JEMC said:
Stop worrying about drivers! Yes, it's true that Nvidia has an advantage on that front, but only at launch. After that, AMD drivers are as stable and problem free as Nvidia drivers are. Only if you use SLI/Xfire the problems will last longer, but since you don't want to go that way it is irrelevant. Heat and noise will only be a problem with the 3XX cards and if you go with a reference cooler (if there's one). With the top end card, the rumored to be called Fury, that won't be a problem at all since it will be watercooled. And before you start worrying about leaks and all that, the 295X2 is also watercooled and there has been no problems with that. And that's a more complex card as it has two GPUs to cool while "Fury" will have a simpler design with only 1 GPU and what looks to be a full waterblock. Power consumption could be a problem, yes, but the 980Ti and TitanX are 250W cards. They aren't frugal either. |
I'm not worried about the power bill, it's more about having to buy a bigger PSU, they're not cheap in the 700+ watt range around here. I'll not want a card that goes beyond that 250 watt limit by any large measure.
Another thing I have to consider is the amount of pins and connections it requires, this could cause both motherboard and CPU to increase heavily in price (the 6-core processor I'm looking at costs twice as much with 40 PCI-e lanes instead of 26, I believe).
As for drivers; it was worse before, my X1950XTX was hopeless the entire time I had it, artifacts and tearing issues after every Catalyst update, then it leveled out and worked well after a few weeks. There's also the special effects (like Nvidia hair or physX) that don't work well or at all with AMD cards, but that's not a huge deal for me.
Watercooling doesn't really worry me; I had a watercooled processor for many years and it worked really well, and it's a really good way of keeping the fans and their noise at bay as well, they rarely worked at full RPM's (or even 80%) during loads.
