Hardware Graphics card upgrade

nero99

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Hello everyone. I need some advise. I have a mai r9 390 8GB GDDR5 card in my current build and came across a refurbished Nitro RX 580 8GB for $159.99 on eBay from a very high positive feedback seller. Would the 580 be a good upgrade, or should I spend an extra $150 and get a rx vega 56/64? Been a while since I built a pc and am currently out of the loop with decent upgrades. I’ve been using a and r5 1500x in this build and am upgrading to intel. Just for everyone who wants to know, system is 1500x, b350 MSI arctic mb, 16GB 2933mhz ddr4, 650 watt Corsair psu, be quiet dark rock pro 3 cooler (from a previous build), would this be a good upgrade for a i5 8600k build?
 

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The RX580 hardly gives you anything worthwhile compared to the R9 390 and if properly configured the R9 can get you 60 FPS on pretty much every game there is at max if playing at 1080p. Not worth paying 160$ for something that will barely give you 5-10 frames more on a couple games. If you want a better card, just go straight to the Vega ones, with Vega 56 basically giving you close to 60% better performance overall and the 64 giving you close to 80%, meaning that while considerably expensive, the Vegas are worth it. The 64 one especially is so good you won't need to upgrade for at least 4 or so years while playing everything on high or above (especially since it's the cheapest of the cards near the performance wall which is the point where GPUs just can't go above).
 
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nero99

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Thank you for the help. I may go with the Vega 64 then. Or would the rtx 2070 be a better choice for that price area? I clearly have a ton of catching up to do on the current and beat tech for price to performance
 

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The RTX 2070 is better than the Vega 64 on paper, as it sacrifices a tiny bit of things that are already done above exceptionally well to boost some weaker aspects to make for an all around better card. However, as it's pretty much brand new, it's bound to not have too good compatibility right away until the drivers are at a point where they have sufficient compatibility with games and other GPU heavy programs (eg: drivers for brand new cards are often badly optimized). In the long run (I'd say from the third month and on after release, currently at one), the 2070 is much more worth the money around that range.

Just to make it easy for you, use that website I keep linking to to compare the different parts you are interested in. For GPUs, it's important to note that in the "peak bench" section which is what you should be looking at, many cards will be strong in some of the benches with considerably lower performance in others, while other cards sacrifice a bit of what their equivalent cards are good at to boost the weaker one. For example, in the comparison I linked above, the Vega 64 is a fair bit underwhelming when it comes to MShaders (which controls shadows, reflections, collisions, etc. in games and fairly important in parallel processing GPU programs) getting only 191FPS in the benchmark, while the 2070 sacrifices a bit of the other benchmarks to hugely boost that weakness and give an all around 249 minimum FPS. Basically, see whether the card is strong for what you want it for and pick one that's good at what you want it to do. Also, if you don't want shadows, reflections or water effects at ultra settings, then the Vega 64 will instead give you a slightly better performance. In current games though, both run everything at ultra without any issues at a minimum of 60FPS.
 
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