gpu upgrade advice.....

[mauserr]

All my nVidia cards have had coil whine thus far.
The coil whine you mention about the GTX 460 and the character selection screen is due to not having V-sync on; I had it with my GTX 460 as well.
I personally would go for the more cost-effective r9 290x, but since you decided on the GTX 980, Gigabyte and MSI are probably your best bets. The MSI one is quieter, but Gigabyte (at least here in the Nordic region) have been nothing short of amazing when it comes to customer response. MSI? It wasn't very good in 2003 at least, no idea about now!

16GiB of RAM is more than well enough.

Yeah, I know. Once V-Sync is turned on the coil whine goes away. In the newer cards the coil whine is usually present with very high framerates or during benchmarks which push the card to its limits. Cost effective? When you are looking at the price alone, maybe, but then comes the long term power usage and those damn drivers. Don't look at the Swedish prices because well, he's not from Sweden and we don't know if he wants to dabble with importing from abroad.

[BicycleMafioso]

Yeah, I know. Once V-Sync is turned on the coil whine goes away. In the newer cards the coil whine is usually present with very high framerates or during benchmarks which push the card to its limits. Cost effective? When you are looking at the price alone, maybe, but then comes the long term power usage and those damn drivers. Don't look at the Swedish prices because well, he's not from Sweden and we don't know if he wants to dabble with importing from abroad.

Drivers? AMD drivers are better than nVidia's these days.
Beyond that, I still have issues with GeForce experience, and I know I'm not alone with that.
My GTX 680 whines even in 'regular' games.
The power usage money-wise is over-stated, since your computer will idle far more than it is running in full GPU mode.
I'm using Swedish numbers because they're so easy to look up. Only in marginal cases do they differ.
Using newegg, second lowest to second lowest, the GTX 980 costs 91.38% more than the R9 290X, meaning it's even worse. :P

[mauserr]

Drivers? AMD drivers are better than nVidia's these days.
Beyond that, I still have issues with GeForce experience, and I know I'm not alone with that.
My GTX 680 whines even in 'regular' games.
The power usage money-wise is over-stated, since your computer will idle far more than it is running in full GPU mode.
I'm using Swedish numbers because they're so easy to look up. Only in marginal cases do they differ.
Using newegg, second lowest to second lowest, the GTX 980 costs 91.38% more than the R9 290X, meaning it's even worse. :P

But then a second lowest R9 290X is slightly worse than the lowest GTX 980. The price is justified. That's the way it is with electronics, little progress with high price differences. Enough to look at the CPUs, it's not different. And judging by the amount of people whining on AMD's drivers and the market share I would be leaning towards Nvidia being the superior choice amongst people.

I don't really like how slow the progress goes when it comes to PC parts, but eh, what can we do?

[Deleted]

I'm running a crossfire r290x setup with a 4k monitor using the latest AMD drivers and been playing GTA 5 now since release. Its been good fun but if I am honest with myself, going from the 1440p monitor to 4k hasn't been as amazing a jump as you'd think. First thing I noticed was dam was it taxing on the system, before I bought the second r290x it was rather iffy, the second card helped iron that out a lot.

I think that for now, its 4k is simply to expensive to run for such a small yield, I would honestly recommend a nice 1440p monitor with either nvidia or amd mid/high range card depending on the budget.

[Xs]

I'm using Swedish numbers because they're so easy to look up. Only in marginal cases do they differ.
Using newegg, second lowest to second lowest, the GTX 980 costs 91.38% more than the R9 290X, meaning it's even worse. :P

PCPP for the UK has an excellent selection, time and time again I've been unable to find lower numbers than it can give me, give or take the delivery messing about.

[Artorius]

16gb is more than enough.

[Deleted]

have to say ive seen some really good benchmark tests and reviews of the msi lightning edition 290x card https://www.overclockers.co.uk/showp...7-MS.....would I really see `much` difference between a gtx 980 and this to make the £100+ extra outlay worth it. Im thinking I might go for a more affordable 290x as I really detest coil whine for one and your examples arent the only ive heard of with the nvida card and also less outlay on the card means I can possibly strech to a 1440 monitor as well......is the msi the best of the bunch when it comes to 290x?

[Blackmist]

http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html

Seems enough for telling the approximate power of a card. The 970 is still *the* value for money card right now. It's got the 3.5GB/0.5GB thing hanging over it, but unless you push the texture settings too high (so it was over 4GB anyway), you'll find the drivers hide the issue well enough that you won't care.

[mmokri]

2x GTX 970 for 4k.

[Deleted]

the thing that confuses me is the gtx 780TI it seems to be outperforming many of the other cards in framerate tests for gaming but then it loses out on all the benchmark tests.......is the 780ti a fluke or does it have some kind of boost compared to the normal 780 that puts it ahead

[mauserr]

2x GTX 970 for 4k.

I'm pretty sure you made a typo and actually meant 2x GTX 980.