Help with buying new card

[LazyGamer]

I have a choice. I can buy brand new RTX 4060 or used 3070 for around the same price. I don't know what to buy. 3070 is more powerful out of the box. But 4060 beats it with frame gen in supported games. And has half the TDP. Which one would you buy?

 

[P4-630]

Wait for the Supers.

 

[LazyGamer]

I am sure the only super thing about RTX 4000 super series will be that they will be super overpriced for performance they offer.

 

[P4-630]

I am sure the only super thing about RTX 4000 super series will be that they will be super overpriced for performance they offer.

Prices of some other GPU's may go down.

 

[pavle]

If you insist, I'd have to say the RTX 4060 then, it's a better architecture and more power efficient.

 

[Vya Domus]

Neither are good choices, both are terribly overpriced and only 8 GB of VRAM, according to TPU the 3070 is some 20% faster. I'd pick that one.

it's a better architecture

The 4060 is slower, ampere and ada aren't worlds apart.

 

[Deleted member 185088]

Both are bad choices, the 4060 is a 4050 at best with 8gb of vram, the 3070 is faster but only 8gb of vram better go with AMD or wait for supers.

 

[boomstik360]

Best Buy has Gigabyte 4060’s open box excellent for $239 shipped

 

[mlbb_mythic17]

I'd go with 3070 in this case. Since they're similar, choose the one that's somewhat faster and upgrade it once you can

 

[boomstik360]

if you are at around a $300 budget though, I would go 6700XT or 6750XT. $309 and $339 respectively but the 6750XT comes with a $30 Newegg gift card with the purchase.

What is your budget though?

 

[PLAfiller]

I had the same dilemma with a friend's build, but here prices are not "around the same price". We went with a second hand RTX 3070 Palit version with six months left over warranty. He also needed more CUDA cores for work compared to the rtx 4060.

 

[LazyGamer]

Thank you everyone for replies. After thinking a lot about it, in the end i decide my money is best spent on 4060. Very low power consumption, brand new, frame gen support and AV1 encode support, which will matter once/if twitch/amazon implements functionality, since i like to stream from time to time. And i game in 1080P. Yes, AMD is much more generous with VRAM, but on the software side of things every solution they have is worse than same thing on Nvidia side.

 

[Vayra86]

I am sure the only super thing about RTX 4000 super series will be that they will be super overpriced for performance they offer.

You're about to get into a penny wise pound stupid GPU purchase. Do not. 8GB is history. Even for 1080p.

Rather, spend a bit more and get something proper. The 4060 is really bad. The 3070 too.
Bump up to 499 and get 7800XT.
Or a 4070 after SUPER has dropped and its price gone down.
Or the aforementioned 6750XT which is also much better and will last you longer.

The advantages of AV1 encode and stuff ... pretty irrelevant if the GPU itself is too weak. The 4060 has a measly 288Gbit/s. That's entry level bandwidth.

 

[Belfaborac]

The 4060 with its measly, strangled memory bandwidth and only 8GB VRAM is just about the last even vaguely relevant card I would buy.

 

[LazyGamer]

You're about to get into a penny wise pound stupid GPU purchase. Do not. 8GB is history. Even for 1080p.

Rather, spend a bit more and get something proper. The 4060 is really bad. The 3070 too.
Bump up to 499 and get 7800XT.
Or a 4070 after SUPER has dropped and its price gone down.
Or the aforementioned 6750XT which is also much better and will last you longer.

The advantages of AV1 encode and stuff ... pretty irrelevant if the GPU itself is too weak. The 4060 has a measly 288Gbit/s. That's entry level bandwidth.

I'm from EU. We pay everything much more. I don't remember something getting price decrease in US and that decrease transfering over to EU market.

 

[Vayra86]

I'm from EU. We pay everything much more. I don't remember something getting price decrease in US and that decrease transfering over to EU market.

I live in the Netherlands, I know.
If you pay more, its even more silly to buy something that'll be insufficient in a year from now.

If you must buy Nvidia, by all means, but buying a low end GPU based on a feature that gets worse with lower base FPS (Frame generation) means you're in for a nasty, nasty surprise. The simple fact is, the 4060 is entry level hardware sold at midrange pricing. No amount of features can hide that.

Also, speaking from experience... the x60 is historically a Geforce in the line up that is built to run out of juice within two years. The 1060 6GB was an outlier to that, the rest follows that principle by the book. The 4060 is no exception. Almost every x60 is forgettable: 660, 760, 960, 3060... The 2060 was good because it was actually just a 1080 with first gen RT At the same time, it ran 6GB which went obsolete at the same time the 1060 went obsolete - which released 2-3 years earlier.

