My 2019 gaming PC no longer meets the listed minimum requirements for the upcoming Ace Combat game, so I'm considering replacing my Sapphire RX 5700 XT. I'd ideally like to stay below $600, which puts cards such as the Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB, RX 9070 GRE, or GeForce RTX 5060 Ti in consideration. I shop at Micro Center and regularly play Microsoft Flight Simulator, X-Plane, and other flight simulators. I play at 1440p. The rest of the system is a Ryzen 5 3600X, MSI B450M motherboard with PCIe 3.0, 32GB of DDR4-3600, and a Corsair CX650M 650W power supply. Should I stick with AMD for features such as Smart Access Memory, and is my current CPU or PSU likely to limit any of these upgrades?
4 Answers
If Micro Center really has the RX 9070 GRE around $490–$500, I’d choose that over the 9060 XT. It offers roughly a third more 1440p performance for only a small increase in price, making it a much stronger long-term upgrade. It should also run within your power budget, although checking the specific card’s power recommendation and using separate PSU cables is still a good idea.
I’d be cautious with the RTX 5060 Ti if it’s the model using only eight PCIe lanes. Your B450 board runs PCIe 3.0, so that setup can lose more performance than a full x16 card, especially when VRAM or texture streaming becomes a factor. The 16GB version is preferable, but the RX 9060 XT 16GB is a cleaner match for this system and usually offers better value.
The Ryzen 5 3600X may hold back a faster GPU in some CPU-heavy games at 1080p, but at 1440p the limitation should be much less noticeable. Flight simulators can still be CPU-heavy, so a future AM4 upgrade to a Ryzen 7 5700X3D could help, but I wouldn’t let that stop you from upgrading the graphics card now. Also, it’s worth trying the new game with the 5700 XT first—the published minimum requirements can be more conservative than real-world performance.
The RX 9060 XT 16GB is probably the straightforward value upgrade. It stays close to your budget, has a full x16 interface that makes more sense on a PCIe 3.0 motherboard, and the extra VRAM is useful for flight simulators. It should be a noticeable improvement over the 5700 XT at 1440p without creating major CPU concerns.
That was one of the cards I was considering. I’m mainly trying to avoid buying something that will age badly with flight-sim scenery and higher settings.