Best bang for the buck with $600.00

[Roxhound]

Greetings,

I had asked an SLI question earlier, but after reading more, I decided I might go a different direction.

What would be the best setup for the most bang for the buck for $600. It can be ATI or Nvidia, SLI or single card.

I normally run a duel monitor setup, but only use one for gaming usually in windowed mode and surf or watch a movie on the other at the same time.

Thanks in advance.


Current Hardware:

Intel Core i7 960 OC to 4G
Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R
18G Memory Kingston Hyper x
EVGA GTX560
GT240 for Physix

 

[ehanger]

Dual 7950's would be good but your processor might bottleneck not sure. You may want to sell your cpu, mobo, and video card and combine that money with the $600 for a Z77 board, ivy bridge cpu, and better GPU whatever those may be.

 

[geofelt]

If you are looking at an upgrade for gaming, then $600 is probably more than you should spend for an upgrade.

Your cpu is still an effective one, so I would not change that out.

For graphics, a GTX680 superclocked for $480 would be about as good as it gets: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130771
The psu you currently are using should be sufficient.

But... "for the buck" changes things a bit. The extra $100 may not be worth it when compared to a GTX670 FTW card: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130787

The dual monitor does not affect anything. Gaming will not be impacted.
I suppose you could market your GTX560 and attach your side monitor to the GT240.
I did that once, but found absolutely no benefit in gaming to offloading the side monitor from the main graphics card.

If you do not already have a SSD, my suggestion is to use about $400 on a GTX670, and $200 for a 240gb SSD. That will be large enough to hold the os and a large number of games.

If you are looking to win benchmarks, sli might look good. But, there are too many issues involved, and the real performance benefits will not be apparent when using a single monitor.

 

[antonisrsx]

+1 to 7950 CF
your cpu is fine!!there is no bottleneck !

 

[EzioAs]

^ geofelt +1.

His suggestions was the most sensible one in this case.

 

[bak0n]

I'm an AMD GPU fan but I'll tell you the high end nvidias beat them. I'd go with an EVGA 670 or 680, which ever is in your budget.

If it was the lower end I'd sit on an AMD all day long for the price/ performance/watt ratios. But since you are looking high end, its nvidia.

 

[Roxhound]

Best answer selected by Roxhound.