Best Video Card From $200 to $250 - 2014

Today There is a War Between Gpu Manufacturers , all of them are trying to give the best for their clients and they are all giving their best to get to the top , so games like Battlefield are easily making good Gpu go slower and it's not easy any more to play it with an old graphics card , and that's why video cards manufacturers are trying to enhance their video cards performance , to make it stay as is for a few years

The best solution for people who are having problems like that one , is really simple , and that is to upgrade their video card and they won't have any problems because they will pay the same as they have payed in the past and they will get a lot better performance for what they pay .

you might notice that most pc gamers run their games on 1920 x 1080 HD resolution (1080p), and they are using mid-range video cards that are $200 - $300 , and believe me they've picked the right Video card (in most of the times) , the mid-range cards are mostly rebadged GPUs .

AMD has added clock rate boost capability to the Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition and called it the R9 270X. But the Gpu is the same.

Nvidia Is a bit different , so the GTX 760 is replacing the GTX 660 Ti. Both of them use GK104 GPUs , But the GTX 760 offers less shader cores and texture units than the GTX 660 Ti, while boosting the clock speed,and the GTX 760 is better than the somewhat anemic, GK106-based GTX 660 non-Ti variant    

Where both companies got better is that they've cut the prices back. The Radeon HD 7870 cost $350, but these cards are all $250 or less:

1. The Asus R9 270x (Top Edition), it's GPU clock is 1050MHz, and it's 5% higher than the default (Which is 1GHz), It's just like the GTX 760 ships with dual-fan cooling system.

Its a bit more conservative on the clock speeds than the sapphire, but its less noisy

2. The Evga GTX 760 SC ACX , ACX means like EVGA said , it's their own dual-fan cooling system, SC as you might know means superclocked, it's faster by almost 7% from other reference card (GPU clock is 1046MHz) and it's boost clock is 1111MHz

3. The Sapphire R9 270x Toxic , it includes a three fan cooling system , that makes it longer it's one foot long , and it's price is good compared to the others , i know it may not fit your case but it does worth it 

these are the cards compared with the 7870 GHz Edition : 

Spec	Sapphire R9 270X Toxic	Asus R9 270X DC	Asus Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition	EVGA GTX 760 SC
Shader Units	1280	1280	1280	1152
Base Clock (MHz)	1100	1050	1000	1072
Boost Clock (MHz)	1150	1120	NA	1137
Memory Clock (MHz, effective)	6000	5600	4800	6008
Memory (MB)	2048	2048	2048	2048
Memory Interface	256	256	256	256
Texture Units	80	80	80	96
ROPs	32	32	32	32
Transistor Count (Billions)	2.8	2.8	2.8	3.5
Price	$250	$220	$220	$250

Performance Tests:

3DMark Fire Strike	avg fps
Sapphire R9 270X Toxic	5874
Asus R9 270X DC	5498
Asus Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition	5037
EVGA GTX 760 SC	5694

As you can see the sapphire card beats all other cards , it performs really well

Games

these are the results , at 1080p

Metro Last Light (Ultra)	avg fps
Sapphire R9 270X Toxic	28
Asus R9 270X DC	26
Asus Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition	23
EVGA GTX 760 SC	29

Bioshock Infinite (Ultra)	avg fps
Sapphire R9 270X Toxic	55
Asus R9 270X DC	55
Asus Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition	47
EVGA GTX 760 SC	67

Tomb Raider (Ultra)	avg fps
Sapphire R9 270X Toxic	48
Asus R9 270X DC	45
Asus Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition	41
EVGA GTX 760 SC	45

GRID 2 (Ultra)	avg fps
Sapphire R9 270X Toxic	73
Asus R9 270X DC	69
Asus Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition	61
EVGA GTX 760 SC	72

  

you can see that these cards are struggling to get to high numbers in Metro Last Light, but they do a really good job in the other games.

To summarize :
Nvidia cards seem to handle Bioshock Infinite really well on 1080p.
AMD cards are around 60 fps , and all the other cards fell a little short on Tomb Raider , in GRID 2 all the cards were easily hitting over 60fps .

Noise

Believe it or not , none of these cards were noisy , the level of noise is really low , so it's all good

What to Choose ?

well the answer of this question depends on you wether you want to spend only $220 , you can pick the 270x Then , but if you want better performance and a better card you can go and pick or the GTX 760 or the 270x toxic , if your case doesn't fit the 270x toxic then pick the 760 , easy Right?