Christmas hardware wishlist – Graphics cards

The graphics card – even sexy Santa agrees it’s one of the most important components in a gaming rig, one of the most expensive investments you make as a gamer, and a part that depreciates in value faster than a Duke Nukem Forever Collector’s Edition.

But who cares about money and longevity? You want a powerful GPU and you want it now. Day 3 of our 12 days of Christmas hardware sees us moving away from cases and towards graphics cards. Here are three top picks for the festive season:

Asus HD7970 (HD7970-DC2T-3GD5)

Known as one of the top graphics card manufacturers, Asus know how to mix looks with performance and functionality – something they”ve clearly done with the HD7970.

The Asus DirectCU cooler is a pleasure to look at, and according to Asus, knows how to keep things frosty even after the factory increased GPU speed. What’s even better is the VGA hotwire system, allowing you to solder wires directly onto the card’s votage regulators for accurate monitoring and control of the Vcore, Vmem, and PLL voltages on a hardware level – the way it’s meant to be done.

The card is also able to drive up to 6 screens simultaneously with AMD Evefinity 6, thanks to the two DVI ports and four DisplayPorts. It’s big, it’s bad, and it needs two 8-pin power connectors and 300w all on it’s own – now that’s a top card.

Asus HD7970

Gigabyte GeForce GTX 660 Ti (GV-N66TOC-2GD)

The GTX660 chip by Nvidia offers some of the best value for money on the market thanks to it’s incredible performance and reasonable price. Gigabyte are another top tier manufacturer and offer the GTX660 Ti flavour for gamers who care equally about budget and performance.

The card is eye-catching due to it’s unusual cooler design. It’s not the first to use a design that doesn’t feature a full cover plastic airflow director, but then this can actually be a good thing for cases with well-tuned airflow. The “skeleton” effect is also kinda cool.

Apart from the looks, the card has everything a gamer would want. A high GPU clock over 1,000MHz, display-out ports including HDMI, DVI-I, DVI-D and Displayport, and a totally understandable minimum power supply requirement of 450w. DirectX 11 rounds off the package and makes this card a Christmas stocking winner.

Gigabyte GTX660 ti

MSI R7770 power edition

This card is awesome enough to have scored 87 percent in the MyGaming MSI R7770 power edition review as king of the budget-friendly graphics cards. It’s cheap for a gaming graphics card, and yet the performance is enough to make it a serious contender for your next upgrade.

The colour and design of the cooler jumps right out at you and unlike most seemingly over-engineered coolers, it actually works quite well.

Improved performance over previous generation HD7770 cards? Check. Priced competitively? Check. On the Christmas wishlist? Check check check.