My GTX780 died on me

[BinnZ]

Since yesterday I had weird graphic blanks while playing GTA, resulting in the game to freeze entirely and sometimes my whole system. I updated the drivers, worse. Checked game file integrity, nothing. Did a FurMark stress test on my GPU, immediate crash....

So I dug into my shelve with old PC gear and found my GTX570. Installed it, did the necessary updates, and the system runs fine again. Stress test, no issues. GTA? Yes, with heavily outdated graphics

Don't know what to do now... I don't have enough money to get a new GPU atm, let alone a new PC. Well, I can still play the games I want so I might stick to the old GTX570 for now. Glad I never sold it

Sooner or later I will run across a good upgrade opportunity. Ideas are welcome of course

[Art Blade]

wow, that's bad, Binnatics. Sorry to hear about that

Good thing: Christmas. Now everyone will have money and buy the most expensive and newest cards they can afford, and the industry knows it. Wait a little and prices will drop.

[LowPolyOWG]

Nice that you did a hardware test rather than contacting R* Indeed, old hardware can be useful 

Since you never had a pleasant AMD experience, I am not going to suggest that. It's either a GTX 1070 or GTX 1080. The 1080 Ti is mainly for 4K displays, unless you want to do 1080p at a constant 144 Hz refresh rate in games.

The 1070 Ti (yes, apparently, Nvidia decided to slightly cut down the 1080, degrade the memory from GDDR5X to GDDR5 and give it some higher clocks) is basically meh... You get better performance out of the box, but I guess you simply need to slightly OC the stock 1070 to achieve similar performance.

Prices for the 1070 ranges from 450-550 euros. For 100 euros more, you get the 1080. I know that Nex is looking out for the 6GB 1060, but that's a mid range card (you can run some games at high-ultra, but it's mostly designed around medium-high presets). The 1070 Ti improves the 1070, but you can't reach 1080 performance due to different memory. Reading articles about the 1070 Ti makes me think Nvidia did this because they probably got bored. So, either a regular 1070 or go for the 1080.

If you are patient enough, wait for Volta (GTX 1100 series) next year.


On the defense of AMD, their driver software have been a nice experience. Recent Adrenaline driver adds a statistic overlay similar to RivaTuner and boosting game performance on Polaris cards. They managed to get CrossFire w0#k in windowed fullscreen! CF/SLI is only fullscreen exclusive, but AMD managed to get around that!

[Art Blade]

 

[BinnZ]

Thanx GKID! I might consider the 1070. Still a tough price though

I've also been thinking to try to find a GTX780Ti second hand or maybe from old stock or something...
I wanted to not upgrade this system anymore until I need an entirely new system, but that would be an even bigger waste of money now... will see what January brings discount wise indeed

[BinnZ]

Hmm. prices here are roughly 80 euros difference between 1070 and 1080. I might go for the latter. I can find one starting from 550, several brands. And a card from KFA2 for only 530 even. Wonder how that brand got so cheap compared to the rest of the manufacturers

[LowPolyOWG]

You're welcome

On the CPU side, AMD went to war with Intel with their Ryzen CPUs and my current i7-4770K feels old now So expect games becoming more multithreaded thanks to Intel and AMD's Core(an) War and developers building their games around DX12/Vulkan

Next year, AMD will release a refresh of their Ryzens. Dubbed Ryzen 2 (initially Ryzen +) it should bring better performance and a small die shrink, from 14 nm to 12 nm.

Vega will be refreshed too, with Navi coming this year. I hope AMD can do something better, Nvidia and Intel have been the performance kings for quite some time now. Last time AMD had a success was with the R9 290X and any CPUs before Bulldozer.

The 1070 in my laptop is great. I don't run The Division on ultra, but it does a great job staying above 70 fps depending on where I am on high settings. Closed off areas goes up to 90-120 fps Being a laptop GPU, it might be a cutdown GTX 1070 optimized for lower power consumption.

[LowPolyOWG]

Never heard of KFA2. Decided to ask Google and I got this. Seems legit, they are an official partner to Nvidia Just like Gigabyte, MSI, EVGA and PNY

http://www.kfa2.com

Just make sure you have enough wattage on your PSU before buying a new GPU

[fragger]

I can vouch for the 1070, I have that in my new rig and it's superb

[LowPolyOWG]

 

You should find reviews of the various GTX 1070/1080 versions. The 3rd party vendors like to change core clocks for each card, giving different performance

[fragger]

I've "only" got 16 Gb of RAM on it too, not 32. It's still a whizzbanger.

[nex]

I would like to go for the 1070 but, at just over ZAR7000.00
which is close to double the price of the 1060 I'm looking at 

[Art Blade]

 

[LowPolyOWG]

7000 ZAR is about 4600 NOK. And the majority of 1070s here is around the same price

[Art Blade]

well, that doesn't make it any cheaper