What gpu under $500

[speaker4thedead]

My daughter saved up for a gaming computer for over a year. She saved every single penny from birthday, Christmas, and baby sitting. She is about to be 16. She got taken by someone on FB Marketplace. She had one of her friends take her to meet the seller. She was expecting a 7950X3D and a 2060 super. When she got home she had a ryzen 5 1400 and an rx570. They sure made it look like a $2000 rig in the pictures. 
 

she was broken hearted…
 

So for her 16th birthday I’m buying her the parts and am going to teach her to build a PC. 

All I have left is the mobo, ram, and gpu. 
 

Now while I wont be able to afford the cpu she wanted, I purchased a Ryzen 5 7600x 

 

What gpu do you guys suggest? I REALLY want to try the Intel Arc 770 Founders Edition or the 750 Special Edition. But I know that I should probably use an AMD gpu to keep smart access. What do you guys think? I don’t have to buy it immediately. I’m buying it piece by piece. Paycheck by paycheck. My plan was to buy the cpu then gpu as the last two things but I nabbed that 7600x for $150 brand new on Amazon a few days ago. So that leaves me a good month to decide on a gpu as this next check will be the mobo and ram. 

[deadlou666]

6800xt should do perfect, low price and really good performance. At the minute nvidia probably aren't an option, unless u want better ray tracing performance. The arc gpus are reaaally cool, however if your building a rig for someone then they really aren't a choice because of the random performance that really depends on the game

[speaker4thedead]

1 minute ago, deadlou666 said:

6800xt should do perfect, low price and really good performance. At the minute nvidia probably arnt an option, unless u want better ray tracing performance. 

The only game she would care about with RT would be Minecraft. 

[deadlou666]

Ah, I see. The 6800xt can handle it from 60-25 fps . Seems nvidia will be the way to go, if rt Minecraft is wanted 

[deadlou666]

If your okay going 2nd hand a 3080 (depends on any deals u can get) would be ideal, really good Minecraft ray tracing (and dxr in general) and also dlss so things like cyberpunk (if she'll be playing that sorta stuff) can run with high ray trace settings 

[Alinz]

1 hour ago, speaker4thedead said:

But I know that I should probably use an AMD gpu to keep smart access.

Smart acces memory is just a fancy AMD name for resizable bar. Intel cards use resizable bar too, in fact, they really need it in order to perform good. 

 

Resizable bar Support:

AMD 400/500 or 600 series motherboard with Ryzen 5000/7000 CPU, or an Intel 10th-, 11th-, or 12th-generation CPU and corresponding motherboard. Am Nvidia GeForce RTX 30/40 graphics card/Intel Arc graphics card or AMD 6000/7000 series GPU. Resizable bar is supported and enabled by default on AM5.

1 hour ago, speaker4thedead said:

She was expecting a 7950X3D and a 2060 super. When she got home she had a ryzen 5 1400 and an rx570. They sure made it look like a $2000 rig in the pictures. 

So sad to hear this, dad to the rescue! Really nice gesture for sure. Also, a good learning opportunitiy for her to learn about computers. Hopefully she will be more carefull in the future regarding secondshand deals.

 

As for the GPU, what resolution will your daughter be playing at? A 3070 will be good for RT Minecraft at 1080P. Though a 6800XT will be better at everything else other then RT.

 

[speaker4thedead]

6 hours ago, Alinz said:

Smart acces memory is just a fancy AMD name for resizable bar. Intel cards use resizable bar too, in fact, they really need it in order to perform good. 

 

Resizable bar Support:

AMD 400/500 or 600 series motherboard with Ryzen 5000/7000 CPU, or an Intel 10th-, 11th-, or 12th-generation CPU and corresponding motherboard. Am Nvidia GeForce RTX 30/40 graphics card/Intel Arc graphics card or AMD 6000/7000 series GPU. Resizable bar is supported and enabled by default on AM5.

So sad to hear this, dad to the rescue! Really nice gesture for sure. Also, a good learning opportunitiy for her to learn about computers. Hopefully she will be more carefull in the future regarding secondshand deals.

 

As for the GPU, what resolution will your daughter be playing at? A 3070 will be good for RT Minecraft at 1080P. Though a 6800XT will be better at everything else other then RT.

 

The monitor we currently have is a 1080. It’s unlikely its played on anything higher. And it wasn’t smart access I was thinking about. It was RSR. The super dynamic upscaling.  
 

and I have considered getting a 2nd hand gpu but I’m terrified of it working for a week and dying

[deadlou666]

2 hours ago, speaker4thedead said:

The monitor we currently have is a 1080. It’s unlikely its played on anything higher. And it wasn’t smart access I was thinking about. It was RSR. The super dynamic upscaling.  
 

and I have considered getting a 2nd hand gpu but I’m terrified of it working for a week and dying

i'm using a 2070 2nd hand its been perfectly fine for the past ages. ebay also have a really good returns policy so if anything goes wrong theyll happily refund you if the seller doesnt