with black friday coming up it's the time of year to spend your hard-earned
money on gaming upgrades manufacturers know this well and the last quarter of
the year is typically so chock-full of
new products and promotions that it can become impossible to keep track of them
all so with all the different options out there how do you figure out which car
delivers the best value for your dollar
well you could spend a few days
compiling the mother of all benchmarking data spreadsheets
or you could just watch this video because we kind of did all the work for
you just like tunnelbear does all the work
of setting up a vpn for you to try tunnelbear for free go to tunnelbear.com
LTT we've got that linked below
if you don't feel like watching the rest of this honestly that's fine we've got
recommendations for 1080p 1440p and 4k
60fps gaming linked in the description below
if you want to learn about how we got to those conclusions then watch on just
like last year we need to start by defining value
value is not determined by price alone but by how much performance you get for
that price so we might recommend expensive cards
that you wouldn't consider affordable and still be able to call them a great
value next we need to ensure that for every
recommendation in this guide the real world performance that you'll get will
actually be enough for the resolution you want to run your games at if we just
looked at value by itself we could end up telling you to go buy a
seven dollar el cheapo graphics card that gets
two frames per second that would be fantastic FPS per dollar
but a terrible gaming experience so what would be the freaking point
on that subject we are going to be focusing then on three main categories
of gamer all at high detail settings 1080p 1440p and 4k which is why you
actually won't then see any budget card recommendations they weren't able to
meet our minimum performance requirements regardless of how great of
a value they were so our methodology for finding the best
values out there was pretty similar to last year now due to how cards clock
speeds are determined these days with heavy emphasis on automatic tuning
that's done through GPU boost we will not be focusing on the minimal
performance deltas that might exist between vendor a's gtx 1080 and vendor m's gtx
1080 because even a factory overclocked
1080 GPU on the fancy gigantic card is
going to end up a lot closer to a normal
founder's edition 1080 than it will to a
like 1080 ti something with a completely different GPU and this general rule is
true throughout both AMD and NVIDIA's lineups as for which gpus
we looked at we limited ourselves to ones that are actually available for
purchase brand new directly from a large reputable seller so we picked the three
lowest priced models of each one from amazon and newegg then averaged them so
that we could be confident that you can actually go buy something at about the
pricing we're using in our value calculations
we specifically left out used hardware and the reason for that is because while
an older gen card can often be an excellent value and deliver decent
performance at the same time it won't be covered by warranty in all but a few
cases and not everyone's comfortable with that and we've actually run into
situations before where we've gone and recommended some second-hand hardware
only to see the demand and therefore pricing shoot up shortly after we
publish our video okay with me so far
now let's talk about our performance metrics
obviously testing over 40 cards at three
resolutions in a wide enough variety of games to give solid recommendations
wasn't going to be feasible so instead of trying to find the actual frames per
second of every card in every game like last year we used one card that was
very likely to show up on performance charts at all three of these resolutions
from reputable sites like guru 3d and pc perspective and then we logged the
relative performance of any of our cards that we could find compared to that
reference then we used that relative performance
to extrapolate what the expected FPS might be
now in some cases we had to extrapolate from an extrapolation
and then everything got a little fuzzy for a while and i think at some point we were
visited by the spreadsheet fairy
but anyway the point is it is imperfect
we know thanks to the amount of data we collected including benchmarks from FPS
rts and rpg games we're confident that after applying a common sense filter
like we ignored products outright that will obviously thermal throttle we've
got a pretty clear picture of which cards will perform consistently better
and which ones will perform consistently worse
so at 1080p there are only really a couple of choices for team red the rx
570 and 580 were far and away the best
their little brother the rx 560 did manage similar FPS per dollar numbers
but it wasn't able to consistently deliver a high quality 1080p experience
as for team green i never thought i'd hear myself say this but
if all you want is 1080p you can actually save a few bucks the 1063 gig
is less powerful and has less video memory which hurts it at higher
resolutions compared to AMD's offerings but it met our performance bar and on
average we were able to find it for 40 to 50 dollars less
moving up to 1440p the rx 570 and 580
once again deliver along with the 1063 gig the highest FPS per dollar by a
significant margin unfortunately for team green their
offering just doesn't have enough raw power for us to recommend it here now
with that said we aren't saying that higher end cards
are a bad idea at this resolution the gtx 1070 and 1070 ti are our
recommendations if you want much higher frame rates and fewer stutters and
you're willing to pay a bit of a premium for it finally for the ballers among you if you
want a game at 4k at high details 60 FPS
there's really only one choice the gtx 1080 ti
anything else other than a titan xp though its FPS per
dollar would be obviously worse since it performs about the same as a 1080 ti
would require you to turn down your in-game settings turn down your
resolution or turn down both in order to reach 60 FPS
obviously there are other factors to consider when you buy a graphics card
like NVIDIA's excellent shadow play game recording software that obviously isn't
supported on AMD cards or polaris's
efficiency for cryptocurrency mining if you want to make a couple bucks with
your gaming rig when you're not busy gaming on it and then as to individual cards well the
design of the board and cooler the length of the warranty and any game
bundles should also weigh into your decision
but as i've said before to narrow your search you can find in the description
of the video three solid choices for each resolution
happy shopping and
if you guys are looking for a recommendation for shaving supplies and
other bathroom supplies you'll also find a link down there for that dollar shave
club it is now the best time ever to try
out dollar shave club they make it easy to upgrade your shave and your bathroom
and you don't have to set foot in a store in order to get high quality
shaving and grooming products they deliver them straight to your door for a
limited time dollar shave club is basically giving away their shower shave
starter set to new members for five bucks it includes their executive razor
and three trial size versions of their most popular products to help you stay
fresh and clean so you'll get their shave butter their body wash and their
one wipe charlie's butt wipes after the first box replacement cartridges for
your executive razor are just a few bucks a month and this offer is
exclusively available at dollarshaveclub.com
Linus so go check it out below
so thanks for watching guys if you dislike this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get
subscribed maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description i've
kind of already said that a couple of times but you guys get the point uh also
link down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our
community forum