Need Video Card recommendation

I installed the Sapphire card and the new PSU yesterday, what a staggering difference !  Must go back and have another look at all my other games now. Cheers everybody !

Enjoy your upgrade 

General rule of thumb, always get the best one you can afford that has the best cooling solution and power design. The details on power design can be hard to find but generally google should be all you need to find it. A solid power design means the card gets more, more stable power and will have a better chance to overclock well compared to a weaker power design. My Gigabyte GTX 960 G1 Gaming for example has the same power design as most other GTX 980s and as a result was a phenomenal overclocker.

Sorry, I should've been clearer. I meant AIB partner brands - for example Asus, MSI, Gigabyte, Sapphire and XFX - who make their own versions based on the R9 380 GPU. These cards may differ in many ways from each other, so while the GPU itself will be the same in each, there may be differences in size, how many power connectors the card uses, how silent and efficient the cooling is, how easy it is to overclock, is the GPU factory overclocked etc. Prices will also be different for different models and the difference between the cheapest and most expensive model may be significant.

shane49 wrote: Man,I reckon I've read and viewed about a hundred reviews and comparisons in the last 3 hours, youtube and web based. This is such a complex arena with so many conflicting opinions, it makes me scared to actually make a decision.

Remember that benchmarking video games is not really an exact science. The results may vary a couple of % between runs even on the same computer with the same settings, so it's no surprise that different people running benchmarks on different rigs, different settings and even different drivers get different results. This is why it's a good idea to read through several reviews and concentrate more on trends than individual results or exact FPS figures.

By the way, I'd pay extra attention to GPU reviews that don't only report the average FPS in benchmarks, but also the 99 and 99.9 percentile FPS (i.e. the average of the lowest 1% and .1%, respectively). Some reviews are even reporting frame times. This is all valuable information since it will give an indication of how consistent the performance is and reveal differences between GPUs that are not visible in the average FPS values.

Edit: I see you've made your decision (I was went afk mid-post for several hours). In that case I'd maybe stop reading reviews so that you won't start to unnecessarily doubt your choice. ;) It is worth considering which AIB card to choose, though. Not all brands are equal. Have you decided which brand you'll go for yet?


Edited by PetrolHead - 23 Jul 2016 at 11:15am