KitGuru Annual Awards 2013

We have now looked at the chassis, power supply, mainboard, processor and storage with solid recommendations in each category.

Now's the time to delve into the product area that gets more interest than any other – graphics.

Despite millions being spent in marketing by both sides, the world still seems to divide neatly into GTX-Lovers and Radeon-Ravers. Why should KitGuru try and change your mind? We shouldn't. We are splitting these two giants apart and will give you budget and overall recommendations for both discrete GPU powerhouse corporations.

Buy a system with an APU these days and you will be able to load and run most games straight from the box. Sure, you will need to play with the image quality settings and you won't be playing it the way it was meant to be played, but you can certainly get up and running.

In this category, we're looking for an affordable graphics card that will play all modern Direct X 11 games with decent image quality settings and an average frame rate that is over 30fps – and preferably in the mid 40s, or greater.

Doing that means you will need to arm your system with a graphic card and, if you want to go down the AMD route on a budget, that means a Radeon.

You can buy something for less than £100, but the improvement over something like a 6800K's ntegrated graphics might not be as much as you would have liked. For that reason, we have opted for an R9 270X card, which retails around the £200 mark. It will give you the extra beans you need to play games at the time kind of settings.

Example?

If you want to run Battlefield 4 on a cheaper card, then achieving 30+ frame rates at 1920×1080 with good image quality and a bit of anti-aliasing is unlikely. But it can be done with an R9 270X like the Gigabyte R9 270X WindForce OC.

Games like Tomb Raider 2013 can be enjoyed with very high image quality and frame rates in the mid-40s with a card like this – overall it will give you a great experience at 1080p.

You can read the review, over here.

KitGuru's choice for the Best Value AMD Graphics Card 2013 is the Gigabyte R9 270X WindForce OC.

You can buy from Overclockers UK, from this link.

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