Trying to figure out if I want to get a good brand 280 or the xfx 280x

[sparkyme]

Hi, I recently have been putting together a new system for myself for malware analysis- working with lots of windows and linux vms, and also doing a lot of stuff with my own scripts that I use with hashcat. I currently have been using an intel core i7 920 processor, and a gtx 460. Great system but I really would like to build something that I can use for my own education and work, I'll be building it on the fx 8350, 16 gigs of corsair ram, and a 1tb raptor hard drive. Now I'm not really sure what card that I should go for, I posted the same question on a couple of other forums and all that I got was a bunch of gamers that really didn't know anything about this type of thing. So has anyone used any of the newer xfx cards? I wanted to get the gigabyte 280, but I'm somewhat new to it and I'm not sure if I just can overclock the crap out of it and if I will get a performance increase for the hashes.

[atom]

the speed increase are mostly small but you get a ton of unpredictable problems that make you mad. all in all, overclocking is not what you want.

[sparkyme]

Should I get the good brand 280 then? I wanted to get the msi or gigabyte card, mostly because I'll have the card working on stuff for days at a time. My video card right now I think is almost dead. I've been having it run full blast for about 2 or 3 years now, the only time that I really gave it a break is when I was going to be gone for a full day, or if I was working on a new script. So I'm trying to find something that I can have running for a fairly long time. I haven't really bought anything amd based for a while so I'm trying to figure it out. I know xfx is decent but I read some fairly poor reviews on the card that I was looking at,