Upgrading your Radeon card/s:

[Bikerdude]

Wondering whether to get a new Radeon. I like the silence of a passively-cooled card, but the 7750 really isn't

I'll consider nVidia once they start properly supporting open-source Linux drivers. The FOSS Radeon driver may not be blisteringly fast but it is stable, fully featured and not dependent on incomplete reverse engineering..

 

Your current card, a HD 7770 is about the same as an R9 270, so your only choice if sticking with AMD is an R9-290. The price on those has dropped due to the release of the GTX 970 -

 

Sapphire Radeon R9 290 Tri-X, Overclockers for £222 (this week only).

Sapphire Radeon R9 290X Tri-X, Overclockers for £260 (this week only).

[OrbWeaver]

Your current card, a HD 7770 is about the same as an R9 270,

 

Mine is a 7750 (512 cores, 72 GB/s mem bandwidth), a whole market segment away from the 7870 (1280 cores, 179.2 GB/s mem bandwidth) which seems to be the same as the R9 270 (source: http://www.tomshardw...marks,3669.html). Going by this chart at Tom's Hardware, even the lowly R7 260X would be three "performance tiers" above the 7750, and the R9 290 is eight tiers away.

 

In fact, given that what I have is clearly a cut-down low-power card designed for casual gamers, I'm really quite impressed by how well it does run.

 

so your only choice if sticking with AMD is an R9-290. The price on those has dropped due to the release of the GTX 970

 

That is actually the one I'm looking at, as it happens. Either the Sapphire Vapor-X or the MSI Twin Frozr version, which will hopefully avoid nasty whiny fan noise. 2560 cores versus 512 ought to make a huge difference.