Help with a new Graphics Card

Ensamo

New Member
Hi everyone,
Recently I've been having problems with an old graphics card that I've had in my system for about 4 months. I have the very outdated Nvidea Geforce GTX560 DirectCU 1, and most of my problems lie in overheating with certain games. i.e Starcraft 2 on any settings above low, Diablo 3 on anything above medium and World of Warcraft on Medium/High. On all these games (mostly SC2 and Diablo3) my card hits 60-65 celcius with my fan on 60%, anything higher making the noise almost unbearable with this card. Hence I spend half my time while playing anything monitoring my temperature and making sure it isn't at a silly level.

I'm a bit of a novice when it comes to details on Graphics Cards so I'm not really sure on what to look for when it comes to optimizing for these games. But basically I'm looking for a card within the £200-250 (about $375-390) range, and the main things i want from it is high FPS on high detail, preferably sustaining low temperatures, though I can deal with some fan noise - especially after owning my current card!

My other system specs are:

Motherboard: Asus M5A97 pro
Processor: AMD Black 8core 3.1GHz
Ram: 8GB Corsair DDR3
Current Graphics Card: GeForce GTX560 DirectCU 1
Windows 7 64bit
Any other necessary information I missed can be given if you need it.

So any advice anyone can give would be hugely appreciated as I really am clueless as to what/where to look.

Thanks!
 
I'd hardly call a GTX 560 outdated. I'm running a 570 myself.

In any case, you could always get a nice 7950 for that price. But if you want to stay nVidia, I'd get a GTX 670 or maybe even a GTX 570 if the 670 is too expensive.
 
Ah ok thanks for the feedback. One thing though: my motherboard has PCie 2.0, and i had a look at the Radeon 7950 and it says it requires 3.0. Does only having 2.0 slots really handicap me in terms of getting a decent graphics card, or is that not the way it works at all? Apart from that the 7950 or GTX570 are both looking like good options.
 
Ah ok thanks for the feedback. One thing though: my motherboard has PCie 2.0, and i had a look at the Radeon 7950 and it says it requires 3.0. Does only having 2.0 slots really handicap me in terms of getting a decent graphics card, or is that not the way it works at all? Apart from that the 7950 or GTX570 are both looking like good options.

pcie is like usb, they are interchangeable and work fine but a 3 and a 3 will be much faster, except no games use enough bandwidth to take advantage of 3 so gaming wise it doesn't matter.

i dont see what power supply you have, what is it? make sure it's a reliable one with enough wattage.
 
That's good news, last thing I want to do is update my motherboard. but my power supply should be fine, upgraded it a few months back to 850W. So ideally that should cover either of those cards (leaning towards the 7950). Thanks for the advice!
 
The hd7000 series are good in price atm.
I'd get the hd7950. The XFX HD7950 Dual Fan BLACK is really good for the price now.
and looking to this the hd7950 is a far better choice.
 
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