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Why not just upgrade to a new card?
Because
I'm not rich, that's why. Even a $250 GTX 760 is out of my reach. Otherwise, I'd probably be waving waterblocked GTX Titans in everyone's faces.
Even then, what's the point in pairing a much more powerful card with a Q6600, even overclocked to 3.6 GHz? What I need isn't just a whole new graphics card, but a whole new COMPUTER.
And given my price estimates on recent parts, it's going to cost me around $600-700 just for CPU, mobo, and PSU. Now throw in the RAM, case and graphics card...you see where I'm going with this? It'll probably be $1000-1500 by the time I've pieced everything together, and that's not even including new drives, sound cards, peripherals or extra water-cooling equipment (I can just carry all that over from my current build).
Speaking of which, did I mention that the water-cooling loop is really the first purchase intended for that next build, but it just happens to work on my current system anyway due to careful choice of CPU waterblock?
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Probably to see if the new console do anything to market. Additionally the GTX480 might have been loads cheaper than a GTX660(nearest in production Nvidia card) or a HD 7850/70. Should still tide a rig over for a year or so.
It only cost $108.75 shipped. I checked the reviews, and price-to-performance on that level is hard to beat.
Admitted, the GTX 760 at $250 could easily be today's 8800 GT in terms of being the price-to-performance king, but I already made the decision to go for that GTX 480 and hold off for Maxwell/GTX 800, which will be out by the time I'm ready for the REAL upgrade. Here's hoping it's the big jump from Kepler I've been waiting for, the total single-GPU Crysis manhandler.
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And that is where my elitism kicks in (I know, I'm sorry). If it can't handle games maxed out, it's not good enough.
Try running PlanetSide 2 or ArmA III maxed-out at a constant 60 FPS (meaning MINIMUM framerates cannot be lower than 60 FPS), ANY resolution.
It's probably not going to happen at all with today's hardware, because the CPUs just aren't fast enough. In other words, NOTHING will be good enough for your standards...let alone mine.