Which graphics card should I get?

[ShaunH]

Giving my brother my old pc parts as he is on some ancient tech - like an A4 apu. He needs a graphics card to put in the pc but he doesn't want to spend alot. His PC will be for 1080p gaming. 
I've been looking at Nvidia 1660 Super - £230, AMD Radeon RX 5700 - £300 and RTX 2070 Super for £460. 

Pc Parts to go with it:

Ryzen 7 1700 Oc'd 3.7ghz

16gb RAM 3000mhz

1080p Monitor.

 

I've been looking at the RX 5700 as its not going to break the bank and seems to be perfect for 1080p gaming, just want to know if you guys recommend it or should I get him the 2070 super if possible.

[Bombastinator]

28 minutes ago, ShaunH said:

Giving my brother my old pc parts as he is on some ancient tech - like an A4 apu. He needs a graphics card to put in the pc but he doesn't want to spend alot. His PC will be for 1080p gaming. 
I've been looking at Nvidia 1660 Super - £230, AMD Radeon RX 5700 - £300 and RTX 2070 Super for £460. 

Pc Parts to go with it:

Ryzen 7 1700 Oc'd 3.7ghz

16gb RAM 3000mhz

1080p Monitor.

 

I've been looking at the RX 5700 as its not going to break the bank and seems to be perfect for 1080p gaming, just want to know if you guys recommend it or should I get him the 2070 super if possible.

It is if anything 5700 is overpowered.  It’s going to drive 1080p at 144hz with room to spare.

 

will his monitor even do 144hz?  If not a 570 might be enough.

[LaPlume]

For a balanced build, I would advocate for a RX 5X0 too, be it 570 or 580, as long as it's a 8GB variant.

 

A 5700, XT or not, won't even been likely to have to stretch before spitting the frames above 60fps, so unless he has an high refresh rate monitor, the difference won't be tangible, but for the wallet.

+ the R7 1700 may be still a respectable CPU, it starts to show it's not last gen anymore here and there, and in games the 5700XT would be usually used fully, the CPU would top off before the GPU reaches full utilization most of the time.

[TouchOfThorn]

If he has a 144hz monitor then maybe go for the 5700 but if he only has a 60hz monitor then I would go for a simple RX 580 and that would do just the job

At this price point nVidia cards aren't a great value compared to AMD cards

[BTGbullseye]

1 hour ago, ShaunH said:

I've been looking at Nvidia 1660 Super - £230, AMD Radeon RX 5700 - £300 and RTX 2070 Super for £460. 

57 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

a 570 might be enough.

23 minutes ago, LaPlume said:

For a balanced build, I would advocate for a RX 5X0 too, be it 570 or 580, as long as it's a 8GB variant.

Actually, I'd go for the 5500 XT over the RX 570/580... It's about the same performance as the 580 8GB, only $10 more comparing the cheapest of the new models, ($30 if comparing an 8GB model) but due to the new architecture it is compatible with newer game rendering techniques that significantly improve performance. Plus it has VCE which is now on-par with NVENC, just not as well supported just yet. (if you use OBS though, it works great, and more software is bound to support it in the near future) Oh, and it has all the nice little features that come with the new Navi architecture, like RIS, (you can set it per-game, and the intensity of the filter as well, the two things everyone asked for) Anti-Lag, integer scaling, etc...

 

Unless your brother is using software that is specifically designed to not utilize AMD properly, (like Adobe Premiere) your best bet is the 5500 XT.

[LaPlume]

In fact, I did thought of the 5500XT over the RX580 8GB

There isn't a big performance gap between the two from what benchmarks I saw, but in efficiency, there is!

If you don't have a beefy PSU, the 5500XT won't make it break a sweat compared to the power hungry RX580.

I was just thinking too much about a "generation accurate" GPU that made sense with the R7 1700

[ShaunH]

10 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

will his monitor even do 144hz?

It's not at the moment, but its mainly to give him room for upgrades. At the moment he is using a 1080p 75hz monitor. No idea if he is planning on changing it but I mainly just want to future proof his pc. Until he can change the cpu and board to maybe a 2XXX or 3XXX ryzen (or intel depends on prices at the time).

10 hours ago, LaPlume said:

For a balanced build, I would advocate for a RX 5X0 too, be it 570 or 580, as long as it's a 8GB variant.

Thats the plan, wanted to future proof his pc just a little. Even if the 1700 is outdated a bit it still works for now, and cpus these days dont cost much to upgrade.

9 hours ago, BTGbullseye said:

Actually, I'd go for the 5500 XT

I see, didn't know that. What would you think of this card to go with it? https://www.scan.co.uk/products/powercolor-radeon-rx-5500-xt-red-dragon-8gb-gddr6-pcie-40-graphics-card-7nm-rdna-1408-streams-1685mh. Mainly want to future proof his pc a bit but this is pretty much half the price of a 5700 so if its atleast going to last a year or two I don't see why not to get it.

8 hours ago, LaPlume said:

In fact, I did thought of the 5500XT over the RX580 8GB

Another vote for the 5500XT then. 

Thanks all for the suggestions, shall give him the list then. Either go for the 5500 XT or 5700 XT. 

5500 XT - https://www.scan.co.uk/products/powercolor-radeon-rx-5500-xt-red-dragon-8gb-gddr6-pcie-40-graphics-card-7nm-rdna-1408-streams-1685mh

5700 - https://www.scan.co.uk/products/powercolor-radeon-rx-5700-8gb-gddr6-pcie-40-graphics-card-7nm-rdna-2304-streams-1465mhz-gpu-1725mhz?utm_source=TechRadar&utm_medium=awin&utm_campaign=Editorial+Content&awc=15473_1577018782_e788a785c48c108b5210a92b70d121d9

(got the prices wrong when i posted it seems, accidently looked at the non xt version)

5700 XT - https://www.scan.co.uk/products/powercolor-amd-radeon-rx-5700-xt-dual-fan-8gb-gddr6-graphics-card

 

Out of these he will probably go for the 5500 xt as its the cheapest haha.

