GTX 970

Hehe, the title of this blog post really makes me happy. If you've read through my blog, you would have seen that I was due to purchase a GTX 960 graphics card in the upcoming months, but something bugged me a little with that card... It's also a mid range card, like my GTX 560 ti was back in 2011 when I got it. But this time around, nVidia's mid range card is mostly a "power consumption" upgrade from the previous generation. I read that the GTX 960 is a perfect upgrade for a 560, but if you have a 660 or a 760, then it's not really worth it that much.

Also, being stuck at the bottom of Africa means we pay a lot more for stuff than the lucky guys in the first world countries. And, as an added bonus, South Africa is experiencing numerous issues like load shedding (for my overseas readers who aren't familiar with that - basically our local government didn't think of upgrading our power generating abilities as our population grew exponentially in the last 20 years, meaning our power provider, Eskom, doesn't have sufficient capacity to actually supply us with a constant and steady stream of electricity anymore, now they cut power every day or two to prevent a total blackout... fun!). Combine that with the oh so useless xenophobic attacks taking place, we now sit with a weakening currency, meaning we pay an even bigger premium for items that are manufactured overseas - aka all things computer related.

Anyway, I've been contemplating really hard to maybe invest in the GTX 970 instead - yes I know there's the whole 3.5GB RAM issue, but it's still the best value for money nVidia card on the market, and the RAM issue only becomes an issue when you start gaming on extreme resolutions with extreme settings. I'm on 1920x1080, so in my case it's not gonna be such a big impact on my gaming experience - in fact, it won't bother me at all!

So, after deciding that, I started doing some homework, and for a mere R1800 more, I can get a 970 instead of a 960, and I reckon it'll give me a good 2-3 years longer service than the 960 would.

I phoned up my suppliers, and my sales guy at Corex is giving me an excellent deal - his name is Dylan, and he's one of the sales guys at the Cape Town branch of Corex, and I've only ever gotten excellent service from the guys there, and Dylan especially - if you're ok with registering as a reseller with Corex (a bit of a mission but very much worth it believe me!), I can heartily recommend chatting to him - DylanV@corex.co.za or 021 528 8000 - and here's the purchase I will be making very soon:

That's right, the MSI GTX 970 GAMING 4G! And the price I'm paying is less than R1000 more than you'd pay from a big overseas vendor like NewEgg! Makes me extremely giddy to know I'll soon be upgrading to a higher end card like this one, and as the box says, I look forward to JUST GAME!

I'm especially looking forward to cranking up the settings more on GTA V, which I installed yesterday (wasn't happy with the 5GB patch I had to download after installing from the discs, but hey, these things happen!) - my GTX 560 ti only has 1GB RAM (the game shows how much RAM your settings is using, and I was sad to see that the 1GB I have didn't allow for much), so the 4GB will be a huge step up, let alone the rest of the raw power my new addition to the family will serve!

Happy gaming in my future, I foresee! :)