R9 290 or GTX 780 for gaming?

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In my opinion, go for Nvidia.

Personally, Id go with Nvidia. having had both, Ive had a much better overall experience from Nvidia.

Of course, there will be occasion ups and downs from either card depending on the situation. Meaning, there may be a game where the AMD card does bit better, Some where Nvidia does better and some where they pretty well even in regards to performance.

But all things considered, I'd still choose the Nvidia if its within budget.

Just opinion of course.

the R9 varient cards run very hot out the box (at full load they run at about 95c)
this isnt an issue, amd have said it will run at this temp all day for the life of the card.

what it means for you is that it will be fairly noisy as the fans will be spinning at a high rpm constantly. the inbuilt software can be used to throttle back a little but at the cost of performance.

the R9 290 pips the 780 ever so slightly in most benchmarks ( my reference is custom pc magazines super gpu group test in this months issue)

but its only minimal, 2-5 fps here and there.

im not against ATI cards =) in fact I favor them! its just most people ive specced rigs up for have moaned about the r9 and heat and noise. I plan to watercool my r9 290x when I get it, silence is bliss.

I want a 780 but after running benches for the last few months my cards do very well against the new toys

Me and the wife are about to get those taxes done so now i need to come up if i want one or not i even thought of the 290x

but at the end of the day i still get about the same performance as the new cards 1x 7970 scores pretty damn close to a stock 780 when it is beefed up by a overclock

Dont buy reference cards:)! you wont be running at 90C if you buy anything other than a reference card, my brother has the R9 280X sapphire edition and it runs pretty cool, AMD cards have more ram which will help out alot at higher res and as you said recording will be easier on the card. Also as you said its around $100 cheaper, I highly recommend AMD over NVIDIA anyday of the week, simply because you get more bang for your bucks:)
They also have mantle:)! which i can see being a big thing in the future!

780 all the way