[LOST TALE]

> 1080p.

 

I bet if these cards were 10x more powerful, this post wouldn't have even changed. Somehow there seems to be zero correlation between graphic cards becoming more powerful relative to games at the same price and the price you are willing to spend on a gpu at a 1080p monitor.

 

You're going to mine ethereum while playing on 1080p? You can run 1080p60... on the first low priced high value card. rx 570. All these gpus are overpowered, you can either save money or do whatever you feel like and not regret it either way.

[Bombastinator]

1 hour ago, LOST TALE said:

> 1080p.

 

I bet if these cards were 10x more powerful, this post wouldn't have even changed. Somehow there seems to be zero correlation between graphic cards becoming more powerful relative to games at the same price and the price you are willing to spend on a gpu at a 1080p monitor.

 

You're going to mine ethereum while playing on 1080p? You can run 1080p60... on the first low priced high value card. rx 570. All these gpus are overpowered, you can either save money or do whatever you feel like and not regret it either way.

Yes they’re overpowered. Even the 570 is overpowered for 1080p 60fps gaming with current games. The problem is games tend to use whatever amount of computer power is common at the time.  Going under a 570 makes a certain amount of sense except the new consoles are going to beat the 570 and I’m not sure less than 8 gb of vram is wise atm.  There’s an argument for something like a 1050 or something even smaller.  1080p 60hz gaming doesn’t need 8gb of vram.  More like 2gb.

[SteveGrabowski0]

Man I don't get all the people recommending RX 570 for 1080p75 fps gaming. My GTX 970 is roughly the same power and I was having to drop some settings to medium to get a consistent 60 fps in Resident Evil 2 at the beginning of this year, for instance. I didn't even bother with AC Odyssey when I couldn't get a consistent 60 fps on AC Origins at high settings. For 1080p75 fps I'd have a hard time buying anything less than GTX 1660 Super, especially if he wants to play big 2020 releases like Cyberpunk or Dying Light 2. Or if you have a month to wait, maybe see if the 5600 XT that's 3/4 of a 5700 XT rumors actually come true (that would put a hypothetical 5600 XT a few percentage points above the 1660 Ti).

[BTGbullseye]

4 hours ago, ShaunH said:

I see, didn't know that. What would you think of this card to go with it? https://www.scan.co.uk/products/powercolor-radeon-rx-5500-xt-red-dragon-8gb-gddr6-pcie-40-graphics-card-7nm-rdna-1408-streams-1685mh. Mainly want to future proof his pc a bit but this is pretty much half the price of a 5700 so if its atleast going to last a year or two I don't see why not to get it.

 

Another vote for the 5500XT then. 

 

Out of these he will probably go for the 5500 xt as its the cheapest haha.

It's a good price for a decent card. Should satisfy the 1080p75 high gaming requirement, and have some room to spare.

[Bombastinator]

13 minutes ago, BTGbullseye said:

It's a good price for a decent card. Should satisfy the 1080p75 high gaming requirement, and have some room to spare.

I’ve recently been hearing some ugly things about the 5500s.  Like they don’t actually have 16 lanes.  Only 8.  They crippled the thing.  If he doesn’t have pcie 4.0 on his motherboard the 5500 is a worse choice than a 570.  570s are kinda cheap right now

[BTGbullseye]

4 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

I’ve recently been hearing some ugly things about the 5500s.  Like they don’t actually have 16 lanes.  Only 8.  They crippled the thing.  If he doesn’t have pcie 4.0 on his motherboard the 5500 is a worse choice than a 570.  570s are kinda cheap right now

That only applies if the VRAM is filled completely. If you're not using up all of the 8GB of VRAM, it's not going to have any issue on 8 lanes of PCIe 3.0.

[Juular]

1 minute ago, BTGbullseye said:

That only applies if the VRAM is filled completely. If you're not using up all of the 8GB of VRAM, it's not going to have any issue on 8 lanes of PCIe 3.0.

What PCI-e bandwidth has to do with VRAM ?

[BTGbullseye]

1 minute ago, Juular said:

What PCI-e bandwidth has to do with VRAM ?

When the VRAM is full, it overflows into system RAM. The PCIe 4.0 lane speed improves the access speed to the system RAM a lot, so it has a much lower performance hit on PCIe 4.0 when the VRAM is full.

[Bombastinator]

1 minute ago, Juular said:

What PCI-e bandwidth has to do with VRAM ?

The report was that with low vram there’s swap to memory and 4.0 can do that faster than 3.0. Apparently it can only be a thing if they cut the lanes down.  Which they did.

[Juular]

@BTGbullseye@Bombastinator

Any real benchmarks ? I highly doubt that will matter with such low performance GPU and anyway, texture & polygon gets moved between VRAM and RAM all the time, why do you think games use RAM at all ?

[BTGbullseye]

1 minute ago, Juular said:

@BTGbullseye@Bombastinator

Any real benchmarks ? I highly doubt that will matter with such low performance GPU and anyway, texture & polygon gets moved between VRAM and RAM all the time, why do you think games use RAM at all ?

The GPU VRAM is a much faster variant, and it does affect framerates a lot.

[Bombastinator]

24 minutes ago, Juular said:

@BTGbullseye@Bombastinator

Any real benchmarks ? I highly doubt that will matter with such low performance GPU and anyway, texture & polygon gets moved between VRAM and RAM all the time, why do you think games use RAM at all ?

I just read the links I don’t attest to their quality.  They were second hand.  Now third. The actual testing was done on some German site.