I want to give my roughly seven-year-old gaming PC a worthwhile GPU upgrade without spending so much that I would be better off building a new system. I am looking for a card, new or used, that pushes the limits of what my current platform can reasonably support without creating an absurd bottleneck.
My budget is about $600 CAD, and I would prefer not to replace the CPU unless it is absolutely necessary. The system currently has a Radeon RX 5700 XT, Ryzen 7 3800X, MSI B450 Gaming Pro Carbon AC motherboard, 16GB of DDR4-3600 memory, Corsair RM750e 750W power supply, and a 1TB HP EX920 NVMe SSD. I expect to build a new system within the next five years, so I am mainly after a sensible interim upgrade rather than a high-end card.
4 Answers
For the used market, keep an eye out for an RTX 4070, RX 7700 XT, or possibly an RTX 3080 at a good price. A used RTX 3070 Ti could also fit the budget, but its 8GB of VRAM makes it less appealing as a longer-term purchase. Check power requirements and condition carefully, especially with used cards.
At $600 CAD, I would prioritize the best-priced 16GB card you can find rather than chasing an unnecessarily powerful flagship. Your 750W PSU is adequate for the suggested options, and the extra memory capacity should make the card age better than an older 8GB model. Also consider upgrading to 32GB of system RAM later, since 16GB is becoming restrictive in some newer games.
The Radeon RX 9060 XT with 16GB of VRAM looks like the most sensible new-card option around this budget. It should be a noticeable step up from the 5700 XT without being so powerful that the rest of the system becomes a major limitation. I would avoid the 8GB version if possible, since newer games can already exceed that at 1080p and above.
The 3800X will limit the fastest cards in some CPU-heavy games, particularly at 1080p and high refresh rates, but you do not have to replace it immediately. A 9060 XT 16GB or similarly priced RX 7700 XT is probably the reasonable ceiling for this upgrade. A future BIOS-compatible move to a used Ryzen 7 5700X3D or 5800X3D would give the platform more headroom, but that can wait if you want to stay within the current budget.
The Nvidia options may show more CPU overhead on this older Ryzen platform, so an AMD card could be the safer pairing if prices and performance are otherwise close.