(12-12-2014, 01:59 PM)goldedark007 Wrote:(12-12-2014, 01:21 PM)KHg8m3r Wrote: Looking at the reviews, someone knows what they're doing and specified what the motherboard and brand of GPU:
"Gigabyte Z97-HD3 motherboard that only supports Crossfire, cheap Zotac GTX 760 graphics card"
So then is that good or bad? Z97 is what I need but you say that the graphics card is cheap?
GTX 760 isn't necessarily a cheap card. It's a bad card for the price. (It's a cheap card to an enthusiast. But that's because many enthusiasts spend a LOT of cash on their GPUs. The GTX 980 is going for over $500 right now, the GTX 780Ti was $700 at launch. Enthusiasts spend money on GPUs, especially when it comes to Nvidia GPUs. Personally, I wouldn't touch the GTX 760. Because I don't like midrange cards. I'd only purchase an R9 290 and only for $240 or less. Sadly, you missed the great Black Friday deals of the R9 290 being available at $200 which was an essential buy to any gamer who needed a new GPU).
You're paying an "Nvidia premium" for the privilege of owning Nvidia. Something Nvidia can charge because they have brand image. Similar to how they could charge $1000 for a single GPU (GTX Titan) or $3000 for Titan Z. Nvidia generally can charge whatever they want, and people will simply buy what's in their price range irregardless of performance.
GTX 760 60%
R9 270x 57%
GTX 760 performs 5% better than the R9 270x.
Price?
GTX 760 $170
R9 270x $150
GTX 760 costs 13% more than the R9 270x.
It's not a good price/performance ratio purchase. Most Nvidia products currently arent, Kepler (GTX 700 family) has literally been ignored by Nvidia in recent games. It's performance relative to the R 200 series of AMD GPUs has actually been dropping.
Furthermore, AMD has just released another driver improving performance. Many review sites did reviews on this and aren't showing amazing performance gains (at most 10%) but they've only been testing AMD's flagship cards (R9 290x). Some users have reported massive FPS jumps in certain games on their HD7000 and it seems the driver update effects midrange users better than flagship users who already have top end hardware.
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Would I purchase the GTX 760? It's a waste of approximately $10-12 to have an Nvidia branded products (I can explain that calc if you want but not really necessary). Since I make every decision mathematically, I wouldn't do it. But some people would spend that $10-12 to have an Nvidia branded product. Up to you.