- It's easy to look at a GPU that costs $1,000
and think, "What, all of that for games?
What a bad deal."
But what if I told you that cheap GPU next to it
is even worse?
Don't buy it.
I'm not shaming anyone for being on a budget,
I've been there, which is why I know that the less you have,
the more important it is to shop smart,
and this video is gonna arm you with everything
that you need to avoid the pitfalls
of the extreme budget segment
but without blowing up your budget.
The best part is that you can use what you're about to learn
for years to come because these principles have been valid
for as long as this channel has existed,
and it doesn't look like they're gonna change anytime soon.
Like my cringe segways to sponsors like-
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- Let's begin with a couple
of good reasons to buy a basic GPU.
Let's say your PC dies the night before a deadline
and grabbing the cheapest thing on the shelf at Best Buy
is your only way to get back up and running,
I would do the same thing,
or maybe you're hacking together a low-power Plex Box
or a utility PC from old hardware.
If you only need some form of video output,
budget GPUs can end up being your only option
thanks to their compact size and low power consumption,
but if your main consideration is the cost,
these good reasons start to disappear very quickly,
because now what matters is the value of what you're buying,
which for gamers fundamentally boils down to one thing,
for every dollar I am spending,
how much performance am I getting?
And typically for a GPU that's measured in FPS
or the number of frames that it can render per second.
For many of you watching this channel
this concept might seem downright intuitive
but people who aren't enthusiasts might not have the context
to interpret a graph like this,
and they shouldn't be shamed for that.
I mean, I don't know everything
there is to know about tires, for example,
and think about it,
if you spent your whole life gaming on consoles,
compatibility is binary, it runs or it doesn't run,
you've never had to think about how well it runs
and how that might vary
depending on the rest of your setup
and the games that you're playing.
Making matters worse for new buyers,
it's not obvious whether a given graphics card on the shelf
will deliver an acceptable gaming experience,
and I lay a lot of the blame for this firmly
at Nvidia and AMD's feet,
both use naming schemes
that work a little something like this.
Your first number or numbers
is the generation of the product,
the next one is its performance class,
and the final is a placeholder that sometimes gets used
to denote an in-betweener product.
You've got your suffixes like XT or Super
that typically denote a more better version
of what is fundamentally the same thing.
The issue is that neither of them
treats their own conventions as anything other
than rough guidelines, and both of them have shown
that they're willing to break these conventions outright
in the interest of making a subpar product
seem more desirable.
Take the GT 1030 and GTX 1630 from Nvidia, for example.
From the numbering alone
we might conclude that, while they're in a similar class,
there should be a huge performance difference
between these two cards, and there is,
but it's not as much as you might expect.
While the name suggests that the 1630s should be
six whole generations newer,
there's actually only one generation
separating these two cards,
and even within its own generation,
I consider the 1030s naming to be very misleading.
Consider this, a 1070 is roughly 80% as fast as a 1080,
a 1060, roughly 70% as fast as a 1070,
which kind of makes sense so far, right?
But then a 1050 is only half the speed of a 1060,
and a 1030 falls to just half the speed of that
making matters more complicated.
Nvidia has made headlines multiple times in recent years,
in recent days, actually,
for releasing GPUs that use the same numbering scheme
but with downgraded memory configurations
that are catastrophic for performance.
As an innocent victim, I mean shopper,
how am I supposed to infer
that higher performance tiers have large price gaps
and small performance gaps, while lower performance tiers
have small price gaps with big performance gaps?
Even as someone who does understand the numbers,
I would be totally lost here,
which is why the savvy shopper then always comes back
to frames per second.
Let's talk about how to read a graph like this.
- This is a performance graph for in-game performance,
it's the result of data collected over the course
of the benchmark, and the bars you see here
indicate how smooth the overall display is.
Each item is split into three bars here,
average, 5% low, and 1% low frame rates.
Average is exactly that, the average performance,
but it doesn't tell you the whole story,
because how fast a game runs at any given moment
differs depending on what's happening on screen,
that's where the lows come in,
and these represent the lowest frame rates
that were recorded 5% and 1% of the time respectively,
which paints a more complete picture
of the performance that you can expect from scene to scene.
What frame rate is acceptable or playable
is very subjective, but generally speaking,
gamers often want to see 60 or higher on these minimums
in order to ensure animations and motion
is as smooth as possible on the typical consumer displays
that can display a new frame 60 times per second.
Even then, a high average frame rate
with low minimums indicates a wide swing in performance
that will be very noticeable during gameplay
unless both are well above 60.
Console games will often lock their frame rate to 30
if they can't reach 60 to ensure those swings don't happen,
and while that's often controversial
for current gen owners, it crucially ensures
that things feel consistent from frame to frame.
But don't be fooled into thinking
that you'll exactly match a GPU's performance shown
in graphs like these.
The system it's installed in will have a massive impact
on the level of performance,
and this phenomenon is often referred to as bottlenecking,
where the maximum performance is held back
by the weakest link, this is why you have to pay attention
to the system that a reviewer is using to test a GPU.
One piece of information you might notice is missing
is the price, and that's something that we've tried
and unfortunately failed to incorporate
into our graphs in the past.
The reason is that the actual price
is often going to be very different
from what the MSRP is,
especially late into a product's life cycle,
and the used price is going to change
the calculus even further and is not consistent,
but performance mostly is.
