Graphics Card Buying Guide Spring 2015

I don’t want to spend more than £200

Pricing is a big issue today; everyone wants the shiny new hardware, but the bank account says otherwise. The sub £200 bracket is a fierce place to be and is generally where graphics card manufacturers aim the mid-range products.

AMD R9 280x @ £199.99.

• Core Clock: 950MHz
• Core Boost Clock: 1000MHz
• Processing Core: 2048
• Memory: 3GB GDDR5
• Memory Clock: 6000MHz (Effective)

This is hitting the upper edge of the boundary, the R9 280x is a very powerful card and can beat the new GTX 960 hands down in a straight up power brawl. To find a match at the same price point, I’ve had to look back a generation into the NVIDIA catalogue.

NVIDIA GTX 770 @ £199.99.

• Core Clock: 1046MHz
• Core Boost Clock: 1085MHz
• Processing/ CUDA Cores: 1536
• Memory: 4GB GDDR5
• Memory Clock: 7010MHz (Effective)

The GTX 700 range sort of slipped under the radar, with the only big hitters being the GTX 780 and GTX 780Ti. Now that the newest Maxwell GTX 900 series has been released, it has significantly dropped this generations price. The GTX 770 is still a great graphics card in its own right, but slightly falls short of the R9 280x performance offering at this price point.