All of the listed cards will get taxed roughly the same. It comes down to the cooling solutions. The best you can do is to underclock the card enough to lower the temperatures and RPMs without hitting game performance. I run both of my R9 290Xs at 650 MHz core and 700 MHz RAM down from 1050 MHz core and 1350 MHz RAM. the difference is impeccable.
Also I will disagree with SirSquishy about DirectCUII. That’s what my R9 290Xs are, sure they CAN run quiet but when they do, they can run pretty hot. I’ve watched mine hit the upper 80 degrees margin. Asus imo dropped the fumbled the ball on the design; there’s no VRAM cooling from the sink whatsoever.
Despite this, my two cards perform out of this world. I can recommend them if you have good airflow. I definitely recommend Sapphire’s triple fan cooled AMD cards, though when looking at AMD. Any Sapphire card actually.
All of the listed cards will get taxed roughly the same. It comes down to the cooling solutions. The best you can do is to underclock the card enough to lower the temperatures and RPMs without hitting game performance. I run both of my R9 290Xs at 650 MHz core and 700 MHz RAM down from 1050 MHz core and 1350 MHz RAM. the difference is impeccable.
Also I will disagree with SirSquishy about DirectCUII. That’s what my R9 290Xs are, sure they CAN run quiet but when they do, they can run pretty hot. I’ve watched mine hit the upper 80 degrees margin. Asus imo dropped the fumbled the ball on the design; there’s no VRAM cooling from the sink whatsoever.
Despite this, my two cards perform out of this world. I can recommend them if you have good airflow. I definitely recommend Sapphire’s triple fan cooled AMD cards, though when looking at AMD. Any Sapphire card actually.
He’s not looking at 290x’s, or even 290’s, to play the game with his current CPU and clock settings. If he was to push higher then 1080p then he would need a better GPU.
The cards I listed work just fine with the DirectCU II. In fact, my 280x was DirectCU II before I moved my giant heat sink from my aged HD7790 over to it. my temps dropped by 10c’ and there is almost no noise.
DirectCU was just a recommendation, and to get a reference point to start his research on. You do not want to buy reference cards, as their Thermal designs are generally lacking. So the next best thing is something like the DirectCU or WindForce.
I could have been a little more clear, yes. The DirectCU II cooler for the current generation is pretty much all the same. All GPU contact, no VRM cooling.
As for reference cards… Anything that is not an R9 290 or 290X is fine. Slightly on the noisy side at times but still good cards. Any Nvidia card with the Titan cooler is a super choice as well.
I managed to rescue my 660ti (took out my broken card and set the onboard graphics card as default in motherboard bios – then powered down and plugged in broken card while still plugged into onboard graphics – windows booted and managed to get original bios back on – phew!)
After getting my 660ti working again I decided to spend several hours trying settings in GW2 to see if they helped lower my temperatures any.
I found that the settings that affected my temperatures the most were
Best Texture Filtering
Reflections
I have now disabled Best Texture Filtering (and forced 4x Anisotropic Filtering on the Nvidia control panel)
I have lowered reflections from All to Terrian and Sky
I changed anti aliasing from FXAA to none (and have switched to using injectSMAA v1.2 for AA)
My temps are now floating around 60-64 at busy times (which is loads better than the 78-82 I was seeing before hand)
Still think in the long run I might save for a better card – but for now I am happy with the lower temperatures.
Even release pricing (which is often higher than normal) is rather good.
Think I will save for a 970 at that price / performance ratio.
And the early reviews do definitely show the lower power and lower temperatures of these cards – which is what I’m looking for! Would be a monster upgrade in performance from my 660ti
Maxwell GTX 970 is THE best bang for buck right now if you can snag one for $330. When overclocked, and GPU overclocking can be easy, it beats EVERY card but the GTX 980 which is a complete amazing deal.
