I wanna buy a new graphics card.

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Rock Man
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I wanna buy a new graphics card.

Post by Rock Man »

Right now I'm rocking an Nvidia Geforce 970 GTX on a 1440p monitor with freesync. My system info is in the link provided. I tried posting the info in text form on the forum but it looked extremely sloppy, so I'm posting the txt file instead.

https://mega.nz/file/OnhhFB5T#xs521xq0n ... WmO2Ztk3vg

My threshold in terms of price is something under $300. There any graphics cards I can pick up at or below that price range that beats a 970 GTX? It be nice to have more RAM I believe the 970 provides 3 GB of usable RAM I wanna upgrade to at least 6. Games I usually play are Mass Effect 1, 2, 3 and Overwatch so it'll be cool to find a card to increase performance for those games. Especially over the 970.
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TooBeaucoup
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Re: I wanna buy a new graphics card.

Post by TooBeaucoup »

I'd say the nicest upgrade in that price range at this exact second would be something like an RTX 2060. That will smoke the GTX 970 and can easily be had for $250-$300ish if you shop around. Similarly, a 2060 Super will really bump your performance up even further and can also be had for near $300-$325 with a little shopping around. However, with the announcement of the new nvidia 3000 series cards, I'd say if you can hold out and wait about a month or so, we'll probably see prices drop even more and I'll bet you'll be able to find an RTX 2070 or 2070 Super for around $300-$350 which would absolutely demolish the 970!
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Guspaz
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Re: I wanna buy a new graphics card.

Post by Guspaz »

Don't buy a GPU today. Wait a month or two. We are literally a day away from nVidia's 3000 series GPUs going on sale, and a little over a month away from AMD's next-gen GPUs launching. GPU generations are like 2 years long, so buying a new card right now would result in a horrible value.

It's true that the cheapest card in nVidia's new lineup will be the $500 3070, but that will drive prices of their previous generation of cards down (the 3070 will perform similar to the 2080 Ti), AMD may price some of their cards lower than that.
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Rock Man
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Re: I wanna buy a new graphics card.

Post by Rock Man »

Guspaz wrote:Don't buy a GPU today. Wait a month or two. We are literally a day away from nVidia's 3000 series GPUs going on sale, and a little over a month away from AMD's next-gen GPUs launching. GPU generations are like 2 years long, so buying a new card right now would result in a horrible value.

It's true that the cheapest card in nVidia's new lineup will be the $500 3070, but that will drive prices of their previous generation of cards down (the 3070 will perform similar to the 2080 Ti), AMD may price some of their cards lower than that.
So I wasn't being accurate when I talked about buying a card. The truth is my family is offering to buy a card for my birthday which is this month and are asking me to choose now. Dammit Nvidia! The timing for you to drop the 3000 series sucks! Too bad they couldn't reveal cards months ago.
TooBeaucoup wrote:I'd say the nicest upgrade in that price range at this exact second would be something like an RTX 2060. That will smoke the GTX 970 and can easily be had for $250-$300ish if you shop around. Similarly, a 2060 Super will really bump your performance up even further and can also be had for near $300-$325 with a little shopping around. However, with the announcement of the new nvidia 3000 series cards, I'd say if you can hold out and wait about a month or so, we'll probably see prices drop even more and I'll bet you'll be able to find an RTX 2070 or 2070 Super for around $300-$350 which would absolutely demolish the 970!
It would seem the card you suggested is anywhere from $330 to $360 on newegg, still an awesome deal!

Know of any good ones for $200?
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Josh128
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Re: I wanna buy a new graphics card.

Post by Josh128 »

RX 5700 DD is equivalent or faster than a 2060/S and we bought ours for $300 almost a year ago. Its a very powerful card, we have not had the driver issues you hear about...
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ASDR
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Re: I wanna buy a new graphics card.

Post by ASDR »

Your timing really sucks :/ Especially this time around NV is actually providing good value instead of just pushing both price and performance up. The entry level 3070 should be at least as fast as a flagship-level 2080Ti and will be less than half the price. If those GPUs are actually available (i.e. not a paper launch with eBay scalping) they should significantly devalue the 20/10 series cards that are in your price bracket.

