My motherboard is an MSI (K9-MMV), and I can't say I'm really pleased with it. I've had a lot of hdd problems over the past 5 years I've had it, and discovered a few months ago they may be down to a wobbly SATA connector on the motherboard (I'm still using it though).  An Asus mb we got at work a couple of years ago (M5A 78L-M LX) is comparatively solid. Also, what someone said about the memory.

The near-enough nVidia alternative would be the GTX960, although it's around £170. It'd be a bit of a shame to go for one of the older nVidia cards now that this one is out.

http://www.tehforum.co.uk/forum/index.php?webtag=DEFAULT&msg=41006.2
http://www.tehforum.co.uk/forum/index.php?webtag=DEFAULT&msg=40900.1

Will either of those do?

That was me un-volunteering from doing Teh Awards 2008. Feel free to take the reins.

Ahhh, "however" should be 'whoever'. Just a little too subtle for us thickos at the back of the class Kenneth.

Have to agree with with Sergeuiuiuiu about the Radeon R9.  My experience has been completely seamless.  Games play fine across Little Blue's 3 screens with Eyefinity and in the absence of Hydravision updates, Displayfusion Pro sorts out per-screen window snapping & wallpapers.  I'm sure Geforce is a sound offer too, maybe even better; but I wouldn't write off Radeon out of hand.

Cool, I should be clear it's a while since I messed with one.

I have a stoopid GTX980 now for some reason.

My current system is:

Intel Core2 Quad Q9400
4Gb DDR2 RAM TBH
Radeon HD 4850 1Gb (Doesn't do DirectX 11, which is what prompted the upgrade)
1.5 Tbs worth of SATA HDDs (a 1Tb and a 500Gb) - tempted to go SSD at some point, but that'll be a later addition

 

I've just replaced an old first generation i5 cpu plus motherboard and memory with this because the power supply failed. I checked the power supply with a multimeter and it was perfectly obvious straight away that the 5V rail had gone trotters-up (it was only delivering about 2V) but fortunately I managed to persuade myself that there must also be a motherboard problem, in spite of the lack of evidence. This meant that I had to replace PSU, processor, motherboard and memory (might as well go for faster memory, eh?).

I don't do much gaming and get by with an incredibly cheap Nvidia G200 graphics card, so I have nothing to say on that front, but some things were a revelation. Being encouraged to overclock the cpu up to 4.7 GHz by a program supplied by the motherboard manufacturer (Gigabyte) with the click of a button in Windows, and still having it run at 25C under load, updating the BIOS from Windows as though it's a trivial change (yes, I know that's been around for years but not on anything I've owned).

All very fast and very stable - especially with an SSD (from on-button to useable desktop in under 30 seconds - that's better than my blu ray player).

Best of all, I discovered that the incredibly irritating hum from my case that's annoyed me for the last couple of years or more isn't a fan as I had suspected, it's an old hard drive. So obviously I have to buy one of those too.

Some maybe pertinent stuff here, a look ahead at Windows 10 and DirectX 12.
http://anandtech.com/show/8962/the-directx-12-performance-preview-amd-nvidia-star-swarm

In short - big performance boost coming, especially for Nvidiots.

Them Nvidiots on their Micro$haft OS.

I currently have a Radeon 7870 and haven't had any driver issues at all with it. Actually, I've been put off Nvidia somewhat since the bad-bumps scandal of the GeForce 8 range (and my own GeForce 8 which popped a few months after the warranty had expired). Not one of their better moments that, even though the issue is probably long-since fixed.

Seems at the moment as though Nvidia versus AMD for graphics is fairly even-stevens overall, but AMD have somewhat dropped off the boil when it comes to CPUs. My system is still chugging along with a 5 year old Core i5 750 in it. Still runs modern games smoothly with the details cranked up, so I've not felt the need to replace it.

Of course, by the time I read that, I'd already ordered the Radeon R9 that Serg suggested. It's currently sitting under my desk in a ridiculously huge box. I'm thinking about bunging it into my current PC to see whether it can cope, before I attempt the full motherboard-processor-memory-ectomy.

TLDR, but the big take-home message seems to be more about the massive performance improvement of the low-level APIs (black vs. red bars), which applies just as much to the R9:

Yes and no as far as I can tell. Early days, but it's a boost for all, but not 'just as much'.

If you take the top two cards as the current flagships then, DX11 gets a poor speed on Nvidia and positively glacial one on AMD. Then AMD have their 'Mantle' proprietary low level API which actually puts them on top if a game uses it... until DX12 when suddenly Nvidia is way out in front of it either way and AMD suffers a slight drop. And by no means a majority of games seem to support this Mantle thing anyway.

It's good news for owners of any reasonably recent card, I think. Fuck, this text editor.

Or as the article says:

I wasn't saying that the Nvidia wasn't a faster card, just that the benefits of low-level API (be it mantle of DX12) are more fundamental than the age-old GPU war.

Indeed it looks like AMD cards stand to gain rather substantially from DirectX 12, on average more so than the Geforce cards do.

I've just done an upgrade (to this is anyone cares) too so this is that one 6 month window every 5 years where I actually know about this stuff.

AMD cards tend to be better value for money (just in terms of FPS per £ like) and are the better choice if you're 100% certain that you'll never want to use Linux ever.

That particular card is the revised edition of the previous-generation's hardware. It's not the new architecture like the rest of the R9 family, it's essentially a reworked 7870. It's still going to be way faster than what you have now but If you can nudge it up to a 280 or 285 that'd be worth it since they are both the new architecture.

AMD CPUs are generally not a good choice for gaming. Most games, just due to the kind of stuff they do, don't make much use of multiple cores and Intel chips just have *much* better single core performance. DX12 will change that a *bit* but not enough to really matter. So if gaming is your primary concern you'd probably be better off with a slower-clocked Intel with half the cores, it'll actually perform better.

For stuff that *does* make use of multiple cores (compiling, encoding stuff) AMD chips are great because they just load them up with loads of cores/threads.

There's no benefit in getting the 1866 RAM over 1600 RAM. There's a trade off between speed and latency and after a certain point faster speeds make no difference (benchmarks demonstrate this really clearly). Having said that there's like £2 difference between the 1600 and 1866 so it's not a huge deal. I assume you're getting 1x4gb (and thus not getting the benefits of dual channel) with a view to getting another 4gb stick later?






 

I still just read way too many people complaining of weird game issues with AMD cards, like stuttering frame rates and the like. I was wondering if they still need rescuing with those Omega drivers I used to need to use waaay back, and now they call their own drivers Omega?! It's a crazy world is PC stuff.

I'm going to do that pc part picker thing because I keep forgetting what I've got. Need to re-learn to overclock my CPU as well since it's supposed to be good at it.

A 1TB disk? Bravo. But how on earth are you going to fill it?