Gadgetory

hey everyone this is steve from gamers nexus donna and today we're looking at video cards once again that is a thing that we do a lot so this time it's a it's a buyer's guide from the bottom to the top of the best video cards out there for gaming and i'm specifically looking at the ninety dollar price range at the very very low end entry-level htpc level all the way up to 600 bucks for the flagship cards that are out there by Nvidia and AMD and this buyers guide really should be used as a tool especially for the holiday season but it it will extend into 2015 for relevance because we don't have new cards yet so this is still relevant until those new cards start shipping the guide starts with the radeon r7 260x which is presently available for about $95 that is a steal for the card that it is you it looks similar to this this is a 250 x and it will be able to push about low to medium settings depending on the game at 1080p now this is a card that's going to be lower TDP than other AMD devices but still higher than nvidia is most immediate competitors it's not going to produce the amount of heat though that AMD is known for with its 290x for example so it's not like it's crazy hot but it does require more power than what nvidia would require the 260x will play games very well at low settings should play most games that are not triple a massive graphics demos at medium you will not be playing Assassin's Creed unity or far cry 4 or watch dogs on this 260x you can play battlefield 4 on low settings but that's really sort of the extent of the higher fidelity graphics games that you'll be playing with a 260x it is mostly meant for ultra budget pcs stuff that's going to plain Lowell Wow Star Wars you name it stuff like that Skyrim grid games like that it will play very well as an alternative to the 260x there is the 750 this is a passive 750 which is priced at around a hun 2 120 dollars it does get a bit steeper if it's passive and this is really something you would want to buy if you have a very specific use case scenario for instance if you're building a home theater PC that needs to eliminate cables wherever possible this does not require any power cables it can run completely off pcie power and it's also useful if you want to eliminate fan noise it will perform slightly lower than the 260x I would recommend the 260x if you're strictly gaming on a very tight budget and recommend this if you have specific htpc needs moving up to next price range we've got the budget price range as we call it on gamers Nexus and that includes the Radeon r9 270 and the gtx 750ti and those two cards look something like this the r9 270 is a very high-performing card for the price it originally shipped closer to two hundred dollars but it's now a bit I was it was about one hundred eighty dollars 270x was about two hundred dollars both cards respectively are now about 150 and 160 so big price drop the gtx 750ti is presently available for about one hundred thirty dollars so you're basically looking at the sub 150 range you're looking at the r9 270 for 147 and the gtx 750ti for 130 both are very good the 750 ti obviously has differences in software more active driver updates although AMD is changing that very soon and it's got Nvidia's GFE and shadowplay which may be useful to you that said Andy has gbr which does similar things and they have drivers updating very soon that will update their software quite a bit ultimately what you're looking at is TDP and price if you don't care too much about the extra power requirement you don't care about the power cable required the six pen for a 270 then grab the 270 for 147 dollars if you can afford it because that is a crazy good budget gaming card and most systems at 1080 will be playing justifying medium to high ish setting depending on the game obviously your anti-aliasing all that stuff makes a huge impact on the performance but for the most part you'll be playing games like titanfall on high games like even Far Cry will play fairly well once the stuttering is resolved by Ubisoft and grid easily hi ultra and so forth the gtx 750ti performs very well also it'll play battlefield 4 in my testing at high settings pretty darn well about 40 FPS depending on your cpu and other components and that is very competitive with the 270 but the 270 hands down is a better performer strictly in terms of FPS this requires less power at 65 watts does not require a power connector at all and can can be put into a smaller box and it's just cheaper it's seventeen dollars cheaper so if you can't afford the jump from one 30-ish to 150 it's just grab a 750 Ti you'll probably be happy check the benchmarks on our website first to make sure it's going to play what you want to play but for the most part it's a good card all right now we're getting into the mid-range cards these are the fun ones the mid-range price point has suddenly become more relevant strictly because for gigabyte the ram cards are now seeing heavy using games specifically made by Ubisoft but I expect that trend will continue with the other triple-a makers very shortly and my testing far cry 4 and Assassin's Creed unity both use upwards of four gig of ram if you make it available that is not to say it's necessary that 4 gigabytes it will just consume that much memory from the video card if it is present so it's probably a good idea to start prepping and moving in the direction of higher capacity video cards for that reason we recommend the r9 280x as our primary go to card for the 150 ish to 250 ish price point and that's just because it's a very high performer it beats out the gtx 770 and quite a few games frame per frame and the 770 pulls ahead a little bit in some games like Battlefield 4 but that's about it for the most part they're either equal or the 