Torn between PC gaming and new console

New console time is making me think about going down the PC gaming route...

Need a PC graphics card and would something like this NVIDIA GTX650Ti be man enough to match or improve on my experience of xbox 360 graphics?

I like the inclusion of HDMI on new generation cards, as while the beast PC I have is a tad noisy for shooting gaming less of an issue I think.

Slight worry about going back to PC gaming is my addiction to the tower defense genre may resurface, but mainly looking for Battlefield 4. Would love to buy the new console and boost the dual quad core PC.

I would get this instead.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Gigabyte-NVIDIA-GTX660-PCI-E...

the 650 will easily surpass the 360, but new games ported from next gen are probably going to be more demanding so the 660 should be a safer bet than the 650.

Wouldn't take much of a graphics card to improve on the experience of a Xbox 360 that is the best part of 8 years old.

With new consoles on the horizon I would have thought you would have been more than happy with the Xbox One or even a Playstation 4 .

And like you I also love Tower defence games,play quite a few on my IPod and Nexus 7 ,may be you can suggest a few of your favourites,you never know I may not of heard of them

You can suggest Steam based games as long as they are Mac compatible .

Ideally would love to do both upgrades.

Was going to spend the time up to Christmas drooling over hardware and decide in the New Year, plus might have run the ethernet from the loft down to dining room to give best performance and just maybe will have FTTC by that time also

Or you home plugs I find them just as good

Got all my gaming stuff in the living room all running through Homeplugs and never really experienced any issues and the speed is extremely fast and reliable .

Damp in the shed killed one of mine - was running webcam off of it

Have the drum of external cable just a case of crawling into the loft space

My system's running BF4 well enough with medium settings (high textures, effects and geometry, level detail but low filtering/aa). I seem to be averaging around 70-80FPS at the moment and need to tweak it more. Got lighting and shadows set quite low I think. Could look better for sure.

Current PC setup is some 4-5 years old now: Quad core Intel CPU @ 2.66GHz (stock), 6GB DDR3 RAM, Crucial M4 SSD (which makes a huge difference to load times), ATI 5870 GFX card

To max out the settings on BF4 you've got ULTRA settings (low, mid, high, ultra): Guru3D have a relevant article.

I was actually toying with the idea of getting a nVidia GTX770 card for c. £240-250. I think that'd probably pretty much be able to play anything at high-max quality settings (barring aa etc) for a few years. Having said that, I don't know whether the CPU would bottleneck performance at all and haven't read the Guru article myself yet. Edit: check their chart! Should be good to go with the 660 then.

Some of AMD's latest higher end cards are meant to be better optimised for BF4 with performance optimisations due to their latest API, 'Mantle'. Couldn't say if it pays off in actuality but the 290 runs at 95 degC and though it's within design spec I don't want to go anywhere near those kinds of temps. I'd rather not game.

Edited by deleted (Mon 11-Nov-13 01:19:03)

This card would be a better option if you're on a restricted budget, The AMD 7850 1GB is a faster card for the same or less price point although their drivers are flaky and higher resolution gaming is slightly compromised by only having 1 GB of video RAM

\as for the noise issue, thats easily fixed if it is due to case fans as there are a lot of aftermarket silent fans out there.

Edited by deleted (Mon 11-Nov-13 05:28:28)

All this talk of specs and tweaking settings makes me miss PC gaming, I do enjoy all of that

My PC is way outdated now though, it is about 4 and a half years old but was quite a budget build at the time so would need everything replacing.... Dual core AMD @ 2.7Ghz, 4GB DDR2, ATI 3650 512 MB

In reply to a post by SPOOKish:

Some of AMD's latest higher end cards are meant to be better optimised for BF4 with performance optimisations due to their latest API, 'Mantle'. Couldn't say if it pays off in actuality but the 290 runs at 95 degC and though it's within design spec I don't want to go anywhere near those kinds of temps. I'd rather not game.

Watercooling ?

funny enough the cpu and ram would probably be enough for majority of games.

COD ghosts with its 6 gig ram requirement has been proven to be artifical, people have shown it only uses 1.5 to 2 gig of ram but it asks for 6 to launch.