MSI or XFX

MSI is slightly better because of Core Clock, but i think theyre both really good. if i were you id get XFX, i trust them better

i plan on overclocking it anyway

MSI without a doubt. They've never let me down. I'm using an XFX at the moment and fan is screwed.

Sorry to hear that your fan is messed up.

Don't worry, it's just an old temporary card (1GB 4870) to keep me going until I get a proper upgrade :-) My 5970 died just after the warranty expired (third Sapphire that's done that to me) but I didn't want to grab a current-gen card and then regret it when I see what the 2013 models can do. So I'll play some less demanding games on the 4870 until GTX700s launch. Just played Dishonoured on it and it was awesome ;-)

Lol, i myself despise Nvidia. Their marketing has made me hate them. Same thing with GoPro but that's off topic. The 7850 is a great-ass card. I maxed out every game at 60fps average except for GTA 4 with the enb shaders. Far Cry 3, Skyrim, even ArmA II ran completely smooth.

Haha what I despise is singling out a particular tech corporation to hate as if they're an individual, but to each their own :-) There's this idea that AMD is somehow the 'little guy', despite still being a vast corporation with more power and money than most of us could ever dream of having. I'm a strong supporter of just buying whatever is best for the job (too bad there's often not a simple answer to that question).

It's interesting what you say about Far Cry 3 - Tom's performance benchmarking on it suggests it's extremely demanding (http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/far-cry-3-performance-ben...) but most people claim much higher framerates. I'm wondering if people are getting their own framerates from less demanding areas, or if a patch has made a big improvement. Maybe a bit of both.

It makes sense for Tom's etc to benchmark the most demanding areas to give a worse-case scenario of performance. I wouldn't want to buy something that looks capable based on best-case scenario performance to find that in the other half of the game it's laggy. I've seen this in a few games, Battlefield 3 for example. People claiming 60fps on hardware and settings Tom's got 30fps on. Worst-case scenario I think is always your safest bet though to be sure what you buy is capable.

I have not tried BF3 on the 7850, as it is heading back to newegg as we speak. By marketing i mean saying "oh, we're the best, thats why you gotta have this and if you dont you arent the best. Now buy this card, the higher price must mean its better" In reality my $60 6570 is matching a $100 560ti and the price difference only moves up from there. the 7850 is a rather under-rated card, it runs amazingly but most people blow it off because of the 50 at the end. AMD is just a better value in general, they dont market aggressively so they dont have 'as' much funding as intel or nvidia (im not doubting that they have a *** ton of money) I wish i bought one of their Phenom II series CPU's instead of getting my i5 because i could have invested that money to maybe a motherboard or a sound card or something.