yes my name says it all, I am a noob. what is the best brand for amd video cards? I currently have a xfx 6870. and would like to upgrade. i would also like links to website for buying. i would like to keep under 160 USD. new or used is fine just must be under good condition. places i would like to shop ebay or amazon.Gigabyte, XFX, and ASUS are video card brands that I like to stick with. However I have had some of the cheaper brands and they seem to work. The one brand I will never BUY again though is HIS brand. I bought a bunch of video cards that were HIS brand for the graphic arts department at work and the failure rate was high. They lasted pretty much just beyond the warranty and then crapped out.

Cheap brands that I haven't had any problems with, but they are cheap low end cards are = Sparkle, Sapphire, PNY, PowerColor. ( PowerColor was probably the cheapest low quality LOOKING components and PCB materials. " But it worked and continues to work" )

My biggest concern with the cards is the fan life of the cards. That is that some cards are made with cheap fans that dont last and then the cards overheat and die etc. I had bad luck with a bunch of series 7 and 8 GeForce cards with the fans dying I feel prematurely such as a BFG 8800GT that the fan died after about 14 months of use and cooked the GPU to death. On inspection of why the fan died, there was no clump of dust bunnies in it, the bearing simply dried up of what little oil etc is between the metal and plastic and it froze up tight. I think the placement of the fan motor was the problem on these with the heat of the GPU overheating the bearing while it was spinning causing it to dry out and lock up.


As far as purchase locations..... I avoid ebay for anything like this and would go with Amazon of the 2 choices. I have been burned by ebay purchases of electronics, yet I have had good luck with Amazon purchases of computer parts.

I'd rather deal with Newegg or Tiger Direct though than even Amazon for a purchase like this.

As for ebay, I only buy these days parts that are worth the gamble, no high dollar purchases. The last 2 purchases from ebay were for a $5.00 with free shipping Pentium 4 3.0Ghz Socket 478 for a friends eMachine upgrade from Celeron D which made a big difference. He could have upgraded to a 3.4Ghz Pentium 4, but that CPU was $30 at the time, so the $5 deal made more sense. As well as I bought a cheap Athlon 64 x2 4450B Socket AM2 CPU for $10.00 with free shipping for my old gaming system when I moved the quadcore out of my old gaming system into my new gaming system and still WANTED my old gaming system to be functional, so this CPU was the best benchmark for $10 I could find on ebay and it worked out fine.  There were some 4450E CPUs that were almost identical to the 4450B for the same price, but the 4450B was the better benchmark Business Class CPU vs the different Cache Config Economical 4450E for home users etc. At some point I will buy the AMD FX 8350 8-core 4.0Ghz CPU for the new computer and put the quadcore back into the old gaming system or enough time will pass by that I skip the 8-core 8350 all together and go for an even newer build.Personally I like Sapphire branded cards. I agree with DaveLembke on HIS, very high failure rate imo.

Sapphire lately have been releasing cards with excellent non-reference cooling solutions, keeping noise to a minimum while having good temperatures.EVGA should have been mentioned in this...not the cheapest...but rock solid. Quote from: patio on May 14, 2014, 05:09:15 PM

EVGA should have been mentioned in this...not the cheapest...but rock solid.

I was wondering when you were going to pop in to say that  I have not had a lot of experience with EVGA cards, but can agree that what I have dealt with were very dependable.