My GTX 1660 Super recently died after years of use. The rest of my PC was built around 2019 and currently has a Ryzen 5 1600, 16GB of DDR4 RAM, an MSI B450M PRO-VDH MAX motherboard, a 550W power supply, one hard drive, and one NVMe SSD. I can't afford to replace the entire computer right now. Should I buy an inexpensive replacement GPU just to keep gaming, such as a used GTX 1060, 1650, or another 1660, or would it make more sense to buy a stronger modern card and accept that the Ryzen 5 1600 will bottleneck it until I can upgrade the rest of the system?
4 Answers
Avoid the GT 730. It’s far too slow for modern gaming and would be a waste of money. A used GTX 1050 Ti, GTX 1650, GTX 1060, RX 580, or another 1660-class card would be a much more sensible temporary replacement. Your 550W PSU should generally be sufficient for cards in that range, assuming it’s a decent-quality unit.
The right choice depends mostly on your budget and the games you play. You can install a stronger GPU now and upgrade the CPU later, but the Ryzen 5 1600 will limit performance in CPU-heavy games. If a complete replacement PC is within reach financially, compare its total cost against buying a newer GPU, CPU, and possibly more RAM separately; sometimes the prebuilt route is better value than trying to eliminate every bottleneck one component at a time.
If you were happy with the 1660 Super, the simplest option is to buy another one used, or look for a GTX 1660 Ti, GTX 1650, GTX 1060, or RX 580 at a good price. That will fit the performance level of the rest of the system and let you save for a larger upgrade later. I wouldn’t spend much on a current high-end card for this setup right now.
A better long-term path would be a used Ryzen 5 5600 or possibly a cheaper Ryzen 5 5500, paired with a reasonably priced GPU such as an RTX 3060 12GB or RX 6600. Check that the motherboard BIOS supports Ryzen 5000 first. The CPU upgrade would reduce the bottleneck significantly and give you room to upgrade the graphics card later.
The Ryzen 5 5500 can be a good budget choice, but the 5600 is preferable if the price difference is small because it has better overall performance and more cache.