Can't you negotiate the GPU as a holiday present and get something else now? :D
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Austin
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Re: I wanna buy a new graphics card.

Post by Austin »

What are your specs? I'm not clicking on a Mega.NZ link from work, heh. We need to know that before recommending something. There is a point where going too high with the GPU is overkill/redundant until you upgrade the rest of your system.

$200+, you're looking at older cards like the RX580 (8GB) or GTX 1060 (6GB). 1660 is a bit more. Those will still be a considerable bump as many games require more than the 3GB of memory you have on your current card. Avoid the 50 cards (1050, 1650, etc), they are a waste of money for what you are trying to do.
Josh128 wrote:RX 5700 DD is equivalent or faster than a 2060/S and we bought ours for $300 almost a year ago. Its a very powerful card, we have not had the driver issues you hear about...
Yeah, I'd recommend something like this if you're looking in the $300 range. I personally have a 5700XT and it's been excellent, and supposedly the standard 5700 cards are still quite good for the price.
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Guspaz
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Re: I wanna buy a new graphics card.

Post by Guspaz »

The AMD cards are not worth their price, because they're about to be replaced by much faster ones (RDNA2) at the same pricepoint.

If your family can't wait a little bit to buy your present (do they really have to buy it *now*? You can't ask them to buy you a card in two months? Or just give you a gift certificate to somewhere?) then maybe try used cards, their prices have already benefited from the newer cards to some extent.

If you buy a new sub-$300 card new, you'll be getting something that is probably 60% of the performance of what the same money will get you in a few months.

In terms of current-day cards, the 5600 XT ($260+) is significantly faster than the RX 580 ($180+). You can get the 2060 down to $304-310 new, which is pretty much at your limit. It's faster than the 5600XT, and more importantly, supports DLSS, which will help future-proof you as much as you can when forced to buy a last-gen card.

If I were in your shoes (well, I sort of am in that I have a 970, though I'm aiming rather higher end this generation), and my family absolutely would not budge in buying a card RIGHT NOW with no chance to wait, I would buy a 2060 (going used if your family won't pay the extra $4) and play with DLSS whenever possible.

The RX 5700 starts at $370, so it's not in your budget.
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orange808
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Re: I wanna buy a new graphics card.

Post by orange808 »

Make absolutely certain the new card won't be bottlenecked by your mobo, cpu, and storage.

You might also consider targeting 720p for gaming, bypassing this upgrade, and saving up for a completely new machine during Black Friday.
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Josh128
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Re: I wanna buy a new graphics card.

Post by Josh128 »

Guspaz wrote: The RX 5700 starts at $370, so it's not in your budget.
Holy crap man, those prices have increased over the past year. Ours is an XFX DD unit, knocks on XT performance, and we got it brand new for $300. I just checked and apparently you cant get near that now in the 5700 series...crazy, but an RX 5600XT is very slightly faster than a 2060 and you can get them as you said for $260-- the cheapest RTX 2060 card on Amazon is $309. Ray tracing is almost unusable on the 2060 so I wouldnt factor that in. So it seems for under $300, the 5600XT is currently the way to go.

Another option bet would be to either wait for AMDs new cards and how they affect old stock or buy something used off of Ebay now if you can find a good deal, but even there prices are just fucking high for everything...
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BazookaBen
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Re: I wanna buy a new graphics card.

Post by BazookaBen »

Ask for a $300 gift card to Amazon or Newegg.

The 3060 is going to come out in a month or two and will blow away anything you can buy for $300 now.

A used 2080 will also be around $300 soon as people upgrade to 3080.
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Guspaz
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Re: I wanna buy a new graphics card.

Post by Guspaz »

Anandtech's bench results (https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2580?vs=2515) show the 2060 as being generally ahead of the 5600XT, though it's not a clear win. And while it's not fast enough for RT, I'd argue that if you're going to be sticking with the card for the next few years, DLSS is the main reason to get it, because that's going to be present in more and more games now that the implementation has been greatly simplified. It uses much of the same input data as TAA does, and most games use TAA these days. DLSS 2.1 supports the 2000-series cards, and brings (most relevant to the 2060) support for dynamic resolution scaling input to DLSS for fixed output resolutions. Which is particularly relevant for a lower-end card, I think.

