Building a ~$1,000 gaming PC

[baseline bum]

Holy video cards, nvidia 3xxx & 4xxx series, are still $1500-2500 when I searched them yesterday on amazon? ! I was about to purchase a ryzen 9 7950 + mb combo yesterday until I saw those video card prices. I'll hold off until those come down a bit, like $1000 less.

Video card prices got shot to the moon by crypto mining in late 2020 and 2021, and they're only now starting to fall to MSRP for the midrange and lower cards, at least from Nvidia. AMD is much better value right now and I expect their cards will age better because Nvidia is really stingy on the amount of RAM they're putting on their cards, though if you have to use CUDA you're kind of boned and stuck with Nvidia. Nvidia really screwed up overproducing the 3000 series for mining even though it was known long in advance that ethereum would eventually be moving off proof of work this year, and once it did that was pretty much the end of gpu mining. Now Nvidia is releasing their new at ridiculously high prices to get people to buy the rest of their 3000 series cards. The $1200 RTX 4080 is crazy. AMD will be launching two cards Tuesday that will probably be pretty compe ive with the 4080 for $900 and $1000, and I expect at least the $1000 one to beat the 4080 pretty soundly for gaming performance. Well for rasterized performance. For really heavy raytracing (eg Control, Cyberpunk 2077) the 4080 will likely still be a lot better than the RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT launching Tuesday.

[koriwhat]

Video card prices got shot to the moon by crypto mining in late 2020 and 2021, and they're only now starting to fall to MSRP for the midrange and lower cards, at least from Nvidia. AMD is much better value right now and I expect their cards will age better because Nvidia is really stingy on the amount of RAM they're putting on their cards, though if you have to use CUDA you're kind of boned and stuck with Nvidia. Nvidia really screwed up overproducing the 3000 series for mining even though it was known long in advance that ethereum would eventually be moving off proof of work this year, and once it did that was pretty much the end of gpu mining. Now Nvidia is releasing their new at ridiculously high prices to get people to buy the rest of their 3000 series cards. The $1200 RTX 4080 is crazy. AMD will be launching two cards Tuesday that will probably be pretty compe ive with the 4080 for $900 and $1000, and I expect at least the $1000 one to beat the 4080 pretty soundly for gaming performance. Well for rasterized performance. For really heavy raytracing (eg Control, Cyberpunk 2077) the 4080 will likely still be a lot better than the RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT launching Tuesday.

I'll keep an eye out for AMD's drop tomorrow. Thanks for the reply BB.

[baseline bum]

I'll keep an eye out for AMD's drop tomorrow. Thanks for the reply BB.

Reviews just dropped today. This is probably my favorite PC hardware reviewer, Gamer's Nexus.



I have to caution there is a good chance the 7900 XTX sells out in say five minutes tomorrow given it performs right around RTX 4080 level for $200 less.

[baseline bum]

I'll keep an eye out for AMD's drop tomorrow. Thanks for the reply BB.

Some other good reviewers you might check out if interested would be Hardware Unboxed and Digital Foundry





Or for written reviews I like Techpowerup

https://www.techpowerup.com/review/a...n-rx-7900-xtx/

I'm personally really enjoying the RX 6700 XT I picked up a couple of weeks ago (for $380) that's a little less than half as powerful as the RX 7900 XTX, pretty strong for 1440p in really hard to run games like Cyberpunk, and it works really well playing Elden Ring at 1800p. And then I use AMD's upscalers (namely FSR and RSR) to upscale to 4k, but you sound like you have the budget to just go for native 4k without needing any upscaling.

Though if you want the best raytracing performance you'll have to bite the bullet and spend the Nvidia tax. RT isn't too important to me, at least in the budget segment I was targeting (~$400), so I liked the 6700 XT I got for $380 way better than the RTX 3060 Ti that ran $400 to $450 and mostly played games worse than the 6700 XT but raytraced better.

[baseline bum]

LOL MSI ting on the RTX 4000 series