R9 290 vs GTX 770

Now... I have posted about the CPU choices and before you comment I DO NOT WANT AN ARGUMENT ABOUT RED VS GREEN!
I just need it quick because I am ordering it in the next few days so before the 01/12/14. These are the rest of my PC specs:

CPU- Intel Pentium G3258
CPU Cooler- A giant server grade type thing that came off of a Pentium (probably)
Motherboard- GIGABYTE GA-Z97P-D3 (cheapest Z97 I could find that wasn't from some generic company)
RAM- 1x8GB stick of 1600 Mhz ram from a company called Novatech (where all of this stuff will be bought from as well)
Case- Novatech Midi tower case
SSD: Samsung 840 EVO 250GB
HDD: Seagate 500GB SATA II drive (funny story, my dad bought it to clone his drive from his ancient computer with a Athlon 2600 @ 1.86GHz and 512MB RAM @166Mhz and he forgot his drive was IDE so he couldn't, and it's been sitting on his desk for about 6 months now still in it's wrapping)!
PSU: Corsair Builder CX600
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate SP1

Now, for the bit I need help with...
On Novatech, a ASUS Direct CUII GTX 770 4GB is £220- http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/...rds/nvidiagtx770series/gtx770-dc2oc-4gd5.html
And the MSI Twin Frozr R9 290 4GB is £230- http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/...aphicscards/amdr9290series/r9290gaming4g.html

Again, I don't want to start an argument but I know the AMD will probably run hotter and I'm not particularly bothered by that, but I want to know what will get me the most performance for my money (which BTW I have a limited supply of).

Appreciate the help and for god sake DONT START A RED VS GREEN ARGUMENT OR MY CHOICE OF CPU (which is going to be upgraded to a i5 4690K or some sort of i7 next year.)

 

I don't really know what I prefer... I have never had a Nvidia card and neither has anyone in my family, I would ask my dad but the last GPU my dad bought had a TV tuner xD

It wasn't really a personal preference, just pure price-performance.

 

My preference, NVidia. I am yet to touch an AMD GPU rig which hasnt had problems with either game compatibility (for example some BeamNG mod maps have missing textures on AMD cards, AC Unity (god forsaken anyway) ran alot better on NVidia than AMD (still ran like crap), Far Cry 4 is supposedly having AMD stuttering issues and I think there were issues with CoD and Skyrim) or drivers that just want to crash or otherwise break things.
If you go AMD, do not force Anti Aliasing from the catalyst control centre, it makes the car transparent.

 

The 290 offers slightly better initial price-performance, but will draw more power. While AMD's drivers have gotten better they still aren't as stable as nVidia's, and nVidia offers extra features over AMD, but the only thing there isn't really a nearly-as-good alternative for on AMD is GameStream for devices like the Shield.

 

Got more significant adoption of CUDA than you have of Mantle too.
Although I prefer the adoption of OpenCL instead as that functions on both AMD and NVidia GPUs as well as a few other devices (PCI attached FPGAs have been demoed as OpenCL processors). DirectX12 is supposed to bring some of the few benefits Mantle has over DirectX11 or OpenGL and no doubt OpenGL will eventually get them too just to catch up.

 

My GTX-870m is very comparable to a stock 290 ( buddy has a desktop 290 ). That being said, why do people start threads with headers like "R9 290 vs. GTX-770"
and then have the balls to say "NO FLAME WARS!"?????......Silly humans.

 

Get a 970. The 770 is already discontinued, and the 970 is much better than both the 770 and 290 for the same money.

You'll have a huge CPU bottleneck though, unless you OC the shit out of that Pentium :/

 

Yep and yep, but where can you find a 970 for 230 pound sterling? The lowest I've found is a Palit blower based offering for £250, but being in the US is hurting my ability to search UK prices.

I hope the Pentium was bought with plans to upgrade it soon, I personally would have skipped the SSD for a better CPU considering some new games (Dragon Age Inquisition, Far Cry 4) won't even work on just two cores.

 

Well at least somebody realizes I cant get a 970! The MSI one I was looking at was about £290, which unless I ditch the SSD and just go with the SATA II drive, wouldn't be possible. Also the Pentium is only going to be staying in there for about a year or so, I'm planning to upgrade to a i5 4690k or a i7 4770k or 4790k next christmas, maybe coupled by a 970, who knows...