This is where it's up to you
to check the current market conditions
and weigh the performance data against the costs today,
it's also up to you to make sure
that your performance data is as accurate as possible
by using multiple different reviews.
Well, no one wants to make an incomplete review,
testing for reviews are often done
in the span of a week or less,
and none can be truly exhaustive,
that means that each of us has to prioritize our testing
and we'll all have different priorities.
Some reviewers test different games
at different settings, or compare different GPUs,
and this is crucial for understanding the complete picture.
Plus sometimes reviewers mess up,
that's why you should always check multiple reviews
before making a decision.
- Now that we're familiar
with how to interpret these numbers,
there are a couple of things that are going to stand out.
First and foremost is that the blank tees on lttstore.com
are great quality and very reasonably priced.
Second is that, like I've been saying for years,
it should be illegal to call a low-end GPU value or budget,
because it's people on a budget who can least afford
to have their money wasted, and these things are just that,
a complete waste of money across the board,
but just pointing out problems isn't useful,
what are the solutions?
I'm glad you asked.
The first one is the kind of thing
that makes you kinda scratch your head and go, "Really?"
Instead of buying an entry level GPU like one of these,
buy the next tier up for almost the same amount.
Yeah, you heard me.
Look at the pricing for the GeForce 1630,
while you could treat yourself to a polished turd
in a box of KFC, the $20 price gap
to get double the performance with a 1650
seems like a a no-brainer,
especially if you consider that,
even though both of these cards might run your games today,
the 1650 is gonna last you a lot longer
as new games come out.
The $30 delta on the AMD side of things is a bit steeper,
but we've also seen promotions
that have brought the 6500 XT
down to literally the same price as a 6400,
and what goes down almost always comes down again.
Option number two is a little bit outside the box,
but can be an effective way to upgrade not only your GPU,
but actually your whole system,
without spending extra money.
Let's say you're running a fourth-gen Intel CPU
from about 10 years ago.
Working motherboards from that generation
are worth more than you'd think,
selling for anywhere from 60 to $100.
A fourth-gen Core-i5 is worth about 15 bucks,
and eight gigs of DDR3 is worth anywhere from 15 to $20.
As a kit, you might even be able to do a little bit better,
so at minimum, you're gonna be left with $90 to spend
alongside your $150 GPU budget.
Well, guess what?
You can actually upgrade to a Ryzen 5 5600G
with 16 gigs of RAM and an A520 motherboard for about $240,
that gives you six much faster CPU cores, double the RAM,
and an integrated GPU that, guess what,
will perform on par with that GT 1030
that you could have bought,
you're also getting modern features
like extra USB three ports, M.2 storage support,
and the ability to run Windows 11 without any hacks.
I mean, who doesn't like
a fun little Facebook marketplace adventure?
It's kinda like your own little "Scrapyard Wars."
Option number three though is my personal favorite.
Why do you want a brand new card sealed in a box
when a much better one is a bus ride
and a quick dust cleaning away?
A good rule of thumb is that for any current generation GPU
there's probably going to be a previous gen one
that is either faster for the same price,
or cheaper for the same performance.
For example, the 1630 is priced
at about 150 to 190 US dollars,
for that kind of money you could get a GTX 1080, I mean,
sure, it's from 2016, and it will consume more power
while you're gaming, but it runs at least twice as fast,
and there are other options.
Why don't you save some money on an RX 590 from AMD?
That is a great performing card from 2018
that regularly sells for under 100 bucks.
Option number three is also great
if you don't care about gaming performance at all,
since if all you're after is a basic working GPU
so you can output video, those can be had for so little
that even if they die, you could just buy another one
and still have money left over,
compared to buying a brand-new card.
On that note, I get it,
not everyone is comfortable giving up a warranty,
but I would make the argument that much of that risk
can be mitigated by using platforms like eBay
with buyer protection, or doing what I used to do,
and testing products when you meet up to buy them.
With the amount I've saved over the years
buying secondhand hardware,
it has more than covered me for the odd failure.
Which is all fine and good that we have these options,
but there are still a couple big questions remaining,
like, "Why do these crappy products exist at all?"
And why don't AMD and Nvidia just price them fairly then?
Do they hate poor people?
Let's address that one first.
It comes down to the steps involved in building a card
and getting it to your door.
Every GPU, no matter how low end or high end,
has some fixed costs.
The gold in the contacts, the copper in the PCB,
the PCI bracket, assembly, HDMI port royalties,
quality assurance testing, all of that stuff factors in
before the cost of the expensive parts
like the GPU chip itself, the memory,
the voltage regulators, so the lowest end GPUs
actually start to approach this fixed cost floor
to the point where the manufacturing cost
isn't significantly different compared to the step up,
and this is especially true when,
like the GTX 1630 and 1650,
the two cards actually use the same physical chips.
We'll have these better value cards linked down below.
As for why they exist then,
the chips in these bottom-of-the-lineup GPUs
are most often created first as mobile chips.
In a laptop the cost difference
often really is a matter of just choosing
which GPU to solder on,
because almost all of the supporting components
are already part of the final product.
There's already power delivery circuitry,
there's already a cooling system,
there's no need for a PCI bracket,
and the outputs are already there.
A laptop is assembled and QD as a whole unit,
so these GPUs can make economic sense in that market.
What makes economic sense for me
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- If you're looking for something else to watch,
go check out the last time we did a video
about how cheap GPUs sucked when, wait, Luke hosted it?
That was six years ago?
Time sure flies, eh.