Graphics card advice

[Dave Gunner]

Hi everyone, 

Am upgrading my mid level PC and have AMD Ryzen 5 3600x with 32gb ram and 1tb ssd card. Now looking to buy a GPU but am bewildered by the choice. Needs to be able to do a bit of 4k editing. Currently does this with GTX 970 but a bit glitchy. Currently looking at RTX 2060 or GTX 1660 so around about £300-350 price range. 

Any advice gratefully received. Thank you so much.  

[Dean_Utian]

Hi,

You are looking at good graphics cards with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 and Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660. Nvidia and AMD are the best for graphics cards.

From what I hear, the GTX 1660 is not great for 4K video editing.

Here's a recent article that rates various cards including the RTX 2060 and  GTX 1660.
https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/au/buying-guides/the-best-graphics-cards-for-video-editing

[RjL190365]

If you must get a GTX 1660, make sure that it's the SUPER version and not the plain version as the latter uses only GDDR5 VRAM with substantially lower memory throughput than the GDDR6-equipped 1660 SUPER (192 GB/s for the plain GTX 1660 versus 336 GB/s for the GTX 1660 SUPER). That makes the GTX 1660 SUPER significantly more powerful than the plain GTX 1660 for just a fast food meal's worth of extra cost. In fact, I would dare state that the plain GTX 1660 is barely more powerful than the cheaper GTX 1650 SUPER even though the latter comes with less VRAM (4 GB vs 6 GB), to the point that the plain GTX 1660 is just plain overpriced for its performance.

The GTX 1660 Ti is in no man's land right now, being priced roughly halfway in between the GTX 1660 SUPER and the RTX 2060 while its performance is closer to that of the GTX 1660 SUPER than to the RTX 2060.

As for the RTX 2060 variants, the RTX 2060 SUPER is the more powerful part; however, current UK prices for it are just over your specified maximum price limit. The plain RTX 2060 is a bit more powerful than the GTX 1660 SUPER; however, whether it's worth the price premium over the GTX 1660 SUPER is a judgment call.

Hope this helps.

[Andy 1968]

The RTX 2060 or RTX 2060 Super will be a good match for the AMD Ryzen 3600X CPU.

[RjL190365]

I agree that either would be a good match. However, the two 2060 versions straddle the discussion starter's specified maximum budget limit, with the non-SUPER's just below it and the SUPER's just above it.

And IMHO even the GTX 1650 SUPER is a noticeable improvement over the discussion starter's GTX 970. That's because the GTX 970, as Nvidia had admitted, had an idiosyncratic GPU/memory controller setup with its GDDR5 VRAM, where you'd effectively have only 3.5 GB of usable VRAM on a 224-bit bus (the other 512 MB on a 32-bit bus is so sluggish that you might as well run an integrated on-CPU graphics instead). And because CUDA apps severely cap Maxwell's VRAM speed to only 6 GT/s, the effective memory throughput of the GTX 970 ends up being only 168 GB/s. That's slower than the maximum usable throughput of the GTX 1650 SUPER's 128-bit GDDR6 VRAM, where almost the entire 192 GB/s bandwidth is available for CUDA processing (as the 128-bit GDDR6 VRAM in the GTX 1650 SUPER nominally runs at 12 GT/s, of which 11.6 GT/s is available for CUDA, giving the GTX 1650 SUPER an effective memory throughput of 186 GB/s). The newer Turing architecture (minus hardware ray-tracing and Tensor cores) adds further insult to the injury on the old Maxwell architecture.

[Dave Gunner]

Massive thank you to everyone for your top quality answers. I've gone with the 2060. 

[RjL190365]

I'm happy that you picked it. That will be a much closer match to your 3600X than that GTX 970 ever was. And this is all because older Nvidia GPU architectures, up to and including the previous consumer Pascal generation, have not aged well at all in Premiere Pro.