Buying GTX 1060 now worth it for gaming? I'm suspcious why this card is not OOS.

[Zeze]

https://www.amazon.com/EVGA-GeForce...=UTF8&qid=1502902575&sr=1-4&keywords=gtx+1060

Due to the crypto currency craze, the market has wiped out all availability of GPU cards.

According to GPU hierarchy, this is in same league as RX 470. But RX 470 is totally wiped out on all sellers or they sell for $500-600++

1. If GTX 1060 is indeed performing similarly as RX470 in gaming, why is this card sitting pretty in Amazon for sale? Something that makes mining terrible vs RX470?

2. Is the $214 a good price for just wanting to play last year's games at 1080p? (Doom, Witcher, Overwatch, etc).

3. My CPU is really old - i3-2120. Will this CPU bottleneck terribly?

4. Should I just not buy this card and just wait it out until the mining craze is over and grab a RX470 instead?

 

[crisium]

The GTX 1060 Core 1152 3GB isn't as mining worthy as the fully enabled 1280 cores and 6GB version. Those prices are still inflated compared to half a year ago, but if you want to upgrade now then that's a good price. If you don't want to feel ripped off the only gaming card not inflated well above MSRP is the 1050 Ti, but it's markedly slower (1060 3GB is near 50% faster). What GPU do you have now?

Not sure about your CPU. Try to search for game benchmarks that have a CPU section with old i3s.

 

[krumme]

https://www.amazon.com/EVGA-GeForce...=UTF8&qid=1502902575&sr=1-4&keywords=gtx+1060

Due to the crypto currency craze, the market has wiped out all availability of GPU cards.

According to GPU hierarchy, this is in same league as RX 470. But RX 470 is totally wiped out on all sellers or they sell for $500-600++

1. If GTX 1060 is indeed performing similarly as RX470 in gaming, why is this card sitting pretty in Amazon for sale? Something that makes mining terrible vs RX470?

2. Is the $214 a good price for just wanting to play last year's games at 1080p? (Doom, Witcher, Overwatch, etc).

3. My CPU is really old - i3-2120. Will this CPU bottleneck terribly?

4. Should I just not buy this card and just wait it out until the mining craze is over and grab a RX470 instead?

The 1060 is the only card to get now. If you are short on cash get a 3gb even if it hurts. Take the saved money and buy a used 4 core i5 cpu for your system. Your i3 will bottleneck you like crazy in the new games like doom and bf1 what not. Get a used i5. Thats a stellar combination for keeping those min fps at 60fps much of the time. Thats my take on it
Better take texture qulity down one notch and get far more fluid and consistent gameplay with a i5.


Dont wait for anything. The 1060 3gb is a fine card for 1080. Lower texture quality to high or medium and you can go on in all titles. You will have fun.

 

[JackTheBear]

RX 470 is significantly better and more efficient for mining. AMD has a long history of making better GPUs for mining than nVidia. nVidia is at least getting closer with their best cards, but AMD is still ahead. I think the market is pretty straight forward. If you want a gaming card, only buy nVidia. If you want a mining card, buy AMD. There really is no competition here.

 

[Zeze]

So the bad mining ability of Nvidia cards don't affect gaming performance vs equivalent AMD cards right? I mean benchmarks tell.

 

[crashtech]

Gaming and compute seem like they should be linked, but the association is loose at best. The 1060 is the best deal for gaming, if only it did SLI we'd be on to something.

 

[JackTheBear]

In the math behind mining, there is a function that AMD handles in 1 step that requires 2 steps on nVidia cards. Mining for 24 hours probably sees that function execute a billion times or more. The difference is enough that if you're going to buy a mining card, you really need to get AMD. If you're going to game and maybe just going to mine a little bit, you can get by with the best nVidia cards to get your feet wet. Before the 10 series, there was simply no comparison. Relatively weak AMD cards smoked top of the line nVidia cards at mining. Conversely, for most purposes, nVidia makes better gaming cards, so gamers should be looking that way anyhow...

