TechSmart 121, October 2013 TechSmart 123, December 2013 | Page 16

FEATURE

You do not have to wait
for the arrival of next-gen consoles
to enjoy blistering frame-rates and
eye-candy resolutions, as this can be
attained with a gaming PC packing
any of our top 3 GPUs.

3
TOP

graphics cards

of

2013

Nvidia GeForce
GTX Titan
R13 500
For most of 2013, the fastest single graphics
card on the market was the GeForce GTX
Titan. Whilst monstrous gaming performance is the
Titan’s forte, its achilles heel is its Everest-sized asking
price. Rival single GPUs like AMD’s R9 290X delivers similar
performance to the Titan for a great deal less moola. Gamers can
also buy two GTX 770’s, have these run in SLI configuration to trump
the Titan’s performance and still save approximately R3 500. However, if
your power supply and lack of space means you can only use one card,
the Titan has few equals in terms of performance.

Want these? Call Behemoth Technology
today on 012-361-4283, or visit
www.b-technology.co.za for Xmas deals.

AMD Radeon R9 290X
R8 500
The Radeon R9 290X is unofficially known
as the Titan killer on the GPU block, due to the fact
that it is able to match, or in some cases even slightly
top the performance of the Titan. This whilst costing nearly 50%
less. To hit that performance level though, you will need to push the
card to its limits, which results in the GPU running quite hot. As with
the R9 290, buyers need a competent cooling solution in their PC case,
but the old-school fan used by the 290X is able to keep the graphics card
from overheating. The problem with the fan is that the RPM climbs into the
stratosphere, causing us to reach for our gaming headset for a less
distracting audio experience.

Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 TI
R9 500

In the aftermath of the pricing challenge from AMD’S R9 290X, Nvidia
was forced to respond and it did so with the GeForce GTX 780 TI, which
knocked the Titan off its fastest single-GPU card perch. Not only does
the GTX 780 TI cost around R4 000 less than the Titan, it actually packs
more firepower beneath the bonnet thanks to sporting 2880 CUDA
cores compared to the Titan’s 2688, and quicker 7 Gbps GDDR5
memory. For gaming rig buyers this means that even though the GTX
780 TI is more expensive than a R9 290X, the increase in performance
makes the added investment worth it, which is definitely not the case
when choosing between the 290X and the Titan. [HD]

14

December 2013 | TechSmart