What Video Card to Buy - Late 2016
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2017-05-06
·
1,859 words · ~9 min read
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over the last few months AMD and NVIDIA have released a slew of new graphics
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cards promising better performance at in
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some cases lower prices but which P
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should you choose Polaris or Pascal and
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how much should you spend let's try to answer those
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questions tunnel bear is the simple VPN app that makes it easy to browse
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privately and enjoy a more open internet to try tunnel bear for free check out
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the link in the video description so we're going to start as
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usual with the tldr if you're building a
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budget box or upgrading an existing machine you can't go wrong with this
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powercolor Radeon RX 460 2 gig video
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card that we found at 110 bucks the
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rx460 delivers smooth frame rates at full HD 1080p in popular titles like
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League of Legends Dota 2 OverWatch and CSG go without having to compromise on
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graphical quality settings stepping up to the $200 price point this EVGA GTX
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10603 gig is a standout deal on the
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green side of the fence with a susus strix rx4 74 gig holding down the fort
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for team red these cards will perform on
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average very similarly and pack enough horsepower for AAA games at high details
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1080p with pcmr approved frame rates for
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a little more oomph this Sapphire RX 484
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gig costs 15% more than those but is
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also about 15% more powerful making it an equally good value if your piggy bank
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can handle the pain now there's an unusual void right now in the next price
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range I would normally address $300 to
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$350 it's populated almost EX exclusively by overpriced RX 480s and
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GTX 1060s I mean they're good cards and
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thanks to their extra horses and onboard memory they're capable of driving solid
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gaming experiences at higher resolutions like 2560 x 1080 ultrawide and 2560
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x440 but I wouldn't pay more than $260
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to $270 for them given the availability
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of this Gigabyte windforce 106 6 gig and
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this Sapphire rx48 8 gig which leads us
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finally then into Enthusiast class cards
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that cost $400 or more where my pick is
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this EVGA GTX 1070 Super Clock the FPS
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per dollar number is a little lower than our other cards but the 1070s value is
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also not bad it delivers 80% of the
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performance of its bigger brother the GTX 1080 enough to run almost anything
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at 4K with some tweaking but at a price that's closer to 65% as much thanks to
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its lower cost gddr5 memory and cutdown
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processor there are slightly cheaper GTX 1070s but I felt like the EVGA tax of 10
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bucks was worthwhile in this case because there is more to life than
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frames per second but that's a subject for the next portion of this video tldr
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is over where I'll explain the methodology that I used to select these
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cards this is my
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spreadsheet as some of you understood
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when I did my little rant on low-end video cards and why nobody should buy
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them for gaming value by definition is
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not determined by Price alone but by a
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ratio of price to reward a meal that
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costs half as much but contains a quarter as much food is cheap but it is
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not a good value especially if you're still going to be hungry when you're
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done so back to my admittedly imperfect
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spreadsheet it was designed to help me use performance numbers from trusted
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review sites around the web to calculate which cards will give me the best value
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or the most FPS per dollar across a variety of games and resolutions the
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more I add the more meaningful the final
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average numbers become here's how it works I could use exact FPS values like
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42 FPS if I was pulling all of my data
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from one source where I knew that every game was tested with the same
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methodology and the same settings but since no single review covers every
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possible scenario I've opted instead to normalize to a last generation card
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whose drivers are mature and that was well sampled making it a great point of
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comparison for both modern flagships and mid-range Solutions the G gtx980
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reference design so when I enter exact
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FPS values for both the cardart I'm investigating and the gtx980 here I get
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a relative performance number which I fill into my spreadsheet this allows me
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to compare cards across different review sites or even cards that haven't ever
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been directly benchmarked against each other with from some spot checking
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anywhere from 2 to 3% margin of error
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for cards that have never been benchmarked against the GTX 980 like the
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750 Ti I used a card that has been
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benched against both as an intermediary the rx460 though this method is not
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ideal and I approximated a lot of other stuff as well only a small fraction of
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the cards available for sale have ever even had a professional review done but
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thanks to GPU boost 3.0 especially
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actually were more limited by power limits imposed by by NVIDIA and AMD than
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by Factory overclocks anyway these days
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so I've approximated most non-reference cards to perform pretty similarly which
