Point of View Graphics cards

[MorneDJ]

Hi,

I am in the process of finalising my annual PC upgrade. I have selected the i5-2500 as the best bang for buck, I normally stick to the Intel boards and will drop in 16 GB of ram. I received a relative good cost for the Point of View GTX560TI 2048MB card, but since I am not familiar with the brand I am just wondering. Anyone know these cards or should I stick to ASUS/MSI/Gigabyte etc.

Could not really find alot of reviews of their products in the net (yes, I did Google first P)

Regards

[Jonboy]

In this day and age, all the boards for a particular model by none of the "known" brands are based on the reference boards that will serve you just as well as the more expensive "name brand" ones. It's usually Gigabyte, MSI etc., that get rights to add in factory overclocks etc, so unless you're specifically looking for that, just save the money and go for the Point of View.

[Jonboy]

And just one question, unless your PC is being used to drive a home-made CERN super collider, 16Gb of RAM is overkill (4Gb is usually more than enough for gaming unless you intend on adding a 46" monitor), you'll get much better performance out of 4Gb and put the money saved towards an SSD for your OS and games.

[KALSTER]

The first thing to look at with GFX cards is basically the warranty. As Jonboy said, they will all pretty much be of good quality. +1 or the RAM, though I'd suggest 8GB to allow some leeway for when you have a bunch of other programs open during gaming, especially browsers.

[MorneDJ]

lol. Ram is cheap, I have 2x 24" monitors but I mainly play Warcraft III (Dota), perhaps 5 hours a week. I actually use my PC for work and I frequently have a number of powerhog programmes open, sometimes photoshop with a 1 or 2 GB image or 10, GoogleEarth Pro, a few excell spreadsheets, one or two Access files with a massive imbedded Applications model (I do 3D nosie propagation modelling), two or more word files and a few other applications. I actually have my page file on a dedicated SSD drive. It is 4 GB (I have 4 GB ram now), of which 2.5GB is used (now), but I have seen it using 4 GB. My PC actually stalls at times and I just press reset (after saving and closing most applications). Using system monitor my average pages/sec reading is 450 - 700, and the maximum being 18,956 pages a second. Lets see if I can give it enough ram.

[Slimshaedy]

Never heard of that brand before! Everyone has covered all the important points, so I'll just throw in my 2 cents. Manufacturers get gpus from Nvidia and AMD, and they just put on their own stickers and software bundles etc. They normally have that big box cooler on top, these are reference designs. Then you get gpus that have been changed, including the PCB, they add and remove parts to make things cheaper, and throw on their own aftermarket coolers etc. These are non reference designs. Generally non reference cards have the VRM removed to save on costs, and that stops you from overvolting. Which is bad for overclockers.
So the point of the story is, if it has a big original cooler, then its probably a reference design. Meaning its exactly the same gpu as another "good brand"

[KALSTER]

I think they do use their own caps and such, but as far as I am aware, they all use solid state caps these days.

PS: I have a Force3D card, which is also not one of the bigger brands and it has been faultless since I got it 2 years ago.