at $85-$120, is the rx 6500 finally worth it for esports titles?

jordanbuilds1 · May 17

people trash on the 6500 for its horendous price to preformance, but over the course of 2 years, its gone down in price jurastically. so, at the 6500s current new-used market price, is the rx 6500 worth it for the cods and fortnites of the world? or is it still garbage?

Tetras · May 17

For that price it is alright, but it does still have big limitations due to the VRAM/PCI-E issue and the cut down media engine, especially if you're upgrading on an old PC.

Personally, I'd rather have a used 6600, 2060 or maybe a 1660, which don't suffer from any of those limitations.

8tg · May 17

No, because it’s still a 4gb card that gets vastly outperformed by a GTX 1070, which costs less used.

and even on the high end of that price range, you can get 1080’s sometimes around $120 which outperform the RX 6600 even

that’s the problem with low end cards in general, 99% of the time you’re just better off buying used high end stuff from few generations back, because it performs better for the same money or less.

the only times cards like the RX 6500 xt make sense are if you have some strict power requirement where you can only use a 6 pin (even then just get a GTX 1060), or refuse to buy a used product

which is foolish when you’re looking at low end budget cards anyway, as if money is a concern, it’s a huge waste of money to buy new

YoungBlade · May 17

The RX 6500 XT has performance a bit above the level of the RX 580 when installed in a PCIe 4.0 system - lower for 3.0 - and when VRAM needs are kept in check at under 4GB.

In a PCIe 3.0 system, or heaven forbid an old PCIe 2.0 one, the RX 580 is better.

If you need more than 4GB of VRAM, the RX 580 8GB is better.

On the used market, you can either grab an RX 580 for much cheaper, or even step up to something like a GTX 1070 or RX 5600 XT for the same price.

So the use case where it makes sense is that you have a relatively new PC with PCIe 4.0, are only playing eSports titles, have a tight budget where you can't step up to the RX 6600, and you refuse to buy used.

In that narrow case, yes, it finally makes sense to buy at around $100 new.

MadAnt250 · May 17

3 hours ago, jordanbuilds1 said:

or is it still garbage?

Yes. Do not buy it unless you want to waste money.

The people that go around claiming the 6500xt as a great low budget gpu for low budget gaming systems are delusional or full of crap or are mislead themselves. The 6500xt is a terrible buy for anyone who has an older system without pcie gen 4 support and if they do, I still believe it's still bad value to buy it new. Used GTX 1060 6GB and GTX 1660 cards are a much better value and can be found for cheaper than the 6500xt NEW or USED.