I have done some more reading up about the chips and cards. It never is an easy thing.
I have ruled option 1 off the table as the 280 series of cards are just that much better.
The Gigabite R9-285 card costs $269 and you can send in for a $20 rebate coupon to get some money back if they actually send you the rebate, and you jump through the hoops.
On the flip side, The orginal R9-280 card that I can get for $229 technically is a faster card, with more bandwidth and 3tb of ram, but is older then the 285. From reading many reviews, they talk about how the newer 285 card is really a crippled 290 card with less memory and some other parts taken out. The end result is that it runs about on par with the R9-280 with some games playing faster, and other games playing slower. but on average it's +/- 2% at best.
It gets into that slippery slope when it comes to that small upgrade. A week or so ago I was thinking of the R9-270X as it was on sale for $199 but that sale ended, so now for that $10 more you can get the better R9-280 card.
Yes, it would be nice to get some free games. Reading the offer, it was a limiting one in that only certain qualified stores were offering the promtion and it was until they ran out of games, so it might have ended before christmas.
Then there is the question of the PSU. I have a Silver 650W unit, and the 280 series calls for a minimum of 700w. But they don't spec the processor, or very much else, and that can make a difference of a 100+ watts on the board.
I will admit that I am really not that much of a gamer and it's more that since moving over to an iMac, the i5 PC has just sat there and not really done much. Figured it could be useful for something.
