Originally Posted by
Quesoblanco
From who? Make sure u buy from a reputable member with lots of rep. Also make sure you have plenty of warranty left and that it is transferable. I saw a gtx 670 for 120 last week, and I currently see a 7970 for 160, 7950 for 140, and 7870xt for 120. Those are some great deals.
A 7950 is not a side grade to a gtx 580. At all.
A 7950 was always better and as the drivers matured the gap only widened. A 7950 goes head to head with a gtx 670 and even then it still beats it by a tad cause drivers finally optimized.
A 280x takes around 240 watts. It does not need lots of power.
http://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/msi-radeon-r9-280x-twinfrozr-gaming-oc-review,8.html
Power Consumption
Let's have a look at how much power draw we measure with this graphics card installed. The methodology: We have a device constantly monitoring the power draw from the PC. We simply stress the GPU, not the processor. The before and after wattage will tell us roughly how much power a graphics card is consuming under load. Our test system is based on a power hungry six-core Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition Sandy Bridge-E based setup on the X79 chipset platform. This setup is overclocked to 4.60 GHz on all cores. Next to that we have energy saving functions disabled for this motherboard and processor (to ensure consistent benchmark results). We'll be calculating the GPU power consumption here, not the total PC power consumption.
Power consumption Radeon R9-280X
System in IDLE = 121W
System Wattage with GPU in FULL Stress = 350W
Difference (GPU load) = 229W
Add average IDLE wattage ~10W
Subjective obtained GPU power consumption = ~ 239 Watts
look at these sweet deals.
http://www.overclock.net/t/1507321/powercolor-pcs-ax7950-radeon-7950-3gbd5-2dhpp-video-card
http://www.overclock.net/t/1507816/2x-diamond-radeon-hd-7970-7970pe53gv2