With your budget of 200-300, You can go for a 7950, or try to look for a used 7970. But with current difficulties, you wont be getting much coins. Not very profitable at all.
If you're just looking to amuse yourself and have fun mining coins/trading, I suggest investing that $300 into ASIC miners. But if you are the occasional gamer, i'd go for the 7950.
You can pick up about 7 USB Block Eruptors in this group buy at 0.45BTC each with that $300: bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=263587.0
That would give you roughly 2300 MH/s compared to the 600 kH/s a 7950 would give you.
If you want to compute these hashrates into real-time mining profit. That would come out to $3.71 mining Bitcoins and $1.96 mining Litecoins today according to coinwarz.com
Take your pick, but either way you wont profit.
I agree with relazyfo.
Im also new to mining so I was thinking getting a video card 7970 But after running the number you will never get your investment back.
So What I did I purchase a USB Erupter Block last week and got it 3 days ago, so I been playing with.
It been mining for around 20+ Hours. I have been able to mine 0.00653996 BTC - Its not allot -but being that I'm not using energy its money coming back.
I posted the results of 1 Hour test.
--->
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=265616.msg2843768I figure I should have my money back around a month. Then after that its pure profits.
ALSO another thing that Bitcoin price could Jump back to 200$ each like it did afew months ago. OR I could drop down to 0$... Its a chance.
and welcome...