GTX 780 or an R9 290/x

ZeroInfinity94

New member
Hello guys.
Time has FINALLY come where I have the money to buy myself a new graphics card. Well I say new am gonna get it off eBay.
Now my question is which performs better the GTX 780 or R9 290 or R9 290X or R9 380?
Games I play are The Witcher series, Assassins Creed series, Borderlands 2, Dragonage Inquisition.
I have a sinlge 1080P monitor and an auxiliary monitor which I have no idea what the resolution is but it's not 1080.
Why a flagship last gen card? they are cheap on eBay and it must be nice knowing you have the power there to play pretty much anything on high settings.

Cheers guys.
 
Hello...R9 290X is best choice buy it and overclock it you have tutorials great card...you will have 1 more GB of vram and thats important..Kepler is already gimped with only 3gb and also abandoned in drivers in terms of true fps inprovements..and i hope that you have great high quallity branded PSU
 
290. It'll last you longer. You may play games that favor nVidia cards but you'll not run into vram issues. If you can bag one with a decent cooler (aka not an ASUS or reference card) you'll be able to get decent thermal performance/noise. If you want to aim for a particular one, try and get an 8gb Sapphire Vapor-X 290X or an MSI Lightning. If not Sapphire, Powercolor and Club 3D are worth looking at.
 
I have an XFX 650watt, its 80+ bronze. as far as OC'ing am not gong to do it yet, I need to sort the rest of my system out first, get an i5 and a new PSU.
 
id say 290 personally..
takes a bit of bios tweaking and water cooling to get a 780 to its full potential. and even then its only really on par with a stock 970 but with less ram.
so id say 290 if they are the same price or there about.
if you can throw the money in to the water cooling a overclocked 780 will be a lot faster than a 290 even with less ram But again you can over clock the 290 any way, but i doubt to the same lvls as a 780.

the 780 is slightly faster. dx 12 if it ever comes along should favour the 290 though and it has more ram.. So thats 2 points for the 290 and 1 for the 780
 
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290 it is then, I am bidding on one on eBay currently at £155 so if I can get it for less than £200 I would be happy if not I will get a 780 only asking £160 for the Gigabyte windforce one and to be honest am only going to be using it for 1080p displays.
Will my PSU be enough though I wonder its 650watt.
 
290 it is then, I am bidding on one on eBay currently at £155 so if I can get it for less than £200 I would be happy if not I will get a 780 only asking £160 for the Gigabyte windforce one and to be honest am only going to be using it for 1080p displays.
Will my PSU be enough though I wonder its 650watt.

Which 290 is it? I'd not spend more than £120 on a reference (blower) style card as you'd need to by another cooling solution for it.
 
Which 290 is it? I'd not spend more than £120 on a reference (blower) style card as you'd need to by another cooling solution for it.

It's an ASUS DCU2 OC one, the cooling on it really doesn't bother me too much now as am going to be getting myself a custom loop sorted soon.
 
id say 290 personally..
takes a bit of bios tweaking and water cooling to get a 780 to its full potential. and even then its only really on par with a stock 970 but with less ram.
so id say 290 if they are the same price or there about.
if you can throw the money in to the water cooling a overclocked 780 will be a lot faster than a 290 even with less ram But again you can over clock the 290 any way, but i doubt to the same lvls as a 780.

the 780 is slightly faster. dx 12 if it ever comes along should favour the 290 though and it has more ram.. So thats 2 points for the 290 and 1 for the 780

The 780 can be as fast as you like but running on crippled drivers you're screwed.

I came from two Titan Blacks and modern drivers were incredibly suspicious at least. A couple of modern games (inc Witcher 3) ran like slop.

At least with the 290 it's got the same core and works in the same way as a 390.
 
I have a reference 290X and have had countless 780's and 780Ti's, with my friends cards too probably just about every version.

780's are always great cards with practically any cooler they are refined quality solutions. The same really can't be said for 290/290X's, on air the reference card is terrible, everything else is mediocre, basically only the Lightning and Vapor-X are worth considering.

For watercooling it's a slightly different story as all of the issues with the 290X are alleviated, they can actually clock pretty well and they suddenly shine through as a good solution. Having said that 780's respond incredibly well too. They both seem like sorted solutions for a wide variety of games. If you only have one card then the 3GB vs. 4GB argument is irrelevant in my opinion because neither will have enough power to utilize it all unless you like playing at 8k DSR with 5fps. If you had two it may be a different story, having said that I have 3 780's and still managed to find well balanced settings in nearly every game.

From a power consumption perspective either would be fine with a 650W PSU, however when it comes to serious overclocking and over-voltage it's pretty hard to distinguish them on power draw, 780's quickly step up to the same level as a 290X when you push them.

Go with whichever package makes the most sense, if you only want to use it for watercooling then a reference 290X and block make a great cheap pairing. If you may use it on air then the nVidia makes more sense in my opinion as i'm sure tracking down a 290X Lighting or Vapor-X isn't too easy and then they will be much harder to get blocks for. By contrast a reference 780 should be super cheap to get blocks for as they are common PCB with the 780Ti and Titan which all sold in huge numbers.

If you truly care about performance and price then watercooling isn't the best approach, just get a better more current card. But i'm sure you know that already.

JR
 
I know people diss the 290 and 290x stock cards but I've had one and it really wasn't that bad, especially when compared to say, my stock GTX 470 and GTX 480.

And at the price you can get them for (£130 or so) they're an absolute bargain. Sure, they run hot, but at that price you wouldn't even get a 380.
 
290 (x) over the 780, no questions asked. Unless of course you cant do without some NVidia specific feature.

The 970 can be a decent contender if your not considering upgrading from 1080p. Great card, just unfortunate that NVidia decided to cripple it the way they did and not just give a driver option to block off the last portion or dedicate it to windows etc.
 
Don't get DCUII 290/X

They had some serious dissipation issues since some heatpipes didn't even touch the rectangular core of Hawaii chips
 
Would have said the same, however OP appears to want to put the card under water and can source the waterblock.
 
I know people diss the 290 and 290x stock cards but I've had one and it really wasn't that bad, especially when compared to say, my stock GTX 470 and GTX 480.

And at the price you can get them for (£130 or so) they're an absolute bargain. Sure, they run hot, but at that price you wouldn't even get a 380.

They do run extremely loud compared with a reference nVidia cooler and considering they sit being held back at 95°C rather than boosting up to stay at 80°C it really isn't surprising that they got so much disrespect when the prices weren't so far apart.

JR
 
To me the block and custom loop will defeat the purpose of going a cheap last gen card anyways. You'd be better off putting it towards a 970 or 980 or 390x or the like.

Of course the lure of having a newer card right now you have the cash is very strong but I'd hold off if I could unless your current card just isn't cutting it. Honestly don't know what the second hand market is for the 390s or 970s but I'd certainly consider that before committing to a loop.

Just my two cents.
 
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