AMD's 5600 XT doesn't have anything remotely comparable. I expect AMD to have something on par with it by RDNA3 (the rumours of their competing checkerboard-based solution for RDNA2 seem like a half step and not a true competitor), but regardless of if AMD puts out something comparable to DLSS in RDNA2 or RDNA3, if you need to buy a card in the here and now for $400, your best bet for future-proof performance is DLSS 2.0+.

There's a presumption that, even if the rest of the system bottlenecks the GPU, an upgrade to it can follow at a later point in time. I've not looked at the specs, though, since it was a sketchy "mega" link.

EDIT: The target system is a Ryzen 1700X (8c16t) with 16GB of RAM. That's going to be absolutely fine with a midrange graphics card like we're talking about here.
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Rock Man
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Re: I wanna buy a new graphics card.

Post by Rock Man »

ASDR wrote:Your timing really sucks :/ Especially this time around NV is actually providing good value instead of just pushing both price and performance up. The entry level 3070 should be at least as fast as a flagship-level 2080Ti and will be less than half the price. If those GPUs are actually available (i.e. not a paper launch with eBay scalping) they should significantly devalue the 20/10 series cards that are in your price bracket.

Can't you negotiate the GPU as a holiday present and get something else now? :D
I'm thinking about using Christmas to ask for the DE10 Nano or whatever that thing is called. Or and/or another piece that belongs to the fabled Mister FPGA. 8)


Btw the 1660 is probably going to get the nod from family. Plus it looks like it's Nvidia with performance that dwarfs my current 970!
Guspaz wrote:The AMD cards are not worth their price, because they're about to be replaced by much faster ones (RDNA2) at the same pricepoint.

If your family can't wait a little bit to buy your present (do they really have to buy it *now*? You can't ask them to buy you a card in two months? Or just give you a gift certificate to somewhere?) then maybe try used cards, their prices have already benefited from the newer cards to some extent.

If you buy a new sub-$300 card new, you'll be getting something that is probably 60% of the performance of what the same money will get you in a few months.

In terms of current-day cards, the 5600 XT ($260+) is significantly faster than the RX 580 ($180+). You can get the 2060 down to $304-310 new, which is pretty much at your limit. It's faster than the 5600XT, and more importantly, supports DLSS, which will help future-proof you as much as you can when forced to buy a last-gen card.

If I were in your shoes (well, I sort of am in that I have a 970, though I'm aiming rather higher end this generation), and my family absolutely would not budge in buying a card RIGHT NOW with no chance to wait, I would buy a 2060 (going used if your family won't pay the extra $4) and play with DLSS whenever possible.

The RX 5700 starts at $370, so it's not in your budget.
Of the ones you mentioned the 5600 XT is the most viable candidate. We were looking at cards at $300 but the situation has changed and now they wanna buy me a card between $200-$260. Also worth noting I wanna try to stick with Nvidia, only because my last AMD was 4 GB more but ran Mass Effect 1 at only 40-49 FPS even when I overclocked it. Meanwhile my shitty 970 Nvidia GeForce is pushing between 50-60+ FPS.
orange808 wrote:Make absolutely certain the new card won't be bottlenecked by your mobo, cpu, and storage.

You might also consider targeting 720p for gaming, bypassing this upgrade, and saving up for a completely new machine during Black Friday.
I posted the specs, I'm fairly certain my $900 machine is a powerhouse.
Last edited by Rock Man on Thu Sep 17, 2020 4:56 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Austin
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Re: I wanna buy a new graphics card.

Post by Austin »

Rock Man wrote:I am giving you my entire spec sheet from the DxDiag.
Yeah... Don't ever do that again. "Ryzen 1700X and 16GB RAM" would have been more than enough. :lol:

Just wanted to make sure you aren't being bottlenecked by other parts in your system. First-gen Ryzens like that are fine paired with a higher end GPU.
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Rock Man
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Re: I wanna buy a new graphics card.

Post by Rock Man »

Austin wrote:
Rock Man wrote:I am giving you my entire spec sheet from the DxDiag.
Yeah... Don't ever do that again. "Ryzen 1700X and 16GB RAM" would have been more than enough. :lol:
Yessir lol!

