WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:03.720 Picture this, you're gaming on your very average gaming PC, 00:00:03.720 --> 00:00:06.840 and it's all right. But then, 00:00:06.840 --> 00:00:10.520 Inheritance Strikes, your long lost Uncle Milburn, 00:00:10.520 --> 00:00:15.600 who you know well enough to make small talk with, but not well enough to be that sad about, 00:00:15.600 --> 00:00:18.960 left you 3,000 US dollars. 00:00:22.320 --> 00:00:26.560 Well, this is perfect. Everyone knows that if you're on a limited budget, 00:00:26.560 --> 00:00:29.560 the best thing is to get a good enough platform, 00:00:29.560 --> 00:00:32.760 and then dump the rest of your money into your GPU. 00:00:32.760 --> 00:00:36.280 But here's the thing about stuff that everyone knows. 00:00:36.280 --> 00:00:41.320 Sometimes, everyone is wrong. It's been a while since we've explored the effects 00:00:41.320 --> 00:00:46.840 of bottlenecks on the latest and greatest GPUs, and now that we've got a new, latest, and greatest, 00:00:46.840 --> 00:00:52.520 I think it's high time for us to ask, is it really worth spending this kind of money, 00:00:52.520 --> 00:00:56.920 or could we get most of the benefit for a fraction of the cost? 00:00:56.920 --> 00:00:59.080 Something, something, our sponsor. 00:01:09.160 --> 00:01:12.920 If you haven't seen our 2025 most average gaming PC yet, 00:01:12.920 --> 00:01:16.560 the TLDR is this tower here has a six core Core i5, 00:01:16.560 --> 00:01:20.760 16 gigs of memory, and an RTX 3060 with eight gigs of VRAM. 00:01:20.760 --> 00:01:24.480 It's pretty mid, but hey, that's what we were going for. 00:01:24.480 --> 00:01:29.800 So let's game on it to establish a baseline. Kicking things off at 1080p, less demanding games 00:01:29.800 --> 00:01:32.840 like F124 and Anno 1800 managed to hit 00:01:32.840 --> 00:01:37.320 around a hundred frames per second at high, and very high respectively. 00:01:37.320 --> 00:01:40.560 But as we move into more demanding titles 00:01:40.560 --> 00:01:46.160 like Cyberpunk and Returnal, let's just say that I would probably have dialed 00:01:46.160 --> 00:01:50.840 some of these settings down if I wasn't about to compare this setup to a 5090. 00:01:50.840 --> 00:01:56.880 As for 4K, once again, Anno is fine. I mean, 30 FPS is plenty for a game like this, 00:01:56.880 --> 00:02:00.120 but everything else is a little rough. 00:02:00.120 --> 00:02:06.000 So now that we've got some numbers to compare to, it's time to spend dear Uncle Milburn's cash money. 00:02:09.760 --> 00:02:13.440 I'm gonna miss that son of a b***h. Aside from being effective, swapping your GPU 00:02:13.440 --> 00:02:18.040 is one of the simplest upgrades that you can make these days. Now that pretty much everything else 00:02:18.200 --> 00:02:21.320 is buried under coolers or motherboard armor, 00:02:21.320 --> 00:02:24.920 but that doesn't mean that it's entirely without its hazards. 00:02:24.920 --> 00:02:30.600 Releasing the PCIe latch to get your old card out can require some serious contortion, 00:02:30.600 --> 00:02:34.440 although, oh nice, this one has the little button, so I don't have to worry about that. 00:02:34.440 --> 00:02:37.880 And the jump from the 3060 that we have in here now 00:02:37.880 --> 00:02:43.240 to this 5090 is a very significant one, and not just in terms of weight. 00:02:43.240 --> 00:02:47.480 You'll need to ensure that your case can accommodate the space and cooling requirements 00:02:47.480 --> 00:02:51.880 of your bulky new card, not to mention that if your power supply is on the older side, 00:02:51.880 --> 00:02:55.240 it might not have native support for this new fangled power connector 00:02:55.240 --> 00:02:56.440 that probably won't melt. 00:02:58.440 --> 00:03:03.240 Luckily, Elijah went a little overboard when he configured the most average gaming PC's 00:03:03.240 --> 00:03:07.240 power supply this year, so we've got plenty of power for our new 5090. 