Looking to upgrade from a GTX660, budget under £300

[Danthafodder]

Hey, so I built my PC about three years ago now and up until now I've been able to happily chug along playing most games at least on medium (okay, there've been a couple of times when I've had to go a bit lower, sure) and so I was dealing with it okay. I'm now getting to the stage where I really need to upgrade, but I'm not sure whether I should wait until the new line of Pascal cards come out so that I can get an existing card for a lower price and thus get a higher model.

I'm looking at getting either a GTX960 4GB, or a GTX970, basically as good as I can go for under £300. I would be willing to move over to AMD, I recently did so with my CPU, but I'd be scared to move away from the constant updates Nvidia push through and the optimisations for the latest games. We all know that for the vast majority of AAA PC games Nvidia make deals with devils to get optimisation.

Anyways, the TL;DR question is; should I upgrade now to a GTX960/970 (4GB), or should I wait until Pascal starts rolling out and hope for a better deal on a better card?

Thanks in advance,

Danny

p.s. Obviously I live in the UK given the currency, heh

 

[Forever Oleg]

GTX 660 is not THAT bad.

I am sure you can wait until Pascal and see what it has to offer. I am sure there will be at least one card that will be under 300 pounds or around that mark.

 

[Minky7]

I agree with Forever Oleg, and to add to it if the pascal cards are too expensive or not that great it should at least lower the price of Maxwell cards. But if you cannot wait the GTX 970 is around $300 (212 pounds) and is a great card, or if your willing to push it a GTX 980 (Around $400 or 282 pounds.)

 

[Minky7]

Also, amd tends to do better than nvidia at higher resolutions (not always), what resolutions are you using?

 

[SOCKIEtheMONSTER]

R9 390X- £299 (Amazing)

R9 390- £255 (Great)

GTX 970- £270 (Good)

I have seen some good deals on gpu's recently and have heard rumours about Nvidia releasing there next line of gpu's very soon so it might be a good idea to wait a month or two to get a better deal but Ive listed some gpu's under £300 pounds prices are from amazon, you could use pricespy.co.uk to try and find a better price anyways best of luck.

 

[Minky7]

Hey guys, thanks for the replies. I'm only currently running with 1920x1080, though I may end up adding a second monitor at some point soon. I have throught about moving over to AMD, which I did with my CPU a little while ago after swearing I never would (I'm very happy that I did).
I've found a GTX 970 V316-009R that is £164 from a site with a lot of excellent reviews, but I haven't been able to find much info on the card at all, aside from that it doesn't have any dedicated gaming or other modes, and that it has a slightly lower clock speed than other cards. It is around £100 cheaper than other 970s though.

I think that - with regards to waiting for Pascal - that I'll upgrade sooner rather than later, but then if I see a Pascal that I particularly like, then I'll sell off the new card for it. The 970 should still be highly viable for a long while at 1080.

I'm partly justifying the price of the more expensive 970s (that cheap one doesn't come with the offer) due to wanting to buy The Division anyway, so getting the offer would make it cheaper overall.

... That R9 390X does looks damn tempting though

That looks like a pretty good card, as far as the slightly slower clock speeds go, you could probably make up the difference with some light overclocking. The only concern I ever have with cards really is if it has compatibility with water blocks, which this one does, so i'd say go for it. I'm not a big expert though so I'd wait for the others to answer and confirm. Also from what i've been told the 390x provides like %10 better performance over the 390 which imo isn't worth it. If you plan to game across those two monitors at once then the 390 might be a good choice as it has 8 gb v-ram compared to the GTX 970 3.5 gb.

 

[Danthafodder]

Thanks guys, I appreciate the replies. I really do like the looks of the 390 and will probably go for that if I don't like the look of any if the Pascal cards.

I went ahead and bought the game separate so that I'm not tempted to make a rash decision in the mean time, so now I'm happy to wait a bit longer.

Hopefully the new cards are here soon coz I want some new tech!

Oh it's worth noting that I'm currently using just one 1080 monitor but would like to double up soon so that's a great idea Minky7!