What Video Card to Buy - Late 2017
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2018-05-06
·
1,529 words · ~7 min read
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with black friday coming up it's the time of year to spend your hard-earned
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money on gaming upgrades manufacturers know this well and the last quarter of
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the year is typically so chock-full of
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new products and promotions that it can become impossible to keep track of them
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all so with all the different options out there how do you figure out which car
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delivers the best value for your dollar
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well you could spend a few days
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compiling the mother of all benchmarking data spreadsheets
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or you could just watch this video because we kind of did all the work for
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you just like tunnelbear does all the work
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of setting up a vpn for you to try tunnelbear for free go to tunnelbear.com
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LTT we've got that linked below
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if you don't feel like watching the rest of this honestly that's fine we've got
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recommendations for 1080p 1440p and 4k
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60fps gaming linked in the description below
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if you want to learn about how we got to those conclusions then watch on just
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like last year we need to start by defining value
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value is not determined by price alone but by how much performance you get for
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that price so we might recommend expensive cards
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that you wouldn't consider affordable and still be able to call them a great
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value next we need to ensure that for every
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recommendation in this guide the real world performance that you'll get will
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actually be enough for the resolution you want to run your games at if we just
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looked at value by itself we could end up telling you to go buy a
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seven dollar el cheapo graphics card that gets
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two frames per second that would be fantastic FPS per dollar
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but a terrible gaming experience so what would be the freaking point
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on that subject we are going to be focusing then on three main categories
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of gamer all at high detail settings 1080p 1440p and 4k which is why you
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actually won't then see any budget card recommendations they weren't able to
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meet our minimum performance requirements regardless of how great of
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a value they were so our methodology for finding the best
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values out there was pretty similar to last year now due to how cards clock
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speeds are determined these days with heavy emphasis on automatic tuning
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that's done through GPU boost we will not be focusing on the minimal
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performance deltas that might exist between vendor a's gtx 1080 and vendor m's gtx
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1080 because even a factory overclocked
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1080 GPU on the fancy gigantic card is
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going to end up a lot closer to a normal
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founder's edition 1080 than it will to a
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like 1080 ti something with a completely different GPU and this general rule is
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true throughout both AMD and NVIDIA's lineups as for which gpus
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we looked at we limited ourselves to ones that are actually available for
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purchase brand new directly from a large reputable seller so we picked the three
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lowest priced models of each one from amazon and newegg then averaged them so
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that we could be confident that you can actually go buy something at about the
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pricing we're using in our value calculations
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we specifically left out used hardware and the reason for that is because while
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an older gen card can often be an excellent value and deliver decent
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performance at the same time it won't be covered by warranty in all but a few
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cases and not everyone's comfortable with that and we've actually run into
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situations before where we've gone and recommended some second-hand hardware
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only to see the demand and therefore pricing shoot up shortly after we
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publish our video okay with me so far
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now let's talk about our performance metrics
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obviously testing over 40 cards at three
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resolutions in a wide enough variety of games to give solid recommendations
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wasn't going to be feasible so instead of trying to find the actual frames per
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second of every card in every game like last year we used one card that was
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very likely to show up on performance charts at all three of these resolutions
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from reputable sites like guru 3d and pc perspective and then we logged the
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relative performance of any of our cards that we could find compared to that
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reference then we used that relative performance
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to extrapolate what the expected FPS might be
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now in some cases we had to extrapolate from an extrapolation
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and then everything got a little fuzzy for a while and i think at some point we were
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visited by the spreadsheet fairy
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but anyway the point is it is imperfect
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we know thanks to the amount of data we collected including benchmarks from FPS
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rts and rpg games we're confident that after applying a common sense filter
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like we ignored products outright that will obviously thermal throttle we've
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got a pretty clear picture of which cards will perform consistently better
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and which ones will perform consistently worse
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so at 1080p there are only really a couple of choices for team red the rx
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570 and 580 were far and away the best
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their little brother the rx 560 did manage similar FPS per dollar numbers
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but it wasn't able to consistently deliver a high quality 1080p experience
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as for team green i never thought i'd hear myself say this but
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if all you want is 1080p you can actually save a few bucks the 1063 gig
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is less powerful and has less video memory which hurts it at higher
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resolutions compared to AMD's offerings but it met our performance bar and on
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average we were able to find it for 40 to 50 dollars less
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moving up to 1440p the rx 570 and 580
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once again deliver along with the 1063 gig the highest FPS per dollar by a
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significant margin unfortunately for team green their
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offering just doesn't have enough raw power for us to recommend it here now
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with that said we aren't saying that higher end cards
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are a bad idea at this resolution the gtx 1070 and 1070 ti are our
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recommendations if you want much higher frame rates and fewer stutters and
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you're willing to pay a bit of a premium for it finally for the ballers among you if you
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want a game at 4k at high details 60 FPS
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there's really only one choice the gtx 1080 ti
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anything else other than a titan xp though its FPS per
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dollar would be obviously worse since it performs about the same as a 1080 ti
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would require you to turn down your in-game settings turn down your
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resolution or turn down both in order to reach 60 FPS
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obviously there are other factors to consider when you buy a graphics card
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like NVIDIA's excellent shadow play game recording software that obviously isn't
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supported on AMD cards or polaris's
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efficiency for cryptocurrency mining if you want to make a couple bucks with
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your gaming rig when you're not busy gaming on it and then as to individual cards well the
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design of the board and cooler the length of the warranty and any game
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bundles should also weigh into your decision
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but as i've said before to narrow your search you can find in the description
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of the video three solid choices for each resolution
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happy shopping and
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Linus so go check it out below
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so thanks for watching guys if you dislike this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get
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subscribed maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description i've
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kind of already said that a couple of times but you guys get the point uh also
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link down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our
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community forum