I bought a prebuilt for about $1,000 and have already upgraded the CPU from a Ryzen 7 8700F to a Ryzen 7 9800X3D. I mainly play 1440p games such as Rust, Escape from Tarkov, and Rainbow Six Siege. I currently have an RTX 5060 Ti 16GB and was offered an RTX 5070 in exchange, but I would need to add another $150. I would also need a new power supply, probably an 850W Gold Corsair model costing around $100. That would put roughly $800 into the system over the past two months. I might keep the 5070 temporarily and eventually upgrade to a 5070 Ti, RX 9070 XT, or RTX 5080. Is the trade worth it, or should I keep the 5060 Ti and save for a more substantial upgrade later?
3 Answers
I’d keep the 5060 Ti for now. The RTX 5070 is roughly 30% faster at 1440p, but you would lose 4GB of VRAM and spend $150 on the trade plus another $100 on a power supply. That is not a very impressive upgrade for Rust, Tarkov, and Siege. Save the money and make one larger jump to something like an RTX 5070 Ti, RX 9070 XT, or RTX 5080.
The 5060 Ti to 5070 upgrade is pretty small for the total cost involved. If you are going to spend that much, I would aim for an RX 9070 XT or another card in that performance tier instead. The 9070 XT is generally faster and offers a much more meaningful improvement at 1440p, unless features such as ray tracing are especially important to you.
Ray tracing and path tracing can reduce performance heavily even on stronger cards, so I would not choose the 5070 specifically for those features unless you are willing to lower settings or use upscaling.
I would not trade a 16GB 5060 Ti for a 5070 unless the price difference were much smaller. The 5070 is faster, but the extra cost, the power-supply upgrade, and the reduced VRAM make the deal less attractive. Your 9800X3D gives you plenty of CPU headroom, so waiting for a higher-end GPU would make better use of the system.
Would you still recommend keeping the 5060 Ti if I planned to hold the 5070 for a while and sell it later, or is that still not enough of a performance jump?