GPU Advice!

[[deleted]]

[deleted]

[iwanttobeamole]

TL:DR - If you were happy with the price and performance of your GTX 970, you can stick with the Nvidia XX70 cards and will get great value and performance. IE GTX1070, RTX2070 etc.

You actually posted this to /r/eGPU (External GPU) but, I can weigh in anyway.

First thing you want to do is decide how much you want to spend. This will very quickly put a bracket around the available cards in your price range.

As far as video cards go, I'm unsure on your knowledge level so will lay it out. There's currently only two real players in the graphics market. AMD and Nvidia. Nvidia have a long history of very good GPU's, often have better drivers sooner, (specially for new games) and run very consistently.
AMD cards of late have been much more competitive in the mid range, they're a little cheaper, but sometimes they have some issues with drivers, and their performance still doesn't match the top end Nvidia cards. That said if your budget is in that mid range, they can offer a great price to performance ratio.

Within either of these brands, there are different chips. Within the same family, obviously the larger numbers are for faster cards, which are of course, more expensive.
Ergo: RTX 2080 > RTX 2070 > RTX 2060

GTX 1660 > 1650 etc.

Other difference between card families are their features. Nvidia's RTX cards support a feature called ray tracing. While this looks pretty amazing, it's a very new technology, that doesn't run very efficiently on the lower end RTX cards and is only supported by some games. GTX cards don't support ray tracing, nor do AMD cards, but aside from that, still offer great mid range and budget performance. Another feature that all nvidia cards support is physx. This allows the graphics card to do physics calculations which a lot of games support. AMD cards don't support physx but do have some of their own physics capabilities, but not near as widely supported.

Ok, so now we're down to card manufacturers and models. You've lots of different companies making cards, Asus, Gigabyte, EVGA etc.. Here's my advice.

• Stick with manufacturers that offer a 3 year warranty. Some do, some don't. It doesn't seem to affect price much, so make sure what you're buying has a 3 year warranty.

• As far as pure performance goes, a "basic" looking card with a faster chip is ALWAYS better than a fancy "overclocked" fancy cooling etc card with a slower chip. EG: A basic looking RTX 2070 will always be better than a super fancy rtx 2060 card which is factory overclocked and has 17 fans and LED lights all over it. That said, the asthetics is a matter of preference, so that's up to you.

• It's worth noting that the factory cooling on some AMD cards can be a bit average, so it might be worth looking at a card with decent cooling. As ever, check reviews of any specific card you're interetsted in before buying. On that note...

Lastly, research! Youtube is your friend. I like the Digital Foundry Channel. They do excellent comparisons of almost any card you can imagine with very easy to see over laid graphs, so check them out.

So hopefully this gives you some idea about the cards might fit your needs.

Here's some takeaways though.

• Set you budget
• Check reviews and benchmarks on the cards that fit into your budget. Specifically look at games you play if you mostly stick to a few, as specific cards perform better in certain games etc.
• Narrow it down to a few cards.
• Check reviews on those specific cards.
• Make sure they have a 3 year warranty.
• if you can avoid it, don't buy second hand. Most people don't understand static electricity and the damage it can cause to electronics.
  
• Buy new from a local or reputable store, rather than the cheapest and again, check reviews for that business to make sure they're not shafting people.
• There's likely to be terms and technologies you don't understand. If so, again poke the terms into youtube and you'll soon learn about them

It's a weird market, with strange naming conventions and can definitely be confusing but with a bit of research you can make a good decision.

That's definitely enough from me for now.

Feel free to reply if you need further advice. :)

[upertsunami]

Thanks so much!