00:03:07.240 --> 00:03:11.360 But if he hadn't, we'd be looking for something with a 12 volt two by six connector 00:03:11.360 --> 00:03:16.960 that's rated for 600 watts, plus some extra capacity for all the rest of our system, 00:03:16.960 --> 00:03:21.480 which, okay, in our case, isn't much, but your mileage may vary. 00:03:22.480 --> 00:03:26.400 Right out of the gate, that is quite the upgrade. 00:03:26.400 --> 00:03:29.960 Starting at 1080p again, this is much better, 00:03:29.960 --> 00:03:34.180 although it is worth noting that we're at ray tracing medium 00:03:34.180 --> 00:03:37.960 and only 1080p on a 5090, 00:03:37.960 --> 00:03:41.440 so this falls well short of where I would expect it to be. 00:03:41.440 --> 00:03:45.200 With that said, I mean, it's a lot better than an ON F124 00:03:45.200 --> 00:03:48.240 who only jumped by about 70%. 00:03:48.240 --> 00:03:54.200 Again, I can't emphasize this enough. Going from a mid-tier card from two generations ago 00:03:54.200 --> 00:03:59.160 to the 5090. Meanwhile, Returnal is about like Cyberpunk, 00:03:59.160 --> 00:04:02.200 approximately tripling its performance. 00:04:02.200 --> 00:04:06.480 Let's see what happens at 4K though. And there we go. 00:04:06.480 --> 00:04:10.280 Even though we've forexed the pixel count, compared to just now, we're running it 00:04:10.280 --> 00:04:16.040 just over half the FPS, which highlights just how CPU bottlenecked we were 00:04:16.040 --> 00:04:21.600 when we were running at 1080p. As for how this compares to our poor 3060 at 4K, 00:04:21.600 --> 00:04:26.600 well, let's just say we go from slide show to what a show. 00:04:27.100 --> 00:04:32.000 I mean, this is just, this is just smooth. This is a pretty darn solid gaming experience, 00:04:32.000 --> 00:04:35.520 but just because we're having a good gaming experience now, 00:04:35.520 --> 00:04:39.960 doesn't mean that Uncle Milburn's money was optimally spent. 00:04:39.960 --> 00:04:43.320 To answer that, we've thrown our 5090 into this tower 00:04:43.320 --> 00:04:46.360 with a Ryzen 7 9800X3D. 00:04:46.360 --> 00:04:49.880 That's right, we're not only going from six to eight cores, 00:04:49.880 --> 00:04:52.920 but these are running at almost double the base frequency, 00:04:52.920 --> 00:04:57.680 and we've also doubled our RAM to 32 gigs of DDR5. 00:04:57.680 --> 00:05:00.840 Starting at 1080p, it's clear that our slower CPU 00:05:00.840 --> 00:05:04.320 resulted in us leaving a lot of performance on the table. 00:05:04.320 --> 00:05:09.320 We've gone from around 100 FPS to over 150 FPS. 00:05:10.920 --> 00:05:14.800 And this is a butter smooth gaming experience. 00:05:14.800 --> 00:05:19.800 And that's true across the board, meaning that much of our 5090's performance 00:05:19.800 --> 00:05:23.360 was completely wasted on our average PC. 00:05:23.360 --> 00:05:28.600 But what about at 4K? Here, I've got to say, my surprise kind of goes 00:05:28.600 --> 00:05:34.080 the other way. Obviously, I know that Cyberpunk is a very GPU heavy game, 00:05:34.080 --> 00:05:38.660 especially at higher resolutions. That's why we use it as a GPU benchmark. 00:05:38.660 --> 00:05:42.300 But performance that's exactly the same 00:05:42.300 --> 00:05:45.860 as what we were getting with the 12400? That I didn't see coming. 