MSI R9 280 Gaming v PNY GTX760 XLR8 – £185 shootout

We all love to play games! It is likely your dream graphics card will be either a GTX 780 Ti or R9 290X. Not fast enough for you? – then how about AMD's R9 295X2 or Nvidia's Titan Z? Be prepared to dig deep into your bank account at £1,100 and £2,300 respectively … yes, it really is enough to make grown men cry. Back in the real world – and if recent correspondence with our readers is anything to go by then many of you wanted to see which hardware offers a better gaming experience under the £200 ‘sweetspot' – an R9 280 or a GTX760. So with this in mind we went shopping online.

We opted for two cards we have never reviewed before.

On the Nvidia side of the equation we picked the PNY GTX 760 XLR8,  currently priced at £177.31 inc vat on Scan.

To represent AMD – we selected the MSI R9 280 Gaming Edition, currently priced at £186.82 inc vat on Scan.

Both solutions are very closely priced and well below the £200 budget we set for ourselves in this article. Why only two cards? There is not much point including three or four more R9 280's or GTX760's because the performance results will be very close, related to minor changes to the core clock speed. For £180 you aren't going to get much better than these cards.

We test today with the latest Forceware and Catalyst drivers at both 1080p and 1600p resolutions.

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