Gadgetory

over the last few months AMD and NVIDIA have released a slew of new graphics cards promising better performance at in some cases lower prices but which P should you choose Polaris or Pascal and how much should you spend let's try to answer those questions Tunnel Bear is the simple VPN app that makes it easy to browse privately and enjoy a more open Internet to try tunnel bear for free check out the link in the video description so we're going to start as usual with the TLDR if you're building a budget box or upgrading an existing machine you can't go wrong with this power color radeon RX 462 gig video card that we found at a hundred and ten bucks the RX 460 delivers smooth frame rates at full HD 1080p in popular titles like League of Legends dota 2 overwatch and csgo without having to compromise on graphical quality settings stepping up to the $200 price point this EVGA GTX 1063 gig is a standout deal on the green side of the fence with a Seuss's Strix rx 474 gig holding down the fort for team red these cards will perform on average very similarly and pack enough horsepower for Triple A games at high details 1080p with PCM our approved frame rates for a little more oomph this sapphire rx for 84 gig costs 15% more than those but is also about 15% more powerful making it an equally good value if your piggy bank can handle the pain now there's an unusual void right now in the next price range I would normally address 300 to 350 dollars it's populated almost exclusively by overpriced rx4 80s and GTX 10 60s I mean they're good cards and thanks to their extra horses and onboard memory they're capable of driving solid gaming experiences at higher resolutions like 2560 by 1080 ultra wide and 2560 by 1440 but I wouldn't pay more than 260 to 270 dollars for them given the availability of this gigabyte win force 1066 gig and this sapphire rx 488 gig which leads us finally then into enthusiasts class cards that cost $400 or more where my pick is this EVGA gtx 1070 Super clock the FPS per dollar number is a little lower than our other cards but the 10 70s value is also not bad it delivers 80% of the performance of its bigger brother the GTX 1080 enough to run almost anything at 4k with some tweaking but at a price that's closer to 65% as much thanks to its lower-cost ddr5 memory and cut-down processor there are slightly cheaper GTX 10 70s but I felt like the EVGA tax of 10 bucks was worthwhile in this case because there is more to life than frames per second but that's a subject for the next portion of this video TL DR is over where I'll explain the methodology that I used to select these cards this is my spreadsheet as some of you understood when I did my little rant on low-end video cards and why nobody should buy them for gaming value by definition is not determined by price alone but by a ratio of price to reward a meal that costs half as much but contains a quarter as much food is cheap but it is not a good value especially if you're still going to be hungry when you're done so back to my admittedly imperfect spreadsheet it was designed to help me use performance numbers from trusted review sites around the web to calculate which cards will give me the best value or the most FPS per dollar across a variety of games and resolutions the more I add the more meaningful the final average numbers become here's how it works I could use exact FPS values like 42 FPS if I was pulling all of my data from one source where I knew that every game was tested with the same methodology and the same settings but since no single review covers every possible scenario I've opted instead to normalize to a last generation card whose drivers are mature and that was well sampled making it a great point of comparison for both modern flagships and mid-range solutions the GTX 980 reference design so when I enter exact FPS values for both the card I'm investigating and the GTX 980 here I get a relative performance number which I fill in to my spreadsheet this allows me to compare cards across different review sites or even cards that haven't ever been directly benchmarked against each other with from some spot checking anywhere from two to three percent margin of error for cards that have never been benchmarked against the GTX 980 like the 750ti I used a card that has been benched against both as an intermediary the RX 460 though this method is not ideal and I approximated a lot of other stuff as well only a small fraction of the cards available for sale have ever even had a professional review done but thanks to GPU boost 3.0 especially actually we're more limited by power limits imposed by Nvidia and AMD than by factory overclocks anyway these days so I've approximated most non reference cards to perform pretty similarly which won't necessarily be true but as you can see here adjustments to price have a far larger impact on our value calculation than the kinds of single-digit performance differences that you'll typically see from one DT X 1080 to another so yes I know I said it already but it merits repetition here so the entire comment section isn't full of people pointing it out this method is imperfect and would require either many many days of additional manual data entry if I wanted to go beyond relying so heavily on guru 3d for example whose reviews are linked in the excel sheet by the way or ideally some kind of fancy custom statistical analysis software and it also ignores a lot of factors here are the ones I could think of in no particular order multi-gpu you want to shop for an SLI or crossfire setup they would each need to be added individually for every pair or more of cards have fun I'm not doing to characteristics like board length display connectors or the required physical plugs that might affect physical compatibility with your system 3 warranty there is a huge range of policies not just in terms of the coverage period but in terms of whether resale overclocking and/or physical modification is permitted this is critical for folks who plan to water cool for cooler style and quality aesthetics aside though some people care a lot about that for some configs a rear exhaust blower design might be better to avoid recycling hot air to cool other components while in a better ventilated case and open air coolers additional performance for the GPU itself will result in tangibly better performance in games consult your case manufacturer if you're not sure oh and double ball bearing fans are probably worth a couple bucks for a card you plan to keep for a long time 5 frame buffer size now generally speaking bigger frame buffer cards end up underpowered before the extra ram is necessary but there are some exceptions someone who is really into Skyrim texture mods will definitely want to grab an 8 gig rx / 80 versus a 4 gig one regardless of what the performance per dollar metric looks like because vram is one of those things that doesn't affect performance at all until you run out of it and the card is swapping textures out to system memory and at that point everything goes south faster than all the canadian birds and seniors do in the wintertime 6 driver improvements over time and the features that are difficult or impossible to quantify shadowplay and freesync are examples of things that I care about but maybe someone somewhere cares about trueaudio or the automatic game settings optimization and GeForce experience your mileage may vary here and that can definitely affect your decision especially when you're looking at red team versus green team 7 sanity checks this gtx 950 at 130 dollars could look like a great value for 4k gaming with its similar FPS per dollar number but even though this 1080 founders edition costs $700 huh it's 47 FPS versus 5 FPS might be a factor here for you if you actually want to play games so consulting actual reviews for raw performance numbers is still part of the process leaving us to eight and perhaps the most important actual availability just because you can Google some super cool card if no retailers in your region carry it then you're kind of out of luck that is to say unless the retailer ships worldwide like mass drop though does cost a bit extra if you're not familiar with mass drop I'm going to run you through the basic concept mass drop takes a whole bunch of people who want to buy a thing and then a whole bunch of manufacturers who want to sell a lot of things and they put them together the community says hey we'd love to buy that product X but it's like expensive if a whole bunch of us agreed to buy it do you think the price could drop a little bit you know volume discount and mass drop goes to the authorized distributors or even the manufacturers directly and negotiates a better price if a bunch of people want to buy or in certain cases they even have manufacturers produce special products just for them like the k7 xx headphones that we're featuring today and this is the same ones that I reviewed last year so they were configured by mass drop and manufactured by AKG they're open backed headphones with large cushiony ear cups that feature a flat wire voice coil a genuine leather headband memory foam ear pads with velour coverings that a two-year warranty covered by mass drop and what kind of a price do you get well the war buy the better he gets because that's how mass drop works so check out the link in the video description so thanks for watching guys that this video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or check out the link to where to buy the cards that we recommended in the video description so linked in the description is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join now that you're done doing all that stuff you're probably wondering what to watch next so click that little button in the top right corner to check out our latest video over on channel super fun