Don't worry, that Pentium doesn't even know what's coming

 

At least those pentiums are dirt cheap and over clock quite nicely. £53 I've seen them at and they can be ramped up to 4.8ghz on air pretty easily. Sure its only 2 cores without hyperthreading either, but that is an awful lot of single core performance for your money.

As for far cry 4 etc. Programmers write code to utilise threads. Windows is responsible for allocating threads to cores, not the programmer, the only say you get in the matter is how many threads the program has and whether windows should prioritise giving each thread its own core where possible (which quite often its not). If you don't have enough cores or the threads just need virtually no cpu time, windows just runs them 1 after the other on the same core. Far cry 4 will physically run on dual core systems, just with threads sharing cores which is never going to achieve Max throughput (although at 4.8ghz, I'd imagine playability would be achieved).
Your PC already runs 50-100 threads at a time when supposedly idle. You don't have 50 cores. Nothing explodes, hell, when idle I find my PC uses just a single core at low usage still, mostly as the default threads running for system tasks are pretty low demand and it is genuinely more power efficient to run 1 core at 50% load than at is 2 cores at 25% load.


Pentium shouldnt and isn't being chosen as a permanent option. Though it would make a decent CPU for an office PC or htpc.

 

Uhm...

The Far Cry 4 thing has been a known problem for a while. Someone did post a fix to /r/pcgaming not long ago, but performance still apparently leaves a lot to be desired, even with a substantial overclock. Like you said, at least the Pentium was cheap. I still think that an SSD should be the absolute final consideration when building a gaming PC, they can be easily added later without having to waste money on an inferior component you will not be able to use when you upgrade like a CPU, GPU, RAM or mobo and are advancing in price, performance, and longevity extremely rapidly, far moreso than CPUs or even GPUs.

 

seems game is set to seek thread priority on its own cores, people have noticed it only uses cores 2 and 3 forgoing 0 and 1 entirely. You can force the cpucount parameter to over-ride that, windows should also be reallocating it to 0 and 1, there is no method in win32 for ubisoft to prevent that legitimately.

 

It will be overclocked extremely until I am able to upgrade it, in a year roughly...

- - - Updated - - -

http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/components/processors/intelceleronandpentium/bx80646g3258.html actually where I'm getting it from it is £47! Yay! Also, 1 year until this http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/components/processors/intelhaswell1150/bx80646i74790k.html

- - - Updated - - -

OK, just to make things clear for everyone, instead of replying to every ones post...
1. The Pentium will be swapped out for a i7 next year, I wanted a cheap CPU that I could upgrade to something more powerful, hence the choice of a Pentium G3258 because it can be run on a Z97 board.
2. This is not a permanent GPU, next year or the year after I'll invest in a new GPU
3. I know this was going to turn in to a Nvidea vs Radeon debate, but I wanted to stay away from that for as long as possible.
4. Thanks guys for your help, response would be good in the next a day or 2 because black friday is around the corner (tomorrow) and I want to get it as soon as possible before it goes out of stock.
5. If one of my selected graphics cards goes out of stock, then I will get the other one.
6. If one of them goes on sale and the other one doesn't, I shall buy the one on offer (obviously)

Thanks guys and I will tell you what I have ordered when the time comes around...

 

Right, I have been doing some more research and I have found this for a very competitive price: http://www.amazon.co.uk/ADMI-DESKTO...F8&qid=1417191655&sr=8-3&keywords=admi+i5+970 I know this is over-budget but I have managed to save a £few here and there and well... I'm getting a i5 4690k + GTX 970. WOO!

 

A 770 is not really a temporary GPU. One of them will be good for the next few years

 

Look for the newest post by me...

 

Nice, but don't forget you'll be needing a Windows license somehow.

 

go2keys.com , sounds strange but it's legit, I'm running a copy of it right now on my laptop that I am typing this post on!

 

770 is weak compared to 290 (take only custom models like Tri-x!). Normally 770 fights vs 280x from AMD...
290 is the card for you.

970 - 90% have coil whining, so annoying, cheap stuff from NV.

 

I think the 90% number is exaggerated, as a person with whine. There was a thread on /r/pcgaming asking about it a while back, and the majority of commenters said that they did not have whine. AFAIK I was the only one in the thread who did out of 60something replies, and even then it's only barely audible when my system's idling and I don't have my headphones on. If the fans ramp up or anything I'm doing has sound, I can't hear it any more.

Keep in mind, if someone gets a good item they rarely go back online to praise it, but if they get a bad product everyone and their dog are sure to hear about it.