 

[LazyGamer]

I live in the Netherlands, I know.
If you pay more, its even more silly to buy something that'll be insufficient in a year from now.

If you must buy Nvidia, by all means, but buying a low end GPU based on a feature that gets worse with lower base FPS (Frame generation) means you're in for a nasty, nasty surprise. The simple fact is, the 4060 is entry level hardware sold at midrange pricing. No amount of features can hide that.

Entire Nvidia lineup has absolutely terrible price since first RTX cards came out. And it's only getting worse.

 

[Vayra86]

Entire Nvidia lineup has absolutely terrible price since first RTX cards came out. And it's only getting worse.

So don't reward that practice and get a 6750XT (in budget) or a 7800XT (increased budget) that'll, eventually, end up costing you less over the time you get good FPS out of it.

It also means you don't have to depend on crutches for playable FPS (like framegen). I'll remind you that DLSS 3+ support is added on a per game basis. And not everything gets it.
I'm still gaming 95% of the time without a single 'new' feature here - everything just works, no shimmering, no reduced latency, no bullshit and no mandatory driver update for every game you want to play. Don't buy the marketing BS.

 

[LazyGamer]

So don't reward that practice and get a 6750XT (in budget) or a 7800XT (increased budget) that'll, eventually, end up costing you less over the time you get good FPS out of it.

It also means you don't have to depend on crutches for playable FPS (like framegen). I'll remind you that DLSS 3+ support is added on a per game basis. And not everything gets it.
I'm still gaming 95% of the time without a single 'new' feature here - everything just works, no shimmering, no reduced latency, no bullshit and no mandatory driver update for every game you want to play. Don't buy the marketing BS.

I don't game so much that i would require 600-700€ card. Nor do i suffer from the need to have every setting maxed.

 

[BMfan80]

The 4060 series is basically Nvidia asking who will bend over for them.

 

[LazyGamer]

The 4060 series is basically Nvidia asking who will bend over for them.

AT $2K a piece, so is 4090. Even more. Regardless the performance.

 

[Vya Domus]

I don't get it, why pick the slower card.

 

[Vayra86]

I don't game so much that i would require 600-700€ card. Nor do i suffer from the need to have every setting maxed.

Nobody in this topic ever said you could max your settings at 1080p, even on a 7800XT or a 4070. Let's keep our expectations in check here... There is only relative performance in my world. Games advance anyway. There are no 1080p or 1440p cards. There is only a card and the factor of time plus what you want out of it.

You can get a 6750XT over here at 380,- EUR
The 4060 (MSI Ventus) is 329,- EUR - and that's built on a substantially lower quality board at that price (low TDP = cheap out on VRM and more).

Even if the 6750XT wasn't faster at 1080p you'd already just pick it for its 12GB, which games can readily use even now at 1080p.

If you must get the 4060 because you made up your mind, by all means. Its not my loss if your games start stuttering I have the experience on a similar powered card (with double the bandwidth of a 4060, mind) and 8GB in current gen games. Its not pretty. Its also not pretty to depend on Frame Generation right out of the box.

You came here for advice, remember.

 

[LazyGamer]

Nobody in this topic ever said you could max your settings at 1080p, even on a 7800XT or a 4070. Let's keep our expectations in check here... There is only relative performance in my world. Games advance anyway. There are no 1080p or 1440p cards. There is only a card and the factor of time plus what you want out of it.

You can get a 6750XT over here at 380,- EUR
The 4060 is 329,- EUR - and that's built on a substantially lower quality board at that price (low TDP = cheap out on VRM and more).

Even if the 6750XT wasn't faster at 1080p you'd already just pick it for its 12GB, which games can readily use even now at 1080p.

If you must get the 4060 because you made up your mind, by all means. Its not my loss if your games start stuttering I have the experience on a similar powered card (with double the bandwidth of a 4060, mind) and 8GB in current gen games. Its not pretty.

You came here for advice, remember.

Interesting thing that i saw in tests on youtube is that for some reason all games use more VRAM on AMD cards. With identical settings. Why is that?
Edit: well i just saw local ad for RTX 4070 for €500. I think that's a good deal. But guy doesn't want to send and he's hundreds of km away.

 

[Vayra86]

Interesting thing that i saw in tests on youtube is that for some reason all games use more VRAM on AMD cards. With identical settings. Why is that?

How is this relevant? If you're digging for conspiracies, we can stop right here and you need to buy that 4060 now.
We're an inch away from bullshit here. You can find any bunch of nonsense on Youtube. I'm not even spending a second trying to debunk what some idiot says online. If you have trust issues with TPU, go elsewhere

One plausible reason is that AMD cards use a different architecture, and if they have more VRAM capacity, they'll likely also allocate more, because they can.