Need advice on selecting a GPU for a second PC?
Need advice on selecting a GPU for a second PC?
As discussed earlier, the cost for a new 5050 is nearly identical to that of a used 5060. By now, I believe a used 5060 would be worth more than a brand-new 5050, correct? My main worry is about the “8gb vram death” that has been gaining attention recently, which is why I’m thinking about getting a 3060 with 12gb or another model offering more than 8gb of VRAM.
As discussed in the main topic, the emphasis will be on 1080p gaming and securing a position for three years using the selected GPU.
Based on what I observe, the A520M only features a single PCIe 3 x16 port, meaning any graphics card you choose must support a x16 interface. This seems to rule out the 4060 and the B570/B580 models since they would operate at PCIe 3 x8. It's something to monitor closely as it could restrict your options.
Of course, I chose the B580 mainly because I didn’t have any mfgr bias and was looking for the best value in early 2025. It might not be the optimal choice right now. The AMD option seems more appealing to me. In your situation, what worries me is 1) at the moment 12GB isn’t a big factor (B580 matches up with 5050) and 2) you’ve clearly shown a preference for nVidia. If you go with 8GB, several AAA games in 2026-2028 will likely struggle on it, especially since they’ll consume a significant amount of memory. They might even overheat your CPU. I believe the rest of your system will be limited before the 8GB bottleneck occurs, so you’re fairly secure with an 8GB card.
Only catching might appears when running at 1440p. I haven’t tried the lower-end NVIDIA cards, but the Intel options are good enough. What I need from NVIDIA is their features like DLSS.
I conducted some studies on tests comparing GPU PCIe 4.0x8 with MB PCIe 3.0x16. In modern gaming, this difference usually results in about a 5% performance drop, which I consider acceptable.
From your perspective, I agree that upcoming games might prioritize the CPU over the 8GB VRAM on any GPU. Even with 8GB of VRAM in future AAA titles, it should still run smoothly at medium settings.
That intense VRAM demand doesn’t seem realistic for the future, right? If we consider this hypothetical scenario, we should expect GPUs with 20-24 Gb standard within the next 1-2 years.
In my situation, I’ll just be playing 1080p games. I’m thinking a lot about Nvidia’s features and whether they could be a strong reason against choosing the Intel Arc. The advantages of the Arc would be more VRAM and higher bandwidth (192 bits).