The nVidia 10 series is not necessarily bad for mining, particularly the 1070s or better. But the msrp on a 1070 is significantly more than an rx 470 or even a used r9 290 that's going to perform just as well. And miners aren't buying 1 card at a time, they're buying 4-6 or more (or many more as the case may be), so initial price will affect profitability. It sounds crazy to the average person, but 1 mining rig might have 6 graphics cards in it, mounted in a milk crate instead of a computer case, and running multiple rigs improves profitability so building 3 rigs at a time is feasible. If a miner wants to put 3 new rigs together, it's an extra $1,800 to go with comparable nVidia cards. And then you'd have to use different software that works with CUDA instead of openGL, which is not a big deal, but it is another headache to mine with nVidia.

 

[Aikouka]

1. If GTX 1060 is indeed performing similarly as RX470 in gaming, why is this card sitting pretty in Amazon for sale? Something that makes mining terrible vs RX470?

It's the 3GB version, which isn't as favored for gaming or mining as its 6GB brother. The difference isn't just memory size, but also compute units. Although, the memory difference is a big deal for mining as some have been saying that at least 4GB is recommended due to growing data needs. I can't say how much of that is true though as I'm not nearly in the know on that stuff.

2. Is the $214 a good price for just wanting to play last year's games at 1080p? (Doom, Witcher, Overwatch, etc).

It's an OK price. If it's any indication, it has gone up $20 (nearly a 10% increase) since you asked yesterday. However, if you check CamelCamelCamel's page for the product, you'll see that it was around $190 for a while, and even hit a $179.99 low before the mining craze jacked up the price. I bought its bigger brother (the 6GB SC model) for about $260 when it came out.

3. My CPU is really old - i3-2120. Will this CPU bottleneck terribly?

That depends on the games, but looking at what you listed above, you'll likely see some CPU issues in Witcher and a little bit in Overwatch. It just depends on your resolution, graphics options, etc. Doom is optimized really well, so I would suspect that it would be a bit better. Oh, and my remarks on Witcher are assuming that you're talking about Witcher 3 not the original.

4. Should I just not buy this card and just wait it out until the mining craze is over and grab a RX470 instead?

The mining crazy doesn't really seem to be dying down, and Nvidia cards will likely keep selling a bit longer than AMD alternatives due to Nvidia's lower power usage. (The reduced power consumption makes them viable for longer even as the returns go down.) I don't think it's a bad idea to buy one now. Although, if you haven't bought one yet, I'd go for this ASUS model instead. I usually prefer the better cooling solutions. The smaller EVGA card is useful if you have a small case, but that's about it. (My 1060 6GB and 1050 Ti are both the smaller EVGA version.)

 

[SPBHM]

if you are targeting 60 I think that i3 can handle overwatch ok.
witcher 3 will be worse, maybe under 40 at some points (like Novigrad) due to CPU bottleneck, but that's still better than the consoles...

 

[Aikouka]

if you are targeting 60 I think that i3 can handle overwatch ok.
witcher 3 will be worse, maybe under 40 at some points (like Novigrad) due to CPU bottleneck, but that's still better than the consoles...

I don't know if he's willing to spend more, but it looks like you can get an i5-2500 on eBay for about $55-60. That ought to help out a decent amount. I ended up doing something similar for an older build of mine. I had an old i3-3225, but after I put a video card in the system, I upgraded to the i5-3570k to avoid bottlenecking the GPU.

 

[Boris Morozov]

I have a msi game x 6gb 1060 laying around. Thought I would throw it in a random build but probably won't get to that anytime soon. Bought it for an old computer to bring life to it but just retired it lol.

 

[kirbyrj]

I have a msi game x 6gb 1060 laying around. Thought I would throw it in a random build but probably won't get to that anytime soon. Bought it for an old computer to bring life to it but just retired it lol.

Great card. I bought mine for $220, used it for 8 months, and then sold it for $250 during the mining craze.

 

[Smoblikat]

I recently bought a 980Ti off of a member here for $260. Thats one of the best deals on raw power that ive seen in a while. Reminds me of my under $400 quadfire 6970 setup that I had years back, when that sort of thing was still relevant..........