AMD Radeon R7 260X unable to wake up from sleep mode in Windows and why I upgraded to the GTX 750 Ti

After a few years, I decided to upgrade my video card and get something for decent  game play. I always liked the Tom's Hardware Video Card Hierarchy which is a handy guide for those of you wanting to upgrade your video card.

After a lot of thought, I saw the AMD R7 260X being the best bang for buck. At around $120 when I bought it, it seemed like a good compromise. I also got the ASUS PB278Q 27-Inch WQHD LED-lit PLS Professional Graphics Monitor to go with it. Its an awesome 1440p monitor and will give you great looking graphics for a decent price.

So I popped in the card, installed the latest AMD drivers and everything seemed to be good. However my joy was short lived. I realized that once my Windows 7 x64 went into display sleep mode, it never woke up. I updated my BIOS to the latest version, made sure my drivers were the latest, but no-go! Worse, my computer had no signal randomly, even when I disabled display sleep mode. I never enable full sleep. It was getting confusing. I couldnt rule out what the problem was.

Finally I gave up and got an NVIDIA GTX 750 Ti. What a difference it is, for about $20 more I got a card that is extremely stable, uses very less power and is actually higher in the performance hierarchy chart. No more waking up from sleep mode issues and no more crashes.

So if you have a AMD Radeon R7/R9 or any card from the Radeon R series, you may expeience instability issues. I hope AMD fixes this with their drivers but for now NVIDIA seems to be the leader in great quality video cards.

I also realized the NVIDIA cards have all the features in the AMD cards (This particular model the GTX 750i cannot work in SLI, but that is not my requirement). They also have NVIDIA Physx which makes a dramatic difference in some effects in games, adding realism. The NVIDIA GTX 750Ti is also a great card for photo and video editing work. Photoshop supports its OpenCL features and most other software have support too.

So in summary, I highly recommend the NVIDIA 750Ti card over the AMD Radeon 260X. You will be happy with the decision!