Only noise a GPU makes is from it's fan. Check the fan and clean it up. Also Nvidia is almost always the stronger purchase. Better drivers, better support. AMD only if your on a budget.

I agree

@troll93: Bearing's probably bad on your GPU fan. You could swap the heatsink/fan, but if it's three years old, the price of an aftermarket cooler and the work it'll take isn't really worth it.

Clock speed doesn't mean performance when the architecture is the same. A 1.7ghz i7 mobile will run circles around a 3ghz Pentium 4 while running cooler. Think of a hz more like container than a unit of speed. A truck carrying 900 2 liters of pop will carry more pop than the same truck carrying 1,100 cans of pop.

What resolution is your monitor? The 290 is around 30% faster than the 770. It also draws 25-30% more power, generates that same difference in heat, and because of that, will generate more fan noise. At 1080p, you'll most likely be CPU bound before you're GPU bound. It's once you get up to higher resolutions that the 290's going to start pulling away from the 770.

The 770 has 2gb of DDR5, the 290 has 4. The 2gb of ram is the biggest issue. The two cards are priced so closely that I would rather deal with AMD's crappy software (Or lack thereof, as I lost the ability to launch Catalyst eons ago.) then be stuck with a card with only 2gb of ram. If heat and noise is an issue, you can underclock and undervolt the 290 and still have more performance than the 770. The 290 has a big fat 512bit bus for the memory as well.

The 770 is a good card for now. The 290 is a good card for now and tomorrow.

@troll93: something else to consider is Nvidia's Shadowplay feature. Onboard h264, on my machine there is no perceptible performance hit even when recording 1080p60 video...which is all the time. I have an Asus GTX 780 3gb.

I would say get a GTX 780, there isn't much of a price difference compared to R9 290 is there?

Edit: Current recommendation from Tom's Hardware seems to be a tie between R9 290 and GTX 780, so get the one that tickles your fancy :).

I hate recommending AMD just because their drivers are always so awful, but the 290 is a more powerful card than the 770 in pretty much every measure. And that extra 2 GB of RAM is going to be a major plus if you are going to game over 1080p. I don't know how much of a budget restriction you are working on but this 770 has 4 GB of RAM and is highly overclocked. Might not give you as much performance as the 290 but personally I would go for that.

Personally I would go with a GTX 770 with 4GB VRAM myself as Raven pointed out AMD drivers are just so bad its actually not even worth it anymore coz the cards get gimped even though their more bang for buck but the drivers only work half the time, updating is an absolute bitch to do for newer games, Mantle isn't worth the ass its printed on my opinion either because DX12 will neglegate any advantage Mantle API has on lower GPUs, it doesn't really do much for the higher end GPU spectrum and limited on games its actually compatible for.