RX 580 4GB, 1060 3GB or 2nd hand 290/970

[FordGT90Concept]

Too expensive here. Same goes for 980Ti or a 390x. It is a much or more than a new 1060 6GB or 480/580GB 8GB. Also while I can spend 250e on a new GPU and maybe more. I do not play enough games to warrant this purchase so that's why i set a limit for myself around 200-220 and the less the better.

If you hurry, you may still be able to find RX 480 8 GB cards for exactly that price. As inventory dries up, their prices climb beyond RX 580. RX 480 8 GB should outperform the RX 580 4 GB.

 

[P4-630]

270 Euros new:
https://tweakers.net/pricewatch/570319/msi-radeon-rx-480-gaming-x-8g.html

270 Euros new:
https://tweakers.net/pricewatch/567243/evga-geforce-gtx-1060-gaming-6gb.html

 

[kggrm]

I'm not a fan of used products because you don't know about the condition or if was properly maintained by the previous owner. The best option from the available choices is the rx 580 especially if you have a freesync monitor. Get the rx 580 and call it a day.

 

[rtwjunkie]

RX 480 8 GB? Price should have come down on those because of the RX 580 8 GB models. RX 480 8 GB will beat all of the above.

When you can find them they are about at normal price. I was lucky to get my Sapphire for $224.

However, 480's are rapidly becoming out of stock because once 580 was released people decided 480 wasn't so bad and went on a buying flurry.

 

[Kanan]

I only got one monitor plugged into it. Videos usually play on my R7 360. I don't Bluray. The 780 Ti is only faster on two year old benchmarks; GCN improves with age.

Everyone watches youtube videos, those run on high power consumption on AMD hardware too. Next time read better and don't cherry pick.

The 780 Ti is still faster. Simply add about 20-30% perf via overclocks to it, Reference 780 Ti is pretty much irrelevant. Nice try. Also easily seen in the Superposition thread. "Hawaii" has no chance vs. Kepler, not even Polaris looks good.

GCN improves with age because the drivers from AMD used to be bad when the card was delivered, yes. The only card which really "improved" by age compared to the competition was Tahiti because of 50% higher Vram. R9 390 isn't same gen as 780 Ti, it's same gen as 900 series, and still loses to both series pretty much.

I neither use multi monitor nor I watch blue ray so i do not care about that.

Everyone watches youtube videos, those run on high power consumption on AMD hardware too. Next time read better and don't cherry pick.

 

[notb]

Everyone watches youtube videos, those run on high power consumption on AMD hardware too.

A friend was using a PC with R9 390 for photo editing (Adobe Lightroom mostly - it can utilize a GPU). We didn't check the power consumption, but you could actually hear the fan speed up. This is not happening with NVIDIA cards - they can do quite a lot keeping very low power consumption and heat.

I've created a thread lately about the passive cooling in idle feature of modern GPU (actually you gave the last answer in it ). I wanted to learn just how much you can do without waking up the fan.
I've asked around since then and finally found both RX460 and 1050ti in the ASUS STRIX variant. Sadly, the cases were very different, so it's not easy to compare the two, but the general feeling was that you really need to run a fairly modern game (or long gpu-heavy calculations) to wake the fan up in 1050Ti.
RX460 started spinning way earlier - even in some very old games (totally playable on Intel IGP) or running very simple GPGPU scripts / software.

We didn't have a second LCD on hand, but based on above experience and RX460 reviews I've seen, IMO it is possible that 2 high-res screens - with a video on one and productivity software on the other - would already need the fan. That is... weird, really.

I don't know the reason for all this. Maybe it's because AMD is so concentrated on gaming lately (check Ryzen...). Maybe the drivers are optimized for quick boost rather than keeping things steady for as long as possible.

 

[Kanan]

I've asked around since then and finally found both RX460 and 1050ti in the ASUS STRIX variant. Sadly, the cases were very different, so it's not easy to compare the two, but the general feeling was that you really need to run a fairly modern game (or long gpu-heavy calculations) to wake the fan up in 1050Ti.

Correct, I let 3Dmark 11 and Firestrike run for quite a long while back then, before it started to spin the fan - a great card, but it wasn't cheap either (~160 bucks for a MSI Gaming GTX 1050 Ti with premium pcb/cooler).

RX460 started spinning way earlier - even in some very old games (totally playable on Intel IGP) or running very simple GPGPU scripts / software.

RX 460 has definitely the same power consumption or less but the bios isn't as nicely programmed then or the cooler is inferior. Asus generally has a relatively conservative approach and rather goes the safe way (on some cards), but with custom curve it should behave the same like GTX 1050 Ti.

We didn't have a second LCD on hand, but based on above experience and RX460 reviews I've seen, IMO it is possible that 2 high-res screens - with a video on one and productivity software on the other - would already need the fan. That is... weird, really.

A friend was using a PC with R9 390 for photo editing (Adobe Lightroom mostly - it can utilize a GPU). We didn't check the power consumption, but you could actually hear the fan speed up. This is not happening with NVIDIA cards - they can do quite a lot keeping very low power consumption and heat.

I don't know the reason for all this. Maybe it's because AMD is so concentrated on gaming lately (check Ryzen...). Maybe the drivers are optimized for quick boost rather than keeping things steady for as long as possible.

This comes down to AMD cards increasing their Vram clocks to full when Multi Monitor is activated, a problem that persists since at least HD 5000 series (I would know because I had 2 different HD 5000 series cards). They solved it for RX 500 series (and it was solved for RX 470 anyway), but the latest info on it that I saw was @W1zzard complaining about it, not functioning properly as AMD claimed, so the consumption was still on the high side. Then again it worked on another GPU and the power consumption was fixed - generally they are working on it for Polaris and all AMD cards that have HBM don't have the problem anyway because HBM power consumption is low, whether it's clocked down or running full speed (look at Fiji power consumption for that particular info).

Fact is, Nvidia is the power consumption winner since GTX 600 series came - GTX 500 vs. HD 6000 series was a ~tie. HD 5000 series was the only one, clearly and way more efficient than competing GTX 200 and 400 series GPUs. A series (HD 5850 in particular) I love to this day.