In other words, if you were considering building a computer with an expensive CPU and your graphics card is anything weaker than a 2080 Super, you should definitely consider downgrading the CPU to a 3600 and putting everything you saved into a better GPU. This is wonderful news! It makes our job of building the best PC on any budget even easier: as long as you’re building a computer that’s primarily for gaming, you should be putting as much of your budget into the graphics card as possible. So now we find ourselves in a world where a 65W $190 processor that fits comfortably on a $75 motherboard is usually bottlenecked by every single GPU all the way up through the $1000+ price bracket.
Can you come up with a situation where the second combo would beat the first? Sure, but it would almost certainly be a niche scenario, such as playing certain games at a low resolution or on low settings. Even the Rycan handle an RTX 2080 Ti, especially at higher resolutions.įor proof, check out this video where a 3600 + 2080 Ti consistently outperforms a 9900K + 2080 Super in every tested game at every resolution. It will usually be the bottleneck when paired with any modern mid-tier CPU. The graphics card is the most important part in determining the gaming performance of a computer. However, this advice breaks down when you're talking about building a new gaming computer on anything but the tightest of budgets. And it is, if you're just looking to upgrade only the GPU, or if it is all you can afford. This makes the RX 580 seem like an especially good deal. If you analyze from a cost per FPS perspective, an RTX 2060 is approximately 50% faster than an RX 580, but costs twice as much.
This makes sense, considering these cards can run virtually all games at stable frame rates despite their low prices. Techies often call low to mid-range video cards like the RX 580 or 1660 Super the best value from a price/performance perspective.