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Best cards for around £500 right now

el_boufador

el_boufador

el_boufador

Associate
Joined
17 Nov 2019
Posts
5
Hi,
I'm looking for a graphics card for my son for Christmas. This will be used for gaming on monitors but also VR on an oculus quest. He's mentioned he'd like to run games like Half-life Alyx.
Prepared to spend up to about £500, maybe a little more if this gets a significantly better card.
From looking at the Half Life Alyx specifications, to run in high graphics the NVIDIA 3060Ti is recommended, as is the AMD RX 6700 XT
I seem to be able to get either of these cards from a brand I know (e.g. MSI) in budget, however searching on this forum I have also found recommendations to go up to the AMD RX 6800. Generally these seem to be starting at a little over £600 now, but there seem to be some retailers (not OCUK) have these under £500 (but personally I have never heard of the brand before - XFX)

Would you stick on the 3060Ti / 6700 XT (or maybe go up to a 6750), from a major brand, or go for the 6800?

As I say I would prefer this to come in for <£500, but prepared to spend a little more if it is a significantly better / future proofed card.

I know nothing about such things so it would be awesome if anyone had advice to share - I'd really appreciate it.
 
@el_boufador if you're not interested in nvidia-specific features (ray-tracing/DLSS which have little to no use in VR) then just get the best AMD card you can afford - it'll give you the best bang-for-buck for games like HL: Alyx.

Re: XFX - they only make AMD cards which may be why you're less familiar - they have been around a long time though and their quality is much the same as any other Radeon cards.
 
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If you can get a 6800 or 6800 XT for your budget then it's a fairly decent bump in performance from a 3060 Ti class card. I wouldn't have concerns about XFX, as said above they're been around a long time and their cards are sometimes used in launch reviews, supplied on behalf of AMD.

I thought I remembered reading in the VR forum (don't use it myself) that NVIDIA had better support and performance in VR? Probably best to ask on there.
 
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el_boufador said:
Hi,
I'm looking for a graphics card for my son for Christmas. This will be used for gaming on monitors but also VR on an oculus quest. He's mentioned he'd like to run games like Half-life Alyx.
Prepared to spend up to about £500, maybe a little more if this gets a significantly better card.
From looking at the Half Life Alyx specifications, to run in high graphics the NVIDIA 3060Ti is recommended, as is the AMD RX 6700 XT
I seem to be able to get either of these cards from a brand I know (e.g. MSI) in budget, however searching on this forum I have also found recommendations to go up to the AMD RX 6800. Generally these seem to be starting at a little over £600 now, but there seem to be some retailers (not OCUK) have these under £500 (but personally I have never heard of the brand before - XFX)

Would you stick on the 3060Ti / 6700 XT (or maybe go up to a 6750), from a major brand, or go for the 6800?

As I say I would prefer this to come in for <£500, but prepared to spend a little more if it is a significantly better / future proofed card.

I know nothing about such things so it would be awesome if anyone had advice to share - I'd really appreciate it.
Click to expand...

What you want is a used RTX 3080, £500 is the going rate for one, if you can get a new 6800 XT that would be a good choice also that might be outside your bedget though.

Half Life Alyx is a VR title so it's far more demanding graphically than say a comparable game on a monitor/TV, personally I wouldn't consider anything below a 3070Ti for PC VR unless its an old VR headset with low resolution (like a Rift S)
 
Iiiiiiiiffffff you can stretch to £649 you can get a 6900xt and blow them other choices out of the water, gibbo is doing a forum members deal in another thread on here knocking a little bit off the (already discounted) price with a code
 
el_boufador said:
Hi,
I'm looking for a graphics card for my son for Christmas. This will be used for gaming on monitors but also VR on an oculus quest. He's mentioned he'd like to run games like Half-life Alyx.
Prepared to spend up to about £500, maybe a little more if this gets a significantly better card.
From looking at the Half Life Alyx specifications, to run in high graphics the NVIDIA 3060Ti is recommended, as is the AMD RX 6700 XT
I seem to be able to get either of these cards from a brand I know (e.g. MSI) in budget, however searching on this forum I have also found recommendations to go up to the AMD RX 6800. Generally these seem to be starting at a little over £600 now, but there seem to be some retailers (not OCUK) have these under £500 (but personally I have never heard of the brand before - XFX)

Would you stick on the 3060Ti / 6700 XT (or maybe go up to a 6750), from a major brand, or go for the 6800?

As I say I would prefer this to come in for <£500, but prepared to spend a little more if it is a significantly better / future proofed card.

I know nothing about such things so it would be awesome if anyone had advice to share - I'd really appreciate it.
Click to expand...
If you're playing VR wirelessly on the quest, the encode performance of the NV cards is apparently better, at least for the quest favoured codec. Would recommend a 2nd hand NV or waiting for the new AMD GPUs that should have better encode performance.
 
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