What Video Card can I Upgrade Too?

[FriendOfJah]

Hi Folks,

I have a iBuyPower PC that I purchased in December 2019. It came with the Asus ROG STRIX Z390-H GAMING motherboard, a 750 Watt Power Supply and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER - 8GB GDDR6. 5 years later its starting to show its age with newer games. Based on my current setup, what NVidia Series 3 or AMD (e.g., RX 6600, RX 6700 XT) video card would give me the best performance? Thanks in advance for any and all help provided.

Roger

[Zheega]

Even an RX6800XT would probably work just fine without being really bottlenecked by the PCIe 3.0 slot of your motherboard. But it would be bottlenecked by your CPU, but on the other hand when you get a new motherboard, CPU and memory in the future, you can just keep your video card. Something like a 6700XT is, of course a much more sensible solution. Just make sure you don't buy a card with a PCI 8x interface like the RTX4060.

[FriendOfJah]

Zheega - Thanks so much for the reply. I'm using a Intel® Core™ i7-9700K Processor (8x 3.60GHz/12MB L3 Cache) and 32 GB [8 GB X4] DDR4-3000 of RAM. I must admit that I don't know much about AMD video cards. I was thinking of getting an RTX-3060 or RTX-3080 with 12GB of VRAM. Would the AMD video cards provide me with better performance for the money with this motherboard? I was hoping not spend more than $200 for another video card. Please let me know your thoughts on this, thanks.

[Zheega · Accepted solution]

I don't really know what the used market prices are. Generally speaking, you usually get a bit better price/performance with AMD cards, but there is always a lot of weird pricing when it comes to used cards.

A RX6800 XT is about as fast as the RTX 3080, so if the price is the same you might as well get either one. There will be no difference for your specific motherboards, all graphics cards should work. Just avoid the (very few) cards with a PCIe 8x connector. A RX6800 (without the XT) is about 5-10% slower than the RTX3080, and so on. 

Generally speaking, you can just google something like "tomshardware RTX 3080 vs RX6800XT" and get a general sense of what the performance difference is like.

[FriendOfJah]

Zheega - Thanks again for your help.