00:05:45.860 --> 00:05:51.100 You have to be seriously GPU bottlenecked to be pushing four times the number of pixels, 00:05:51.100 --> 00:05:54.420 but still be getting over half the FPS. 00:05:54.420 --> 00:06:00.900 We saw the same thing in Returnal, meaning that only Anno and F1 managed sizable FPS increases 00:06:00.900 --> 00:06:06.020 going to our higher end CPU, showing that these games, even at 4K at these settings, 00:06:06.020 --> 00:06:09.640 are still somewhat CPU bound. But here's the thing, 00:06:09.640 --> 00:06:16.760 we have an average PC or not gaming at 1080p. So then if buying a 5090 is a total waste of money for us, 00:06:16.760 --> 00:06:19.880 what is a reasonable amount of Milburn's inheritance 00:06:19.880 --> 00:06:23.720 to spend on a GPU for our average PC? 00:06:23.720 --> 00:06:26.800 How about a 9070XT? 00:06:26.800 --> 00:06:30.880 It's got better availability, especially if you're willing to physically go to a shop 00:06:30.880 --> 00:06:34.440 and they're selling for maybe 850 Yankee bucks, 00:06:34.440 --> 00:06:40.200 which is still too expensive if you ask me, but AMD and NVIDIA didn't ask me, did they? 00:06:40.200 --> 00:06:45.320 Let's see how it holds up. Would you look at that at 1080p? 00:06:45.320 --> 00:06:49.760 Our average PC, now powered by an AMD GPU, 00:06:49.760 --> 00:06:56.360 not only matches our 5090, but actually beats it in three out of our four games. 00:06:56.360 --> 00:07:01.560 Not by much, other than F1, this probably just comes down to run-to-run variants, 00:07:01.560 --> 00:07:07.600 but still, what that shows is that we are clearly CPU bound 00:07:07.600 --> 00:07:12.600 and buying a more expensive GPU is giving us nada, nothing. 00:07:12.760 --> 00:07:17.760 We could just put a 9070XT in here, maybe even less. 00:07:17.760 --> 00:07:21.880 But what about 4K? Here, now that we're more GPU bound, 00:07:21.880 --> 00:07:24.960 the 5090 does manage to differentiate itself, 00:07:24.960 --> 00:07:29.000 but it does show that if we're not trying to get 00:07:29.000 --> 00:07:35.420 the best of the best performance at 4K, that 12400 can still kind of keep up. 00:07:35.420 --> 00:07:39.340 All of our games get dragged into actually playable territory here, 00:07:39.340 --> 00:07:43.780 though Cyberpunk is arguably a little bit marginal, 00:07:43.780 --> 00:07:47.300 at least at these ray traced medium settings. 00:07:47.300 --> 00:07:51.060 So did AMD nail the positioning of the 9070 series? 00:07:51.060 --> 00:07:55.780 It kind of looks like it. 1080p performance is neck and neck with higher end cards, 00:07:55.780 --> 00:08:02.300 as you would expect with the modern CPU, and at 4K, we're getting at least 50% of the performance 00:08:02.300 --> 00:08:06.420 of the 5090 for less than 30% of the price. 00:08:06.420 --> 00:08:11.980 Now, it is still true that the 9070XT is gonna get a little bit more room to shine 00:08:11.980 --> 00:08:15.700 when paired with a higher end CPU like a 9800X3D, 00:08:15.700 --> 00:08:21.860 and we found that was especially true at 1080p, but the mismatch is not nearly as bad. 00:08:21.860 --> 00:08:27.460 So I guess what I'm trying to say is, for most gamers, that unobtainium video card 00:08:27.460 --> 00:08:31.380 that you can't get your hands on, might not have affected your gaming performance 00:08:31.380 --> 00:08:35.260 nearly as much as you thought anyway. Fun thing, by the way, 00:08:35.260 --> 00:08:39.980 Ploof mentioned in a previous video that he talked his friend into upgrading his monitor 00:08:39.980 --> 00:08:43.360 instead of shelling out for an expensive 50 series GPU. 00:08:43.360 --> 00:08:49.260 Well, I have an update for you. His friend went with it and is totally stoked on the decision. 00:08:49.260 --> 00:08:52.420 So while the wisdom has for years been 00:08:52.420 --> 00:08:55.420 just dump your budget into the GPU, 00:08:55.460 --> 00:09:00.540 I feel like GPU companies have kind of taken advantage of that wisdom and convinced us to spend more 00:09:00.540 --> 00:09:05.060 than we should be spending on the GPU. And these days, we might wanna consider 00:09:05.060 --> 00:09:11.140 a more rounded approach to our upgrades. Like this rounded segue to our sponsor. 00:09:11.140 --> 00:09:14.860 If you guys enjoyed this video, why not go back and find the one where we built 00:09:14.860 --> 00:09:18.260 the most average PC? It's Deez.