I was given an older gaming PC and rebuilt it in a new case after thoroughly cleaning the components. Unfortunately, the RTX 3060 12GB turned out to be dead, which a repair shop confirmed by testing the system with a known-good GPU. They had an RTX 3090 Ti available, but that is far more GPU than I need.
The system has an MSI Z590 Pro WiFi motherboard, an Intel i7-11700F, 64GB of Corsair DDR4-3200 memory, a 512GB Kingston NVMe drive, and a 1TB Samsung SSD. I'll be gaming at 1440p on a 180Hz monitor, mostly playing Sea of Thieves, The Sims, indie games, and older titles such as BioShock. I'm not trying to run demanding games like Cyberpunk at ultra settings.
What GPU would make the most sense for this system and use case? I'm considering AMD cards such as the RX 9070 XT or RX 9060 XT because current Nvidia pricing seems much higher than when I built my PC. Would either card be excessive, and are there meaningful drawbacks to choosing AMD?
2 Answers
The rest of your system should handle most modern GPUs reasonably well, especially at 1440p. The main factor is your budget: buy the best card you can comfortably afford, but there’s no need to jump all the way to a 3090 Ti or another ultra-high-end model for these games. A 9070 XT would work well for high-refresh 1440p, though it may be more performance than you strictly need. A 9060 XT could be the better value if you want to spend less.
If you’re comfortable using AMD, a PowerColor RX 9070 XT around the $700 range would offer strong performance for 1440p and should pair nicely with the 11700F. AMD’s main disadvantages are generally weaker ray tracing and path tracing, plus upscaling and frame-generation support can vary by game. Since you don’t care much about ray tracing, those tradeoffs may not matter much. FSR is useful, but its image quality is not always identical to Nvidia’s DLSS, especially at lower resolutions or aggressive upscaling settings.
I do use DLSS occasionally, so that’s the part I’m most unsure about. For the games I listed, though, I probably won’t need upscaling very often if the card is fast enough.
That helps. I’m mainly trying to avoid spending a few hundred dollars more than necessary, so I’m comparing the 9070 XT with the 9060 XT.