Graphics card conundrum 670 or 7970

[thunderbug]

Backstory - My current Rig uses a pair of XFX 6870's in Xfire, however my brothers graphics card decided to die this week and i gave him one of my 6870's to use, i think im going to give him my other 6870 and just get myself a new card.

I am a ATI fan but that does not mean i will blindly buy ATI all the time, i have been looking at 2 cards from my 2 fave brands :-
XFX 7970 DD Black Edition 3GB - £322
Gainward 670 2GB - £290

My first question is,

Does the XFX card give an increase in performance to justify the extra £32?

My second question is,

I heard that the 2GB vs 3GB of memory can give the 7970's an edge in games like Crysis and Metro 2033. Is this true and what difference can i expect to see.

My final questoin is,

I assume both these cards can easily run Skyrim, Crysis Warhead, Metro 2033. Would this be the case?

Thanks for any help u guys/girls can offer.

PS i know sometimes different componants in a PC can effect the gain u get from a new part so i will list my PC specs, so if anyone has any recommendations to use with the componants i currently have then feel free to let me know .

120GB Corsair ssd
Z77 Sabretooth Mobo
Intel i7 3770k @3.5ghz (stock)
8Gb G-Skill 1600Mhz Cl-7 RAM
1.5tb and 320gb 7200rpm HDD
800W PSU

 

[DazZ.]

Why do you feel an upgrade is necessary?

 

[beyondbrainmatter]

Backstory - My current Rig uses a pair of XFX 6870's in Xfire, however my brothers graphics card decided to die this week and i gave him one of my 6870's to use, i think im going to give him my other 6870 and just get myself a new card.

I am a ATI fan but that does not mean i will blindly buy ATI all the time, i have been looking at 2 cards from my 2 fave brands :-
XFX 7970 DD Black Edition 3GB - £322
Gainward 670 2GB - £290

My first question is,

Does the XFX card give an increase in performance to justify the extra £32?

Actually, check it yourself. Here are two reviews, ignore the reviews and compare the benchmarks. You obviously want to compare benchmarks of the same app.

http://www.techspot.com/review/529-geforce-gtx-670/page2.html
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canucks-reviews/51347-xfx-hd-7970-3gb-black-edition-double-dissipation-review-3.html

(I'd get the Gainward)

My second question is,

I heard that the 2GB vs 3GB of memory can give the 7970's an edge in games like Crysis and Metro 2033. Is this true and what difference can i expect to see.

Dude. You have an ssd. Computers run only as fast as their bottlenecks, which in most cases is read access time of your hdd. Since you have a ssd, this isn't really a big problem. If you want to have a faster system, focus on the bottleneck, not on randomly updating hardware, since improving your gpu(s) doesn't do anything to the bottleneck. Try running your system in an ssd raid configuration, or buy a second even faster ssd and put your swap file on that. I'm not sure, but I guess the raid setup is faster than the swap file thing.

My final questoin is,

I assume both these cards can easily run Skyrim, Crysis Warhead, Metro 2033. Would this be the case?

Yeah, I guess (Read: Yes).

Thanks for any help u guys/girls can offer.

PS i know sometimes different componants in a PC can effect the gain u get from a new part so i will list my PC specs, so if anyone has any recommendations to use with the componants i currently have then feel free to let me know .

120GB Corsair ssd
Z77 Sabretooth Mobo
Intel i7 3770k @3.5ghz (stock)
8Gb G-Skill 1600Mhz Cl-7 RAM
1.5tb and 320gb 7200rpm HDD
800W PSU

Besides getting another ssd, yeah, swap all your current system fans for Noctua's. They have the best noise to airflow ratio on the market.