And no, that wasn't a typo.
I rebuilt my five year-old machine around Christmas, but nothing really caught my eye when it came to GPUs and there seemed to a lot of bated breath over AMD's next generation part.
So I waited.
Then the AMD parts landed, and I was not really impressed. I also had some other life events that pulled me away from gaming so I didn't really notice how much my 4850 was bogging down my 4670K.
Maxwell started to bubble to the surface, and it had hints of great performance in a cooler and quieter package, so I waited. And waited.
Then I got bored and then busy.
Then the GTX 970 landed and all seemed good. With a new job in hand at much better pay and much less stress, I was ready to make my decision. Except inventory levels weren't kind.
Yesterday on a whim, I checked the Micro Center near me and they had 4 MSI Gaming 4Gs in stock. I quickly grabbed one, got it plugged in... then had to go to bed.
I was able to play with it today, and benchmarked it using the FFXIV-ARR tool. My old card on max settings in the otherwise new build had a score of 3832 and avg FPS of 32.6. The new card did slightly better.... 17579 with an avg FPS of 173.3.
And the best part was that the entire system didn't rise above a whisper the entire time.
I rebuilt my five year-old machine around Christmas, but nothing really caught my eye when it came to GPUs and there seemed to a lot of bated breath over AMD's next generation part.
So I waited.
Then the AMD parts landed, and I was not really impressed. I also had some other life events that pulled me away from gaming so I didn't really notice how much my 4850 was bogging down my 4670K.
Maxwell started to bubble to the surface, and it had hints of great performance in a cooler and quieter package, so I waited. And waited.
Then I got bored and then busy.
Then the GTX 970 landed and all seemed good. With a new job in hand at much better pay and much less stress, I was ready to make my decision. Except inventory levels weren't kind.
Yesterday on a whim, I checked the Micro Center near me and they had 4 MSI Gaming 4Gs in stock. I quickly grabbed one, got it plugged in... then had to go to bed.
I was able to play with it today, and benchmarked it using the FFXIV-ARR tool. My old card on max settings in the otherwise new build had a score of 3832 and avg FPS of 32.6. The new card did slightly better.... 17579 with an avg FPS of 173.3.
And the best part was that the entire system didn't rise above a whisper the entire time.