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Best PCIe Card: High-end

Best Graphics Cards For The Money: April 2013
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Best PCIe Card For ~£350:

Radeon HD 7970

Great 2560x1600 performance

Radeon HD 7970
Codename: Tahiti
Process: 28 nm
Unified Shaders: 2,048
Texture Units: 128
ROPs: 32
Memory Bus: 384-bit
Core Speed MHz: 925
Memory Speed MHz: 1,375 (5,500 effective)
DirectX/Shader Model: DX 11.1/SM 5
Max TDP:
250 W

AMD's Radeon HD 7970 is the only top-tier card we recommend for the price. You might be able to find a Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition card selling in the £350 range. If you do, that'd be a good buy too. But, at the ~£380 most GHz Edition models are currently selling for, we'd skip them. As they stand, the standard Radeon HD 7970s are quite overclockable, meaning you can coax much of the performance difference out of the cheaper card anyway.

There's not much reason to pay extra for a similar-performing GeForce GTX 680 unless the Nvidia card's 55 W-lower thermal ceiling is necessary in your small form factor enclosure. In that case, spending more for better efficiency might make sense.

Read our full preview of AMD's Radeon HD 7970 for more information on the card and its accompanying architecture.

Honourable Mentions:
Assorted Multi-Card Configurations

The Radeon HD 7970 delivers such strong performance at £350 that we find it hard to recommend higher-performing (but sometimes-inconsistent) multi-card configurations for more money. 

We'll call out some of the most promising options, though, mostly for folks with one of these cards already installed: two GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost 2 GB cards in SLI, two Radeon HD 7870 LEs in CrossFire, two GeForce GTX 670s in SLI, and finally, two Radeon HD 7970s in CrossFire.

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  • 0 Hide
    Blahman11 , 19 April 2013 17:49
    I have seen DDR5 6670s on ebuyer for not much more than £50. It's worth stretching to the DDR5 version, the available bandwidth doubles
  • 0 Hide
    Hazzacanary , 21 April 2013 14:56
    A 7750 for £80? I'm pretty sure you can get the 7770 for £80-£90 on numerous websties, making it much more competitive. Also, some special offers on the 7790 get it down to £110-£120, making it stiffer competition for the 650 ti surely (unless you also point out that the 650 ti can be had for around £100 now anyway)? Where were the quoted prices from, as they all seem slightly high.
  • 0 Hide
    jakjawagon , 24 April 2013 19:14
    Missing chart on the last page.