Get an RTX 3070 Founders Edition for £469 (UK RRP) Get an RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition for £369 (UK RRP)
Both of these GPUs are great value options, particularly at their original 2020 RRPs as these models are. Nvidia’s Founders Edition cards are genuinely great designs, often more compact than third-party models while maintaining great cooling performance, so don’t be put off if you were a little disappointed with Nvidia’s reference designs from earlier generations. Let’s talk a little about each GPU too - starting with the RTX 3060 Ti. I’d argue that this is the best 1440p card on the market, capable of powering the latest games with max settings at 60fps in the vast majority of circumstances, while also packing in hardware-accelerated ray tracing and DLSS to boost frame-rates. Nvidia’s media encoder is also far better than its AMD competition, so this is a good shout if you’re interested in streaming or recording your gameplay. While I characterise this as a 1440p card, the RTX 3060 Ti RPS review reveals that it can just about stretch to 4K, and likewise paired with a good CPU it can work well with a high refresh rate 1080p monitor too. The RTX 3070 is Nvidia’s other ‘best value’ GPU, offering similar performance to the outgoing RTX 2080 Ti - for years, Team Green’s fastest GPU - while outperforming that old milestone in games with RT or based around more modern graphics APIs (like Vulkan and DX12). In the RPS RTX 3070 review, Katharine got 80+ fps at 1440p max settings, or around 60fps at 4K with high settings. To put that in perspective, that’s around twice as fast as the GTX 1070, making this a very juicy upgrade for anyone upgrading from that class of card. As usual, I’ll close this one out with our standard warning. Next-gen cards are coming, so you may want to hold fire if you aren’t in a hurry to upgrade. I suspect that we’ll see the normal reaction to next-gen GPUs (price spikes, supply drops, botting and overall bad behaviour), but perhaps nature is healing and all of that won’t happen? In any case, you’re likely to get a bit more for your money by the end of the year, but to be honest if you’re in need of a card now, I think you’ll be pretty happy with a known quantity now and a ‘get-out-of-gpu-stock-alert-discord-servers-free’ card later.
