GPU Upgrade from 1660TI

[Pspritechologist]

Budget: However much is reasonable in CAD; I am not adverse to simply waiting for prices to come down more for a better deal.

Country: Canada

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: The big reason for the upgrade is VR, as my 1660TI does alright, but is redlined in a lot of games, and I haven't even tried HL: Alyx or Boneworks yet, as I'm holding out for a better experience on my Index. Other than that, general gaming, nothing too intensive honestly, on a 1440p panel. My current card is fine for most things, but that sweet, sweet VR calls.

Other details: It will be paired with my current CPU, a Core i5-9600KF. Like so many others, I've been holding out for a very long time, and with prices finally stabilizing, I am extremely eager to get myself a new card, preferably around the 3070-3070ti ish range. I don't want to jump the gun and buy one before it makes sense.

 

Any advice on the matter is appreciated

[Mikey8888fan]

A nice gpu upgrade from the 1660 Ti to the RTX 3060 should be good enough to run basically any game you would want it to run (even in VR). As of right now 3060s are around $410 (USD, no tax included) ($525 CAD, no tax included). The i5-9600KF should be a small bottleneck to the 3060 so I would recommend upgrading the cpu too; to something like i5-10600k (The price margin between the RTX 3070 and the 3060 is insane!). You could use that extra $200 from the 3070 and 3060 margin to upgrade the cpu, just make sure the motherboard supports it. Hope this helps!

[Pspritechologist]

1 hour ago, Mikey8888fan said:

A nice gpu upgrade from the 1660 Ti to the RTX 3060 should be good enough to run basically any game you would want it to run (even in VR). As of right now 3060s are around $410 (USD, no tax included) ($525 CAD, no tax included). The i5-9600KF should be a small bottleneck to the 3060 so I would recommend upgrading the cpu too; to something like i5-10600k (The price margin between the RTX 3070 and the 3060 is insane!). You could use that extra $200 from the 3070 and 3060 margin to upgrade the cpu, just make sure the motherboard supports it. Hope this helps!

It certainly does help! I did want to upgrade my CPU at some point, do you really think it would bottleneck even with something so GPU bound like VR?

Additionally, do you know where you've seen GPUs at that price? I've only managed to find 3070TIs for relatively reasonable prices. 

[Mikey8888fan]

11 hours ago, Pspritechologist said:

It certainly does help! I did want to upgrade my CPU at some point, do you really think it would bottleneck even with something so GPU bound like VR?

Additionally, do you know where you've seen GPUs at that price? I've only managed to find 3070TIs for relatively reasonable prices. 

Where I found the $410 USD 3060 was on newegg, as for the cpu bottlenecking; it shouldn’t really bottleneck it that much, as long as you’re fine running your games smoothly without the max performance you can get it really shouldn’t be a problem.

[Queen Chrysalis]

2 minutes ago, Mikey8888fan said:

Where I found the $410 USD 3060 was on newegg, as for the cpu bottlenecking; it shouldn’t really bottleneck it that much, as long as you’re fine running your games smoothly without the max performance you can get it really shouldn’t be a problem.

VR is very single-thread dependent, so a 9600k is still plenty fast.  And for a 3060 I don't really see an issue.  If you are going off some nebulous 'bottleneck calculator', the formulas those things use are hilariously out of date.  If you are worried about price, the 6600xt is faster than the 3060 for about the same price or less, and the 6700xt is usually just a little bit more for a lot faster framerate in most games.

[Pspritechologist]

2 hours ago, Queen Chrysalis said:

VR is very single-thread dependent, so a 9600k is still plenty fast.  And for a 3060 I don't really see an issue.  If you are going off some nebulous 'bottleneck calculator', the formulas those things use are hilariously out of date.  If you are worried about price, the 6600xt is faster than the 3060 for about the same price or less, and the 6700xt is usually just a little bit more for a lot faster framerate in most games.

I was actually looking at some of those, switching to AMD would be mildly uncomfortable territory for me, just due to some negative experiences I'm aware of, but you think it'd be fine for VR and all that? I was considering it might make more sense, since I know a big draw to Nvidia is a lot of the features they pack on their cards, a lot of which I likely wouldn't ever use, even if they're nice to have.

I was hoping for something a little more 3070 ish in performance range, somewhat to make the upgrade feel a little more worthwhile, and also to ensure I don't have any issues with VR in the near future.

 

A final thing I've just remembered; New Nvidia cards are set to come out some time soon, aren't they? Perhaps it'd be a good idea to wait for the launch of that, and see what I can get discounted, or even find something used.

[Queen Chrysalis]

24 minutes ago, Pspritechologist said:

A final thing I've just remembered; New Nvidia cards are set to come out some time soon, aren't they? Perhaps it'd be a good idea to wait for the launch of that, and see what I can get discounted, or even find something used.

Yes they are and that's a very good plan if your current system does what you need it to.  I gave up on caring about brand a while ago.  I remember having discussions like that when polaris and maxwell were a thing.  The feature sets on both are excellent, but the DLSS side for nvidia should be great if you ever wanna do 4k  AMD is probably gonna have something like this next time around, but tbhj most of the features are for learning and rendering, so for gaming just go with who make a better framerate at your budget and resolution.  Right now the go tos are old cards (1080tis are showing up on facebook for 300-350) for under $400, 6600xt for $420ish, 6700xt/3060ti for $550, and 3070ti for over $700, the 6900xt is now going for $950 (msrp) so that's pretty unbeatable at that end of the performance scale.