I have recently been on a mission to set up an affordable gaming PC that can be located in my living room and act as an all in one gaming and media PC. While I would like a high-end rig using one of the RTX based cards, I can’t quite justify its expense, nor would I make the most of it. I will, however, use it a lot for Kodi, and Plex, including Plex server with hardware transcoding of streams, plus my partner will play less graphically intensive games on it.
While the latest GTX 1600 cards arrived to positive reviews, AMD has been aggressive with the pricing of their older RX570 and RX580 cards. This, therefore, has led most people to recommend these cards based purely on the cost vs performance.
I was interested to see how accurate this is so decided to compare the fives options using some super scientific methodology.
As there are dozens of options per card, I used Scan.co.uk to find the cheapest two fan option (I prefer to avoid single fan cards where possible). For cards with different memory configurations (AMD) I opted for the 8GB model as they generally offer better value.
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For the Time Spy, because some of the results are suspiciously high, I selected the CPU as the AMD R7 2700 then selected the 50th result or the last result if there were not 50. Hopefully, this rules out erroneous results.
For benchmarks, I used Game Debate as it had the easiest way for me to pull the data. The I had to cross-reference some results, as the RX 580 had a ridiculously high FPS result.
For no particular reason, I divided the price by the various performance benchmarks to provide an idea of the value of the card.
The results are probably not surprising. The AMD RX 580 8GB is the best value card out of the options and is probably the best card for 1080P gaming at Ultra settings.
However, that doesn’t mean you should rule out the new Nvidia GTX cards, both the GTX 1660 and GTX 1660 Ti offer more consistent performance for all games in 1080P. In particular Metro: Exodus is taxing for all the cards, and it is only the GTX 1660 and Ti models that stay comfortably over 40FPS.
Similarly, if there is a chance you will move up to 1440p gaming, then the GTX 1660 Ti is going to offer superior performance than all the other cards on the list.
| GTX 1650 | GTX 1660 | GTX 1660 Ti | RX 570 | RX 580 | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | 155 | 210 | 260 | 150 | 170 | |
| Cores / Streams | 896 | 1408 | 1536 | 2048 | 2304 | |
| Memory | 4GB | 6GB | 6GB | 8GB | 8GB | |
| TDP | 75W | 120W | 120W | 120W | 150W | |
| TimeSpy | 3654 | 5620 | 6894 | 4349 | 5005 | |
| GTA5 1080P | 57 | 56 | 88 | 52 | 102 | |
| Far Cry 5 1080P | 57 | 77 | 94 | 70 | 77 | |
| Ghost Recon : Wildlands 1080P | 31 | 45 | 51 | 33.1 | 48 | |
| The Witcher III | 45 | 70 | 80 | 67 | 67 | |
| Metro: Exodus | 27 | 46 | 50 | 33 | 37 | |
| Just Cause 4 | 48 | 68 | 77 | 55 | 56 | |
| Assassins Creed: Origins 1440P | 32 | 40 | 55 | 27 | 32 | |
| The Division 2 1440P | 45 | 41 | 49 | 37 | 42 | |
| Price/Performance Time Spy | 4.24 | 3.73 | 3.77 | 3.44 | 3.39 | |
| Price/GTA 5 | 271.92 | 375 | 295.45 | 288.46 | 166.66 | |
| Price/Far Cry 5 | 271.92 | 272.72 | 276.59 | 214.28 | 220.77 | |
| Price/Ghost Recon | 500 | 466.66 | 509.80 | 453.17 | 354.16 | |
| Price/Witcher | 344.44 | 300 | 325 | 223.88 | 253.73 | |
| Price/Metro | 574.07 | 456.52 | 520 | 454.54 | 459.45 | |
| Price/Assassins Creed | 484.375 | 525 | 472.72 | 555.55 | 531.25 | |
| Price/Division 2 | 344.44 | 512.19 | 530.61 | 405.40 | 404.76 | |
| Price/Performance AVG 1080P | 392.47 | 374.18 | 385.37 | 326.86 | 290.96 |