over the last few months AMD and NVIDIA have released a slew of new graphics
cards promising better performance at in
some cases lower prices but which P
should you choose Polaris or Pascal and
how much should you spend let's try to answer those
questions tunnel bear is the simple VPN app that makes it easy to browse
privately and enjoy a more open internet to try tunnel bear for free check out
the link in the video description so we're going to start as
usual with the tldr if you're building a
budget box or upgrading an existing machine you can't go wrong with this
powercolor Radeon RX 460 2 gig video
card that we found at 110 bucks the
rx460 delivers smooth frame rates at full HD 1080p in popular titles like
League of Legends Dota 2 OverWatch and CSG go without having to compromise on
graphical quality settings stepping up to the $200 price point this EVGA GTX
10603 gig is a standout deal on the
green side of the fence with a susus strix rx4 74 gig holding down the fort
for team red these cards will perform on
average very similarly and pack enough horsepower for AAA games at high details
1080p with pcmr approved frame rates for
a little more oomph this Sapphire RX 484
gig costs 15% more than those but is
also about 15% more powerful making it an equally good value if your piggy bank
can handle the pain now there's an unusual void right now in the next price
range I would normally address $300 to
$350 it's populated almost EX exclusively by overpriced RX 480s and
GTX 1060s I mean they're good cards and
thanks to their extra horses and onboard memory they're capable of driving solid
gaming experiences at higher resolutions like 2560 x 1080 ultrawide and 2560
x440 but I wouldn't pay more than $260
to $270 for them given the availability
of this Gigabyte windforce 106 6 gig and
this Sapphire rx48 8 gig which leads us
finally then into Enthusiast class cards
that cost $400 or more where my pick is
this EVGA GTX 1070 Super Clock the FPS
per dollar number is a little lower than our other cards but the 1070s value is
also not bad it delivers 80% of the
performance of its bigger brother the GTX 1080 enough to run almost anything
at 4K with some tweaking but at a price that's closer to 65% as much thanks to
its lower cost gddr5 memory and cutdown
processor there are slightly cheaper GTX 1070s but I felt like the EVGA tax of 10
bucks was worthwhile in this case because there is more to life than
frames per second but that's a subject for the next portion of this video tldr
is over where I'll explain the methodology that I used to select these
cards this is my
spreadsheet as some of you understood
when I did my little rant on low-end video cards and why nobody should buy
them for gaming value by definition is
not determined by Price alone but by a
ratio of price to reward a meal that
costs half as much but contains a quarter as much food is cheap but it is
not a good value especially if you're still going to be hungry when you're
done so back to my admittedly imperfect
spreadsheet it was designed to help me use performance numbers from trusted
review sites around the web to calculate which cards will give me the best value
or the most FPS per dollar across a variety of games and resolutions the
more I add the more meaningful the final
average numbers become here's how it works I could use exact FPS values like
42 FPS if I was pulling all of my data
from one source where I knew that every game was tested with the same
methodology and the same settings but since no single review covers every
possible scenario I've opted instead to normalize to a last generation card
whose drivers are mature and that was well sampled making it a great point of
comparison for both modern flagships and mid-range Solutions the G gtx980
reference design so when I enter exact
FPS values for both the cardart I'm investigating and the gtx980 here I get
a relative performance number which I fill into my spreadsheet this allows me
to compare cards across different review sites or even cards that haven't ever
been directly benchmarked against each other with from some spot checking
anywhere from 2 to 3% margin of error
for cards that have never been benchmarked against the GTX 980 like the
750 Ti I used a card that has been
benched against both as an intermediary the rx460 though this method is not
ideal and I approximated a lot of other stuff as well only a small fraction of
the cards available for sale have ever even had a professional review done but
thanks to GPU boost 3.0 especially
actually were more limited by power limits imposed by by NVIDIA and AMD than
by Factory overclocks anyway these days
so I've approximated most non-reference cards to perform pretty similarly which
won't necessarily be true but as you can see here adjustments to Price have a far
larger impact on our value calculation than the kinds of singled digigit
performance differences that you'll typically see from one GTX 1080 to
another so yes I know I said it already but it merits repetition here so the
entire comment section isn't full of people pointing it out this method is
imperfect and would require either many
many days of additional manual data entry if I wanted to go beyond relying
so heavily on Guru 3D for example whose reviews are linked in the Excel sheet by
the way or ideally some kind of fancy
custom statistical analysis software and it also ignores a lot of factors here
are the ones I could think of in no particular order multi-GPU you want to
shop for an SLI Crossfire setup they would each need to be added individually
for every pair or more of cards have fun I'm not doing that two characteristics
like board length display connectors or
the required physical plugs that might affect physical compatibility with your
system three warranty there is a huge
range of policies not just in terms of the coverage period but in terms of
whether resale overclocking Andor
physical modif ification is permitted and this is critical for folks who plan
to water cool four cooler style and
quality Aesthetics aside though some people care a lot about that for some
configs a rear exhaust blower design
might be better to avoid recycling hot air to cool other components while in a
better ventilated case an open air Cooler's additional performance for the
GPU itself will result in tangibly better performance in games consult your
case manufacturer if you're not sure oh and double ball bearing fans are
probably worth a couple bucks for a card you plan to keep for a long time five
frame buffer size now generally speaking
bigger frame buffer cards end up underpowered before the extra RAM is
necessary but there are some exceptions someone who is really into Skyrim
texture mods will definitely want to grab an 8 gig rx480 versus a 4 gig one
regardless of what the performance per dollar metric looks like because vram is
one of those things that doesn't affect performance at all until you run out of
it and the card is swapping textures out to system memory and at that point
everything goes south faster than all the Canadian birds and seniors do in the
winter time six driver improvements over
time and the features that are difficult
or impossible to quantify Shadow play and freesync are examples of things that
I care about but maybe someone somewhere cares about true audio or the automatic
game settings optimization in GeForce experience your mileage may vary here
and that can definitely affect your decision especially when you're looking at Red Team Versus Green Team seven
sanity checks this GTX 950 at $130 could
look like a great value for 4K gaming
with its similar FPS per dollar number but even though this 1080 Founders
edition cost $700 H it's 47 FPS versus 5 FPS might be
a factor here for you if you actually want to play games so Consulting actual
reviews for raw performance numbers is still part of the process leading us to
eight and perhaps the most important actual availability just because you can
Google some super cool card if no retailers in your region carry it then
you're kind of out of luck that is to say unless the retailer ships worldwide
like Mass drop though it does cost a bit extra if you're not familiar with mass
drop I'm going to run you through the basic concept Mass drop takes a whole
bunch of people who want to buy a thing and then a whole bunch of Manufacturers
who want to sell a lot of things and they put them together the community
says Hey we'd love to buy that product X
but it's like expensive if a whole bunch of us agreed to buy it do you think the
price could drop a little bit you know volume discount and mass drop goes to
the authorized distributors or even the manufacturers directly and negotiates a
better price if a bunch of people want to buy or in certain cases they even
have manufacturers produce special products just for them like the k7xx
headphones that we featuring today and this is the same ones that I reviewed
last year so they were configured by mast drop and manufactured by AKG
they're open-backed headphones with large cushiony ear cups that feature a
flat flat wire voice coil a genuine leather headband memory foam ear pads
with velour coverings and a 2-year warranty covered by mass drop and what
kind of a price do you get well the more buy the better it gets because that's
how Mass drop works so check out the link in the video description so thanks
for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like
button or check out the link to where to buy the cards that we recommended in the
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