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won't necessarily be true but as you can see here adjustments to Price have a far
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larger impact on our value calculation than the kinds of singled digigit
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performance differences that you'll typically see from one GTX 1080 to
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another so yes I know I said it already but it merits repetition here so the
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entire comment section isn't full of people pointing it out this method is
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imperfect and would require either many
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many days of additional manual data entry if I wanted to go beyond relying
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so heavily on Guru 3D for example whose reviews are linked in the Excel sheet by
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the way or ideally some kind of fancy
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custom statistical analysis software and it also ignores a lot of factors here
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are the ones I could think of in no particular order multi-GPU you want to
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shop for an SLI Crossfire setup they would each need to be added individually
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for every pair or more of cards have fun I'm not doing that two characteristics
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like board length display connectors or
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the required physical plugs that might affect physical compatibility with your
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system three warranty there is a huge
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range of policies not just in terms of the coverage period but in terms of
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whether resale overclocking Andor
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physical modif ification is permitted and this is critical for folks who plan
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to water cool four cooler style and
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quality Aesthetics aside though some people care a lot about that for some
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configs a rear exhaust blower design
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might be better to avoid recycling hot air to cool other components while in a
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better ventilated case an open air Cooler's additional performance for the
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GPU itself will result in tangibly better performance in games consult your
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case manufacturer if you're not sure oh and double ball bearing fans are
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probably worth a couple bucks for a card you plan to keep for a long time five
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frame buffer size now generally speaking
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bigger frame buffer cards end up underpowered before the extra RAM is
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necessary but there are some exceptions someone who is really into Skyrim
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texture mods will definitely want to grab an 8 gig rx480 versus a 4 gig one
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regardless of what the performance per dollar metric looks like because vram is
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one of those things that doesn't affect performance at all until you run out of
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it and the card is swapping textures out to system memory and at that point
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everything goes south faster than all the Canadian birds and seniors do in the
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winter time six driver improvements over
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time and the features that are difficult
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or impossible to quantify Shadow play and freesync are examples of things that
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I care about but maybe someone somewhere cares about true audio or the automatic
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game settings optimization in GeForce experience your mileage may vary here
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and that can definitely affect your decision especially when you're looking at Red Team Versus Green Team seven
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sanity checks this GTX 950 at $130 could
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look like a great value for 4K gaming
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with its similar FPS per dollar number but even though this 1080 Founders
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edition cost $700 H it's 47 FPS versus 5 FPS might be
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a factor here for you if you actually want to play games so Consulting actual
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reviews for raw performance numbers is still part of the process leading us to
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eight and perhaps the most important actual availability just because you can
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Google some super cool card if no retailers in your region carry it then
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you're kind of out of luck that is to say unless the retailer ships worldwide
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like Mass drop though it does cost a bit extra if you're not familiar with mass
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drop I'm going to run you through the basic concept Mass drop takes a whole
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bunch of people who want to buy a thing and then a whole bunch of Manufacturers
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who want to sell a lot of things and they put them together the community
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says Hey we'd love to buy that product X
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but it's like expensive if a whole bunch of us agreed to buy it do you think the
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price could drop a little bit you know volume discount and mass drop goes to
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the authorized distributors or even the manufacturers directly and negotiates a
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better price if a bunch of people want to buy or in certain cases they even
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have manufacturers produce special products just for them like the k7xx
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headphones that we featuring today and this is the same ones that I reviewed
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last year so they were configured by mast drop and manufactured by AKG
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they're open-backed headphones with large cushiony ear cups that feature a
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flat flat wire voice coil a genuine leather headband memory foam ear pads
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with velour coverings and a 2-year warranty covered by mass drop and what
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kind of a price do you get well the more buy the better it gets because that's
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how Mass drop works so check out the link in the video description so thanks
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for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like
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button or check out the link to where to buy the cards that we recommended in the
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video description also linked in the description is our merch store which has
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cool shirts like this one and our community Forum which you should totally join now that you're done doing all that
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stuff you're probably wondering what to watch next so click that little button in the top right corner to check out our
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latest video over on channel super
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fun