So I've been on here before to ask for advice on a budget £600 build for GTA and LSPDFR, and it's come down to a decision between the GTX 960, GTX 970, the newer GTX 1060, or the Radeon R9 380. This will most likely be combined with an i5 6500 (or hopefully a 6600k if there is enough budget left) and an SSD.

Which of these cards would the community recommend? The 1060 is a much newer card so it has that appeal, as there's no way I can afford a 1080 or even a 980

 

Thanks!

GTX 1060 is newer, cheaper, faster, and depending on the model will have more memory than the rest of the GTX cards you've mentioned.  Seems like a no brainer to me.

Alright, sounds good. I probably won't get a 6600k because from what I've heard the only advantage over the 6500/6600 is overclocking which I'm not interested in

9 minutes ago, Matthewcl375 said:

Alright, sounds good. I probably won't get a 6600k because from what I've heard the only advantage over the 6500/6600 is overclocking which I'm not interested in

Yes, that's correct.  And you would need a special Z170 motherboard for overclocking to work.  If you're not going to overclock the CPU, go with the 6600 instead.  You'll have a good budget PC in the end.

Looks like the GTX 1060 will take me £50 over budget. There's not a huge difference between the 970 and the 1060 anyway is there? The R9 380 is also an option

GTX 970 is a good card as well.  I don't know that much about Radeon cards, but I do know that they are usually less power efficient.  So you may need a more powerful power supply, just keep that in mind.

Okay, my final question was whether the brand of GTX 970 makes a difference. I know they all have slightly different clock speeds from 1.08GHz to 1.18GHz the one I was looking at was the EVGA GeForce GTX 970 4GB Superclocked ACX 2.0 http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/product/JTwqqs/evga-video-card-04gp42974kr which is 1.17GHz

Edited August 31, 20169 yr by Matthewcl375

EVGA is the only one I've ever had experience with and it has never let me down.  So I would highly recommend them, yes.