NVidia GTX 680 2GB or Radeon HD7970 3GB?

Go for the 7970. And get one from Asus or Sapphire like my one, they come overclocked a lot and they're quite kickass. Cheaper and faster than the 680 aswell. (Especially a Ghz Edition).
Default 7970 clocks are 950Mhz, if you get a 7970 Vapor-X from Sapphire, they come with a turbo boost of 1050Mhz. It overclocks very well too. I have mine running at 1150Mhz without a voltage change.

If I were you, I'd go get myself a Sapphire 280x Toxic/Vapor-X. But if you can only choose between a 7970 and 680. Then get the 7970. You won't be disappointed.

EDIT: I'd just like to add, my 7970 is completely silent. I run it at 10% fan which is manually set, and my temperatures have never exceeded 70c(Which is more than safe)

 

This, this all over. Currently running a 7970 that I got on offer which, for the price, not only blasts the 680 out of the water, but has an additional gig of vRAM that'll certainly be useful a few years down the road. PhysX is good but not worth the extra cost. Also, if mantle lives up to the hype, you'd see significant increases in performance by going red!

 

I'm too late . But if you lived in the UK the GTX 770 costs the same as the 680 and offers better performance, also it have shadowplay and Physx. Also the 770 is faster than the 7970.

GTX 770: http://www.amazon.co.uk/GeForce-Dir...e=UTF8&qid=1383932077&sr=8-1&keywords=GTX+770

GTX 680: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Asus-Nvidia...e=UTF8&qid=1383932098&sr=8-1&keywords=GTX+680

 

This is an interesting comparison, you can select 2 cards and see how they do in different benchmarks:

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/GPU13/583

 

Um... ok. Thanks.)

 

First of all what processor do you have? And motherboard/power supply? You need to make sure that your power supply and processor are powerful enough for a card like those.

 

I can tell you this, buy the 770. Has more performance you will ever need for the next couple years. I was a big AMD guy and my 6950 did the job for the year and a half I had it. I bought the EVGA ACX 4GB 770 and its a monster of a card. I'm looking to trade up to the 780ti but still. 90+ fps on beamng max settings 1080p.

 

My Asus GTX650ti came with a program called gpu tweak, here:

 

@jackeo21: You can also download MSI Afterburner or EVGA PrecisionX. Works on every GPU.

BTT: I would also go for a GigaByte 7970 (non GHZ Edition) and Overclock manually.

 

The difference between a GTX 670 and 680 is almost unnoticeable. Its the same story with the 7950 and 7970. My overclocked 670 performs faster than most stock 680s and I'm assuming that will be the same for 7950 vs 7970. The only difference between 670 and 680 is a few more cores.

 

My 7950 easily overclocks to the performance level of a 7970, so that is correct.

 

what about fan noise?

 

That's neither here nor there between the cards. All up to which AIB company (i.e. MSI, Gigabyte, etc) produces a cooler for their card which you like.