Purchased as a replacement for Gigabyte HD6850 that, while still a good card in its day, was beginning to show its age even at 1080p with newer titles (shadow of mordor, for example) and was requiring quality-limiting settings to retain playable frame rates on those titles. Being somewhat cost-conscious and unwilling to spend the top dollar for top performance for what amount to being an entertainment diversion, I always shop in the sweet spot of price/performance. This landed me in the $190-$220 realm of the Nvidia GTX960 and the AMD R9 380. I've been a long(er) time fan and user of Nvidia cards... up until I acquired the AMD HD6850, I'd been exclusively an NVidia user. That last purchase, and now this one, found AMD to be the more compelling and better price/performance solution in the range I was shopping in. I wouldn't take a GTX960 over this card, even at a $15 or $20 savings. The GTX960 is a very small tad down the food chain in overall performance and, for me and for buying in the price/performance curve that I was, that tad was plenty enough separation to continue with AMD this round.
Swapped out the HD6850 and beyond the initial issue of getting my onboard video to keep itself out of the picture, the card was recognized, lit up my screen, booted into Windows 7 with the typical discovery process of a new device and the rest was easy. I hadn't bothered removing the old drivers (I would have, were I switching to NVidia at the time) and everything was recognized without a problem. A quick visit to AMD to grab the most (and very) recent driver update, I installed/updated and verified everything was happy, no errors, no unknown devices, everything reporting properly to Windows. Ran some benchmarks, both in-game and standalone tools to make sure I was seeing the performance I should expect and everything is perfect. Huge leap forward in power from the 6850, giving me 100% of the eye candy on Shadow of Mordor (for example) at 1080p with frame rates that are exceedingly playable, so there's still some overhead despite running on an older Intel I5-2400k (3.1Ghz) 'SandyBridge' CPU. Glad to see the card isn't overly CPU bound, which older cards, and another generation or two of CPU's, being CPU limited when adding a newer video card to an older system was a serious concern and potential waste of money. I'm sure a faster CPU would squeeze out some more frames, of course, but this isn't hitting head hard against the 2400k and has resulted in a great upgrade to keep me playing until I find the impetus to move ahead to the latest gen cpu/mobo options. Not a priority at this time, in no small part because of this card.
Runs relatively cool and quiet, and under normal desktop use it might as well have no fans on it. No added noise. Fire up a long gaming session to tax the card, I can hear the fans over the system fans, but it's not objectionable. Like the power connectors being on the end of the card as it made routing the pair of connectors from my power supply to the card a non-issue and non-impediment to closing the case back up. Just a good design of a good card. Hard to go wrong for the money and I don't think there's a better option at this price point (at my time of purchase).
| Max Screen Resolution | 4096 x 2160 |
|---|---|
| Memory Speed | 970 MHz |
| Graphics Coprocessor | AMD Radeon |
| Chipset Brand | NVIDIA |
| Graphics Card Ram Size | 4 GB |