280x out forms it a good a bit and it's also priced at two hundred dollars so the 280x comes with three gigabytes of video ram this is a gtx 770 currently priced at about two hundred fifty dollars for two gigabytes of video ram performs very well if you're doing things that are kuta based or compute based if you are a hobbyist youtube video editor or streamer and you use render and editing software that will make use of kuta you'll probably want this instead of the 280x gaming performance will be slightly lower but your production performance will be way higher than what AMD can currently provide for sony and adobe software the gtx 770 is still a very good card but at two hundred fifty dollars it's pretty tough to beat the two-hundred-dollar 280 x which really does outperform it in raw power then there's the gtx 760 if you can't afford either of those I've seen gtx 760 s 4 190 dollars lately depending on the sale and where you go and that is really a pretty crazy deal considering the card was originally a mid-range ER in the 250 plus range when it launched so that's a very good bye if you can't afford the extra for 280 x or a 770 at this one two hundred fifty dollars next we've got high-end cards this would include the new gtx 970 very powerful low TDP low thermals and great engineering design on the maxwell architecture and the reference cooler and AMD's r9 290x this one is much hotter it runs a very high wattage you can check all the specs on the website and the link of the description below but it pushes pretty high performance so it does make up for it a bit but in the article i say our go-to is the gtx 970 this is the price point where nvidia sort of takes the the market by storm for gaming because the value for TDP for thermals that you're cramming these bigger cards into cases it's time to start being concerned about thermals and for the performance of the 970 is very good it's really pretty unbeatable at 305 50 ish three seventy dollars for the four gigabytes vram version the 290x is three hundred dollars now which is crazy cheap AMD is definitely trying to fight back so it is very tempting to get one of these at that seventy dollar cheaper price point but honestly I would push you toward the 970 because engineering-wise is a far more sound device for the thermals the cooling and the software and drivers Andy does very well in the previous price ranges as you've noticed in this video but really the 970 will play everything at Ultra I've tested it it plays ultra very well for pretty much all games right now plays a CU l far cry 4 well can even play watchdogs which is saying something because websites is not optimized and you'll be happy with that card now if you're exceeding 1080p if you're exceeding single monitor use then it's time to consider something like the GTX mining or an SLI set up and the GTX 980 is something we benchmarked and it's the best video card I've ever tested on the bench for gaming in this price point is available at five hundred and fifty dollars plays everything that max pretty much no problem at 1080p and we'll play some games with DSR scaling to 1440 or 4k fairly well depending on what game it is and how intensive it is originally you will struggle with 4k gaming that's really not feasible yet on a single GPU you definitely need either a hive ram AMD solution for that or an SLI setup or something of that nature if you want 4k gaming that's really not the focus of this article but I would say that the 980 is the best flagship buy right now at the 550 dollar price point do note that is it's about a ten percent improvement over the 970 so the gains are small and the price jump is big it's two hundred dollars more so again top to bottom GTX 980 is our flagship recommendation the GTX 970 is our go-to high-end recommendation with the 290x trailing if you can't afford that price gap and you don't care about thermals in the mid-range the best card is easily and these are 92 80 for two hundred dollars because it's just simply an unbeatable price and the performance is on par with a 770 which is fifty dollars more actually better than the 77 need a lot of cases the 770 is what we recommend if you want Nvidia very strongly if you have use for their software or if you are using CUDA enabled applications like premiere Sony Vegas and things like that the 760 is what we would recommend if you can't afford the two-hundred-dollar 280x and or you can and you really just have a strong feeling toward end video which you should not buy that way but I understand that some people can get like that when they've been screwed by one company or another so that is an alternative do know it will perform significantly lower in frame rate than the 280 x but it's a bit cheaper and it's a good card anyway so it'll still play everything on high no problem moving down into the the budget range we've got the r9 270 for our go to and the gtx 750ti if you can't quite afford it or if you want something that's got a zero cable requirement and lower TDP finally the r7 260x is easily our go-to for sub $100 just I would honestly push a lot of you toward at least the 750 ti from the 260x or toward a 270 because the the performance difference is fairly substantial but there are definitely use cases for a 260x like an htpc or a low end gaming PC where you're just playing something like some low-end demos and things like that so it is something to consider if you're in that range the 750 passive would be the alternative to that if you have very specific htpc requirements otherwise don't get it because it doesn't perform that great at the end of the day compared to these mid-range and budget cards so that's all for this video please hit the link in the description below if you need more help and I will see you all next time peace you