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[hadesian]

oh noes

There's probably a much better place to ask this, but I'm calling on the great community here.
Right now, I have two concerns.
1. Getting an i5 3570. Not a 3570K, am I missing out on anything other than an inability to overclock?
2. The meat of my problem. I currently am comparing three cards.

1. A Palit Jetstream 660Ti.
2. An MSI Power Edition OC GTX 660Ti.
3. A KFA GTX 660Ti (in America, you'd know KFA as Galaxy)

My problem is kinda as follows. The Palit is cheaper, substantially enough to give me headroom to maybe buff up to a 3570K or better RAM.
The MSI Power Edition has apparently got the best components and due to having triple overvoltage at max overclocking it is as powerful as a GTX 670.
The KFA has 3GB GDDR5, contrary to 2GB everywhere else. While I haven't seen much in the way overclocking, the Galaxy equivalent runs surround gaming exceptionally well, and an extra gig would be quite nice I guess, especially for running high res textures and such.

I literally don't know...

[naufrago]

One piece of advice I got from this slightly outdated article from RPS is this:

Bus width is just as important when it comes to memory performance on graphics cards. The rule here is simple. Touch nothing with a bus smaller than 256 bits. Anything more than that is gravy. Anything less isn’t worthy of HD gaming.

The cards you linked seem to have a bus width of 192 bits. In all honesty, that's probably fine, but it looks like you're trying to go as close to the bleeding edge of current technology without paying out the ass for it. It may actually be worth considering going for a 670 instead, unless you can find a 660Ti with a bus width of 256 bits. But if I were to choose from the three you selected, I'd go with #2.

With a few rare exceptions, you don't actually need more than 1GB of VRAM, either. 2GB will handle everything just fine (and will for the next few years at least), while 3GB seems like overkill and can potentially sap performance (from what I've read). I'd personally stick with 2GB unless you can find some good reviews for a 3GB card.

EDIT: Oh, to answer your first question, I'm pretty sure the K just means you can overclock it. Most things aren't bottlenecked by the CPU (Planetside 2 being a notable exception), so I wouldn't worry about it too much... especially with an Ivy bridge CPU, and if you don't need to do stuff like video editing regularly. But if you do video editing regularly, you'd want an i7 anyway, so... yeah.

[Thaago]

My 2 cents:

Don't rely on overclocking figures. They depend heavily on the person's specific rig and cooling scheme and will lower the lifetime of the part. It is rare that manufacturers cover overclocking in their warranty, so if you burn out a part you either have to eat the cost or commit insurance fraud.

How worried are you about budget? Intel chips are faster per spec and less power hungry than AMD chips, but cost about 1.5 times as much per real world performance in the medium gaming budget (for non-gaming machines AMD blows Intel right out of the water, and for high budget Intel has unmatched performance and thermal specs).

Good luck!

[hadesian]

find some good reviews for a 3GB card.

While it's not really a review, more of a demonstration, this is the American version of the 3GB card. KFA2 and Galaxy are, I say again, the same, compare the cards to find them the same.

Also, what you said about 256bit is interesting - I don't want bleeding edge, but I want to make a good system. Right now it'll cost me about £680 in all, and I'm pretty happy with what I've got in it.

And Thaago, my budget isn't really changing, to jump to the KFA would cost me £3, to switch to the Palit would save me £15.

EDIT: MSI cover OC in warranty AFAIK. The whole thing is highly OC oriented and is stock OC'd anyway

[Aleskander]

My 2 cents:

Don't rely on overclocking figures. They depend heavily on the person's specific rig and cooling scheme and will lower the lifetime of the part. It is rare that manufacturers cover overclocking in their warranty, so if you burn out a part you either have to eat the cost or commit insurance fraud.

How worried are you about budget? Intel chips are faster per spec and less power hungry than AMD chips, but cost about 1.5 times as much per real world performance in the medium gaming budget (for non-gaming machines AMD blows Intel right out of the water, and for high budget Intel has unmatched performance and thermal specs).

Good luck!

This

[Gaizokubanou]

Don't rely on overclocking figures.

This.

Make your choices based on stock performance, and save any overclock you can get as a surprise.

TBH I think the whole overclocking scene for PC has gone a bit out of control in marketing department.  Lot of PC component manufacturers advertise overclocking as an important feature but it is rarely ever supported and it can void warranties.  No company should push a product based on a "feature" that is not only unofficial, but also voids warranty (imagine the *** phone companies can get if they had commercial for a new phone with water proof feature, but the manual/tech support is non existent on it and water damage also voids warranty?).

EVGA is one of the exception as I'm certain that their warranty holds even if your card is damaged through overclocking, but you may need to pay for extended warranty for that.