Picture this. You're gaming on your very average gaming PC and it's all right.
But then inheritance strikes. Your long lost
uncle Milbour, who you know well enough to make small talk with, but not well
enough to be that sad about, left you $3,000.
Woohoo. 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,
UG, Green. Their Nexo 500 watt desktop
charger has six GAN chips and six ports with a single port supporting up to 240
watts of PD fast charging. Learn more using the links in our description
today.
If you haven't seen our 2025 most average gaming PC yet, the TLDDR is this
tower here. Has a six core Core i5, 16 gigs of memory, and an RTX 3060 with 8
gigs of VRAM. It 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 F-124 and ano
1800 managed to hit around 100 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 50/90. As for 4K, once again, ano
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 Milbour's cash money.
I'm going to miss that son of a 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 12volt 2x6 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 Ano and 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 4xed the pixel count compared to just now, we're running at
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 slideshow 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
Milbour's money was optimally spent. To
answer that, we've thrown our 5090 into this tower with a Ryzen 7 9800X 3D.
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 frames
per second. And this is a this is a butter smooth gaming experience. And
that's true across the board, meaning that much of our 5090s 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 GPUheavy 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 ANO and F1 managed sizable FPS
increases going to our higherend CPU, showing that these games, even at 4K at
these settings, are still somewhat CPUbound. But here's the thing. We have
an average PC. We're not gaming at 1080p. So then, if buying a 5090 is a
total waste of money for us, what is a reasonable amount of Milbourne's
inheritance to spend on a GPU for our average PC? How about a 9070 XT? 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 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 variance. But still, what
that shows is that we are clearly
CPUbound, and buying a more expensive GPU is giving us nada, nothing. We could
just put a 9070 XT 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 hm 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. Uh, Cyberpunk is arguably a
little bit marginal, at least at these, you know, ray traced medium settings.
So, did AMD nail the positioning of the 9070 series? It kind of looks like it.
1080p performance is neck andneck with higherend cards, as you would expect
with a 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
9070 XT is going to get a little bit more room to shine when paired with a
higherend CPU like a 9800 X3D, 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 unobtanium 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.
Plof 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 want to consider a more rounded approach to our upgrades. Like
this rounded segue to our sponsor, you
green. With how much tech we use in our work or gaming setup these days, the
amount of cables running up and down your desk can be quite disorganized and
messy. The UG Green 500 watt charger will sit right on top of your desk,
giving you easy access to each of its six ports. That's right, six ports, six
GAN chips, and a single port can deliver up to 240 watts of power with its PD3.1
protocol. According to Ugre's testing, that means a 16-inch MacBook can be
topped up from zero to 60% in 30 minutes. That's half an hour. Heck, you
can even fast charge five laptops at the same time if you want. You crazy. And
you can do all that while staying safe. It's got multiple features baked in like
overcurren, shortcircuit, and temperature protection. Use our links in
the description to pick up a UG Green Nexode 500 watt desktop charger today
and to learn more about all the other charging solutions they have to offer.
Wow. If you guys enjoyed this video, why not go back and find the one where we
built the most average PC? It's D.