My RTX 2080 Ti is starting to fail, so I'm looking for an upgrade with a budget of roughly £420. Used RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 4070 cards are both available for around £400–£430. My system has a Ryzen 5 5600X and a 700W power supply, and I mainly play at 1440p. I also stream, so features like efficient encoding matter to me. Would the RTX 4070 or 3080 Ti be the better choice, or is there another card with stronger price-to-performance in this range?
4 Answers
I’d lean toward the RTX 4070. The 3080 Ti is still a capable card, but the 4070 is newer, uses considerably less power, and gives you access to newer features like frame generation. Your 700W power supply should be plenty for it.
I’d also check the price of an RX 9070 if you can find one around £430. Its traditional raster performance is stronger than the RTX 4070, while ray tracing is fairly competitive. The trade-off is losing access to Nvidia’s broader feature set, so the final choice depends on whether DLSS, frame generation, and Nvidia’s encoder are important to you.
If you can stretch to an RTX 4070 Super, it would be a worthwhile step up. It offers a little more performance and can still run efficiently, especially with a mild undervolt. For streaming and 1440p gaming, though, the regular RTX 4070 is already a sensible match for your system and power supply.
The RTX 4070 makes more sense for this use case. It should handle 1440p very well, and Nvidia’s streaming features, DLSS, frame generation, and AV1 encoding are useful advantages. The main drawback is the 12GB of VRAM, which could become limiting in some future games, but it should be fine for 1440p gaming right now.
That’s what I was thinking too. I mostly play competitive games, so 1440p at medium or high settings is fine, and I like the lower power draw and AV1 support. Would you say it’s the best option within my budget?