Picture this, you're gaming on your very average gaming PC,
and it's all right. But then,
Inheritance Strikes, your long lost Uncle Milburn,
who you know well enough to make small talk with, but not well enough to be that sad about,
left you 3,000 US dollars.
Well, this is perfect. Everyone knows that if you're on a limited budget,
the best thing is to get a good enough platform,
and then dump the rest of your money into your GPU.
But here's the thing about stuff that everyone knows.
Sometimes, everyone is wrong. It's been a while since we've explored the effects
of bottlenecks on the latest and greatest GPUs, and now that we've got a new, latest, and greatest,
I think it's high time for us to ask, is it really worth spending this kind of money,
or could we get most of the benefit for a fraction of the cost?
Something, something, our sponsor.
If you haven't seen our 2025 most average gaming PC yet,
the TLDR is this tower here has a six core Core i5,
16 gigs of memory, and an RTX 3060 with eight gigs of VRAM.
It's pretty mid, but hey, that's what we were going for.
So let's game on it to establish a baseline. Kicking things off at 1080p, less demanding games
like F124 and Anno 1800 managed to hit
around a hundred frames per second at high, and very high respectively.
But as we move into more demanding titles
like Cyberpunk and Returnal, let's just say that I would probably have dialed
some of these settings down if I wasn't about to compare this setup to a 5090.
As for 4K, once again, Anno is fine. I mean, 30 FPS is plenty for a game like this,
but everything else is a little rough.
So now that we've got some numbers to compare to, it's time to spend dear Uncle Milburn's cash money.
I'm gonna miss that son of a b***h. Aside from being effective, swapping your GPU
is one of the simplest upgrades that you can make these days. Now that pretty much everything else
is buried under coolers or motherboard armor,
but that doesn't mean that it's entirely without its hazards.
Releasing the PCIe latch to get your old card out can require some serious contortion,
although, oh nice, this one has the little button, so I don't have to worry about that.
And the jump from the 3060 that we have in here now
to this 5090 is a very significant one, and not just in terms of weight.
You'll need to ensure that your case can accommodate the space and cooling requirements
of your bulky new card, not to mention that if your power supply is on the older side,
it might not have native support for this new fangled power connector
that probably won't melt.
Luckily, Elijah went a little overboard when he configured the most average gaming PC's
power supply this year, so we've got plenty of power for our new 5090.
But if he hadn't, we'd be looking for something with a 12 volt two by six connector
that's rated for 600 watts, plus some extra capacity for all the rest of our system,
which, okay, in our case, isn't much, but your mileage may vary.
Right out of the gate, that is quite the upgrade.
Starting at 1080p again, this is much better,
although it is worth noting that we're at ray tracing medium
and only 1080p on a 5090,
so this falls well short of where I would expect it to be.
With that said, I mean, it's a lot better than an ON F124
who only jumped by about 70%.
Again, I can't emphasize this enough. Going from a mid-tier card from two generations ago
to the 5090. Meanwhile, Returnal is about like Cyberpunk,
approximately tripling its performance.
Let's see what happens at 4K though. And there we go.
Even though we've forexed the pixel count, compared to just now, we're running it
just over half the FPS, which highlights just how CPU bottlenecked we were
when we were running at 1080p. As for how this compares to our poor 3060 at 4K,
well, let's just say we go from slide show to what a show.
I mean, this is just, this is just smooth. This is a pretty darn solid gaming experience,
but just because we're having a good gaming experience now,
doesn't mean that Uncle Milburn's money was optimally spent.
To answer that, we've thrown our 5090 into this tower
with a Ryzen 7 9800X3D.
That's right, we're not only going from six to eight cores,
but these are running at almost double the base frequency,
and we've also doubled our RAM to 32 gigs of DDR5.
Starting at 1080p, it's clear that our slower CPU
resulted in us leaving a lot of performance on the table.
We've gone from around 100 FPS to over 150 FPS.
And this is a butter smooth gaming experience.
And that's true across the board, meaning that much of our 5090's performance
was completely wasted on our average PC.
But what about at 4K? Here, I've got to say, my surprise kind of goes
the other way. Obviously, I know that Cyberpunk is a very GPU heavy game,
especially at higher resolutions. That's why we use it as a GPU benchmark.
But performance that's exactly the same
as what we were getting with the 12400? That I didn't see coming.
You have to be seriously GPU bottlenecked to be pushing four times the number of pixels,
but still be getting over half the FPS.
We saw the same thing in Returnal, meaning that only Anno and F1 managed sizable FPS increases
going to our higher end CPU, showing that these games, even at 4K at these settings,
are still somewhat CPU bound. But here's the thing,
we have an average PC or not gaming at 1080p. So then if buying a 5090 is a total waste of money for us,
what is a reasonable amount of Milburn's inheritance
to spend on a GPU for our average PC?
How about a 9070XT?
It's got better availability, especially if you're willing to physically go to a shop
and they're selling for maybe 850 Yankee bucks,
which is still too expensive if you ask me, but AMD and NVIDIA didn't ask me, did they?
Let's see how it holds up. Would you look at that at 1080p?
Our average PC, now powered by an AMD GPU,
not only matches our 5090, but actually beats it in three out of our four games.
Not by much, other than F1, this probably just comes down to run-to-run variants,
but still, what that shows is that we are clearly CPU bound
and buying a more expensive GPU is giving us nada, nothing.
We could just put a 9070XT in here, maybe even less.
But what about 4K? Here, now that we're more GPU bound,
the 5090 does manage to differentiate itself,
but it does show that if we're not trying to get
the best of the best performance at 4K, that 12400 can still kind of keep up.
All of our games get dragged into actually playable territory here,
though Cyberpunk is arguably a little bit marginal,
at least at these ray traced medium settings.
So did AMD nail the positioning of the 9070 series?
It kind of looks like it. 1080p performance is neck and neck with higher end cards,
as you would expect with the modern CPU, and at 4K, we're getting at least 50% of the performance
of the 5090 for less than 30% of the price.
Now, it is still true that the 9070XT is gonna get a little bit more room to shine
when paired with a higher end CPU like a 9800X3D,
and we found that was especially true at 1080p, but the mismatch is not nearly as bad.
So I guess what I'm trying to say is, for most gamers, that unobtainium video card
that you can't get your hands on, might not have affected your gaming performance
nearly as much as you thought anyway. Fun thing, by the way,
Ploof mentioned in a previous video that he talked his friend into upgrading his monitor
instead of shelling out for an expensive 50 series GPU.
Well, I have an update for you. His friend went with it and is totally stoked on the decision.
So while the wisdom has for years been
just dump your budget into the GPU,
I feel like GPU companies have kind of taken advantage of that wisdom and convinced us to spend more
than we should be spending on the GPU. And these days, we might wanna consider
a more rounded approach to our upgrades. Like this rounded segue to our sponsor.
If you guys enjoyed this video, why not go back and find the one where we built
the most average PC? It's Deez.