Hopefully we won't discover more little secrets about that card!

Come on you guys, you do realise that with the way those AAA games are getting 'optimised' these days very soon 4Gb wil be in the minimum requirements? I can understand someone wanting to save money for now and get a better card in a couple of years but 1080p or not the card is simply NOT futureproof.

That's probably true, but it's true for any card. Regardless of what you buy now, 10 years from now it will struggle in games. The question still remains what benefit you get from spending an extra $200 or $400. If you're spending an extra $400 in particular, there's a high likelihood that in 2 years time you'll be able to buy for that something that's better than what you bought now for $700+.

Still, it's always a matter of what you can afford.

Futureproofing isn't so much about saving money as avoiding having to buy multiple med-end cards instead of one high-end.

And how much you actually value the upgrade.

Roughly speaking. I don't think it works that way in practice. If you choose between a GeForce 970 and 980, the extra 70% in price gets you a performance difference of up to around 30% in theory and 10%-20% in practice. So the 980 isn't really that much more future proof than the 970.

Sure, if you really don't like upgrading then buying a more pricy card could net you a few months more between upgrades. Still, is that really such a big deal?

Depends if you value a high-end card, don't want to upgrade a lot and if the money difference is negligeble.

GTX 970 and GTX 980 is far too close, I would consider GTX 970 a high-end. A more fair comparison would be GTX 980 and GTX 960. The latter is obviously a med-end. You'll most likely save money by purchasing the GTX 960 kind but more often but someone with enough money will more likely pick GTX 980 because of supposed future proofing.

I'm not sure what it's a better example for. The 980 is a different class of card in current games, so it's not a matter of future proofing. It also makes no sense to compare the 960 to the 980 when the 970 is close to the 980 and much cheaper.

Yes, they are different class. Isn't that the point? GTX 980 is better future proofing, you don't need to buy a new card in a given time frame.

If you're okay with the performance of the 960, then yes, buying a 980 will give you that performance for much longer (although it would be a huge waste of money to buy the 980 instead of the 970). But it's still just a meaningless argument in this context. You replied to ashwald, who said that a high end card won't be future proof. For AAA games, the 960 isn't really even "present proof".

I'm not sure if that was an argument against what I said but just to clarify, I never said the opposite. I think GTX 970 is a much better deal than either GTX 960 or GTX 980 because of its performance/price ratio.

Yes and I merely offered a better definition of future proof.

Compared to GTX 970 and 980? I agree. As a med-end card for people that is after an upgrade but isn't intent on playing the latest on highest details it's a good card.

Hello. You are a spam enthusiast. Take your gold and, with respect, leave my thread!

I have a Cooler Master GX Lite power supply.

Looks ok, should handle the card fine.

Just for interest, the link below is what I have set up for my potential build:
https://www.digitec.ch/en/ShopList/Show?shopListId=241D168A9C6640D654EDCBBBA7BEE655

(Have a 750W PSU and a 2TB WD Black HDD that I will keep and pop into this build)

It is a bit of money to lay out, but as I say, the intention here is to build something that I can get now, that will mostly last for the next several years without major upgrades.