Austin wrote:
Rock Man wrote:I am giving you my entire spec sheet from the DxDiag.
"Ryzen 1700X and 16GB RAM" would have been more than enough. :lol:
It can handle just about anything I can throw in it.

Think I'll ask for the 1660 you guys have given me some great options but with the power this offers at such a cheap price, I'd be crazy not to get this.
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Lawfer
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Re: I wanna buy a new graphics card.

Post by Lawfer »

Guspaz wrote:Don't buy a GPU today. Wait a month or two. We are literally a day away from nVidia's 3000 series GPUs going on sale, and a little over a month away from AMD's next-gen GPUs launching. GPU generations are like 2 years long, so buying a new card right now would result in a horrible value.
Do graphic cards prices even go down in price that much? Like is it likely that the RTX 3090 going to go down in price 6 months from now?
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Re: I wanna buy a new graphics card.

Post by gray117 »

It should compact the top end prices... However at the low end a 1660 (super probably being best option IMHO) now could still end up 1/2 or 2/3 price of 3060 at launch. Going to be really interesting to see how 3060 price-performance compares.

The cynic in me is thinking although the high end price may come down, what nvidia are kind of doing is raising the price and decreasing the value win of their 60 cards (the 1060 @250 really was a great value release) ... But we'll see - perhaps they just end up with a more linear price/performance relationship, and perhaps the low end 50 cards will start to become more viable presuming they go that way... Also seems like our only hope for a $250 price point 3000 (presuming 3060 somewhere 350-400)

You'll always pay exponentially more for the very top end 90/titan/quadro variants... Lower demand, and market sector who just want performance, nevermind the price.... As I say could be a canny move to graduate the whole spectrum of their offerings and maintain a nice price point for the low end and the mid-high crossover point.

...
Early games benchmarks are not looking great from 3080 series - looks like performance jump is more like 15-20% across the board vs 2080.... Unless you play in 4k (probably about 30%) , ray tracing or are about cuda compute/encode/render applications (where performance are actually doubled) then starts to get more exciting, plus brings that high end price point down.
....

6 months from now the memory on 3090s might be cheaper. But I think there's a suspicious chance we could see some ti/super branded variants within 6 months.... That should compress prices further but who knows maybe the 2 are intended to balance each other out :)

End of the day until you or a competitor releases something else you've got a captive market and combinations of apple and miners taught nvidia that there's only a benefit to charging what you can especially at that top end.
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Josh128
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Re: I wanna buy a new graphics card.

Post by Josh128 »

Guspaz wrote:Anandtech's bench results (https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2580?vs=2515) show the 2060 as being generally ahead of the 5600XT, though it's not a clear win.
Techspots 32 game bench results ( https://www.techspot.com/review/1991-ge ... n-5600-xt/ ) show the 5600XT as having a 3% average lead, so who knows? :? In any case, they are obviously pretty evenly matched perf wise. If the lowest price difference is say, $270 for the XT and $320 for the Nvidia, as I saw yesterday, thats about a 19% premium for the same performance, making the XT the better perf/$. Sounds like the 2060 is out of OPs price range anyway from his latest post.
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orange808
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Re: I wanna buy a new graphics card.

Post by orange808 »

The new high end RTX cards may be impossible to buy because of cryptocurrency. The prices are going up and the scalpers are swooping in. I expect used high end RTX 2080 cards will have artificially high resale values, because many people will be unable to upgrade. Scarcity will reign.

There's also the kids that will decide to "try out" cryptomining and purchase the best cards they can actually find: RTX 20** series cards. Their parents are paying the electricity bill, so they won't need a business plan that makes sense. There's a new set of teens out there that didn't participate last time. I doubt they learned anything from the last fools gold rush, because they were kids.

nVidia wants this to happen again and they are quietly licking their chops for another crypto gold rush.

If it gets crazy again, even the mid range cards will be affected. I'm not convinced prices are coming down very much for anything with respectable performance.

Of course, OP is looking in the bargain bin section, so there's a little more hope. Even if prices on low performance GPUs don't come down, they are unlikely to go up.
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