GPUS!

[Tom Field]

hello everyone i’ve recently bought a pre built PC for £300 on facebook market place. i’ve had it for a few months now, the i5-4450 is getting replaced with a i5-12600k at christmas alongside a new motherboard, it’s currently got a 1060 3gb in it, i’ve been thinking and due to lack of funds for the new cards, the 3gb of VRAM seems to be harming me, is it worth selling and getting a 980 for similar price just to get that extra GB of VRAM until 2023 when the prices will drop?

 

[Trickle]

People are still posting in the Nvidia Founders thread in the Gfx forum that they are getting drops. I would check that out. If you have a job where you cant be distracted during the middle of the day then this may not be an option.

Otherwise there are supposed to be new entry level (probs still £300+) Nvidia and AMD cards due in Jan/Feb. 4th of Jan is when AMD are said to be revealing details.

 

[Preytheon]

What's the budget on a new card?

GTX1060 isn't a bad card, but with 3Gb you may struggle over 1080P and may have to drop the textures back to medium.... but honestly Ultra/Extreme texture settings are for synthetic benchmarks and forum signatures only.... there's very little noticeable difference, other than framerate, when dropping to "high" settings and even medium settings are very respectable in most modern games - which are the ones where a GTX1060 is more likely to struggle.

I don't think it's worth rolling back a generation to only step up a couple of rungs and get an extra 1Gb RAM: TechPowerup indicates a 16% increase on average, but that isn't enough to make it a better candidate for 1440P gaming.... https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-gtx-1060-3-gb.c2867 a 980Ti would double the RAM and give you 34% extra....

According to TechPowerUp, none of those are recommended 1440P card though, but then they say the same for my 1660super and I'm playing 1440P Fortnite at 180fps (capped), but that's using the "competitive" graphics settings, not the eye-candy version....

 

[Joxeon]

If the PC cost just £300 then you may want to check the quality of the PSU first before hooking up new more powerful components.

In terms of the GPU it's a differcult one as trading it out for a similar card may not make a huge difference for the hassle involved. As @Trickle mentions setting up alerts and trying to bag a founders card of some sort is really the only way to get a solid upgrade at a reasonable price these days so maybe worth just hanging on to the 1060 while trying to get one.

 

[jigger]

Probably best waiting for Intel to release Arc.

I’m pretty sure Intel will have some solid cards in the £250 range.

 

[Preytheon]

Probably best waiting for Intel to release Arc.

I’m pretty sure Intel will have some solid cards in the £250 range.

Probably something to compete with the "new" RTX2050.... technically Ampere, but just the cards that weren't up to the standard of the RTX3060.... before anybody things "maybe", the memory bandwidth is also utterly gimped... so it'll probably struggle with any meaningful gaming, even at 1080P