That is how the R9 280 card comes - as stock. The GTX660 costs the same, as stock. I think it's a valid comparison, unless you have some reason to make special allowances for NVidia cards?
So, basically, we've agreed that NVidia cards at a similar price point are outperformed by it and that NVidia fit cheap, crappy cooling fans.
Glad we sorted that out.
Well, I have about 10 days until I choose/buy my next card and currently it's looking like it might be a GTX760 as they seem to be coming down in price and slightly outperform the standard R9 280.
Depends what deal I can get on the day as all I want is the most game-frames per pound and if they are 20% more expensive for only 5% extra fps, I'll probably take the cheaper option and upgrade again next year.
Just hoping AMD haven't done anything nasty in the APU to stop the NVidia card performing as well as it should
Hehe - I do a lot of research. It was humour, @Blkout
I read Comp Sci at Uni 20 years ago, I'm an AI programmer, I've built all my own systems for 20 years now. As I said in a later post, I use whatever works and gives the most 'bang for the buck'.
Power consumption is rarely an issue, since I always fit Corsair 600W+ PSUs after having some cheaper ones fail on me over the first 10 years of builds.
I normally use Unigine benchmarks as they drive the cards best to show you which work well. It's hard to optimise your drivers for something that uses actual game video to test - unlike the '3D Mark' test which can be fooled.
Sample test of 2013 gaming cards with Unigine on normal DX11 settings
It will all depend on the prices at time of purchase as I can cope with the power consumption and, with Winter coming on, extra heat means I can turn the boiler off during the day while I'm working/playing on the PCs. (We have 7 of them for various purposes, the lower end ones built from hand-me-downs off the newer systems)
If anyone is going to talk about fans, coil whine, cooling etc... you have to also talk about who made your card and the specific model. MSI, EVGA, Powercolor, Sapphire etc...
Coil/choke whine is grossly exaggerated as it relates to GPU's. Most people think its the GPU that's whining when its more often than not the chokes in the power supply or on the motherboard. I've read some people on the hardware forums returning as many 4 different brands of video cards complaining that they all whine when most likely it was their power supply or motherboard causing the problem. That being said, the fans that are used on the Titan blower style cooler on most Nvidia reference coolers seem to be made by the same manufacturer and are very high quality. You never read about the fans dying or making loud noises but there's tons of AMD cards on eBay with non-working fans or loud squealing fans and its most likely because they're using the same manufacturer for their fans too but not the same as Nvidia's since its a different style fans. The Nvidia reference cooler uses a squirrel cage type fan and the AMD's use a standard type fan.
I don't know what you are getting at with this.
I am just saying if anyone is going to say anything good or bad about AMD or Nvidia they need to be specific as to the card and model they are referring(MSI, EVGA, Powercolor, Sapphire etc...)
Both AMD and Nvidia cards are great.