD 7970 GHZ OC 6GB DDR5:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0098HW0H2/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?ie=UTF8&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER

MSI NVIDIA GeForce OC 4GB GDDR5:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008MWLI04/ref=ox_sc_act_title_4?ie=UTF8&smid=A2L77EE7U53NWQ

Thanks everyone!

EDIT: Additional info/PC specs

ASUS P8Z68-V/GEN3 LGA 1155 Intel Z68
Intel Core i5-2500K Sandy Bridge 3.3GHz
16 GB DDR3

 

[alvine]

get the 7970. I have that card and I was able to play Skyrim with all the high texture, emb lightning mods. For skyrim mods visit skyrimnexus.com they have a very nice management tool that will keep track of your mods for that game, it lets you browse wihtin the manager for new mods and individually enable/disable them if your game is crashing for some reason


make sure to overclock your cpu to get the most out of that 7970 goodness

 

[Nezacant]

Thanks Alvine. That's what I was leaning towards as well. How you you judge the noise of that card?

I'm very familiar with Nexus. Long time premium member there. Best place for TES mods.