Daily tracking of GPU prices and stock for Tom's Hardware's GPU index has revealed a major influx of GeForce RTX 40-series (codename Ada Lovelace) graphics cards at Walmart. While Ada Lovelace cards may have slipped from the very top of the best graphics cards list, they remain competitive, especially at their new, sharply discounted prices. The PNY GeForce RTX 4080 Super Verto's price, for example, has plummeted from $1,501 to just $1,019 in the past 24 hours alone.

• Check out the PNY GeForce RTX 4080 Super Verto deal on Walmart
• Check out the PNY GeForce RTX 4080 Verto deal on Walmart
• Check out the PNY GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super Verto deal on Walmart
• Check out the PNY GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Verto deal on Walmart
• Check out the PNY GeForce RTX 4070 Super Verto deal on Walmart
• Check out the PNY GeForce RTX 4070 XLR8 Gaming Verto deal on Walmart
• Check out the PNY GeForce RTX 4060 Ti Verto deal on Walmart

Falling victim to the persistent memory shortage, Nvidia’s latest GeForce RTX 50-series (codenamed Blackwell) graphics cards continue to see substantial price hikes, effectively creating a big gap between them and gamers. The surges have shed a positive light on the previous generation of Ada Lovelace-powered graphics cards, which are becoming increasingly attractive options.

One might even dare to say that Ada Lovelace is aging like fine wine amid current market dynamics. We wouldn't normally recommend purchasing last-generation graphics cards in normal circumstances. However, the current pricing landscape makes them a compelling alternative for desperate gamers seeking an immediate system upgrade, especially if you're rocking an older 30-series card, for instance. Walmart seems to share the same idea.

The major U.S. retailer has significantly increased its inventory of 40-series graphics cards, likely in response to the high prices and limited availability of the newer Blackwell GPUs. New listings show a wide range of Ada Lovelace options from the GeForce RTX 4060 to the GeForce RTX 4080 Super. More importantly, Walmart has significantly lowered prices on Ada Lovelace-powered graphics cards by over $400 on some models. This strategy positions Walmart as the go-to retailer for those seeking value in the current volatile graphics card market.

As to the retailers' specific motivations, there are a couple of possible factors. It may be that the AI crunch on PC components is making it harder for retailers to come by RTX 50-series GPUs, forcing them to turn to older models. It's also possible that Walmart has plentiful RTX 50-series stock, but that buyers are simply not parting with their cash because of increased prices. GPU sales generally may also be down as users avoid upgrading or building rigs due to inflated prices of other parts like SSDs or RAM. Whatever the reason, Walmart has decided now is the opportune time to get back into the RTX 40-series business.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 40-Series Graphics Card Pricing

The lowest price on a GeForce RTX 4080 Super yesterday was $1,501, but the influx of these graphics cards at Walmart has set a new lowest price of $1,019, resulting in a savings of $482. It's only $20 over the graphics card's original MSRP. We observed similar price cuts with other models. The GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super has dropped by $450, finding its original MSRP. Meanwhile, the GeForce RTX 4070 Super is $319 cheaper than yesterday's lowest price and $20 lower than its MSRP.

The GeForce RTX 4070 Super is the outlier in the current lineup, as it retails at the same price as the GeForce RTX 4070, at least for today. In contrast, the GeForce RTX 4090 has remained consistently priced with no fluctuations, reflecting its premium status and steady demand. Surprisingly, the GeForce RTX 4060 has bucked expectations, rising in price rather than becoming more budget-friendly. It is just a small example of the unpredictable nature of today's graphics card market.

For example, the most affordable GeForce RTX 5070 on the market currently sells for $629, which is 9% more expensive than the GeForce RTX 4070 Super and delivers marginally better performance. There's also the topic of features, though. While Nvidia has expanded some of its technologies backwards to Ada Lovelace, such as DLSS 4.5, some features are only fully enabled on Blackwell. Take Multi-Frame Generation, which runs up to 6X on Blackwell but is restricted to 2X on these cards. A quick glance at our GPU hierarchy shows how these cards stack up against newer models for raw performance:

Shoppers have to weigh whether Blackwell's performance gains and exclusive gaming features justify its premium. But in the current situation, you can't deny that Ada Lovelace offers good value even if it's a previous-generation product.

We're keeping an eye out for the lowest-priced GPUs during the Amazon Prime Day 2026 event, and keeping those listed here for you. The sad state of the memory industry, which is besieged by insanely large memory orders for AI data centers and AI GPUs, has led to increasing prices for gaming graphics cards. Nvidia is purportedly allocating memory based on the amount of money it can make per GB of VRAM, which has made the situation dire for some models. To help you navigate the pricing crisis, we have compiled this GPU index to monitor the availability and pricing of recent graphics card releases from the current and previous generations.

We update this guide constantly with the best prices in the U.S. for each SKU of GPU from the most recent two generations of Nvidia, AMD, and Intel cards. We're listing the lowest price for an available graphics card, regardless of the manufacturer, so it could be an Asus, Zotac, MSI, Sapphire, Gigabyte, Powercolor, or ASRock-branded card, but it will be the cheapest.

A word of warning, with this list, sometimes the retailers switch to third-party sellers automatically. You must be super vigilant and check sellers to ensure legitimacy. For older generation graphics cards, it can often be difficult to find these cards brand-new and on sale from first-party retailers like Amazon, Newegg, and Best Buy, and they are more often than not listed by third parties. Check prices against the current generation of GPUs to understand if you are getting a good deal, or if you're in fact better off paying a little extra for the very latest graphics cards.

Also, check out our list of the best graphics cards and our GPU benchmark hierarchy to see evergreen performance data to help you make an informed decision when choosing a new GPU for your system.

Nvidia RTX 50-Series: Lowest Graphics Cards Prices

The latest 50-series graphics cards from Nvidia include the current most powerful consumer GPU - Nvidia's GeForce RTX 5090. The RTX 5090 uses the new Blackwell architecture and comes with a massive 32GB of GDDR7 VRAM, and given the current prioritization for models with lower amounts of VRAM to boost profits, it's a problem getting your hands on one at anything even in the vicinity of a reasonable price. We are tracking all the best GPU deals in the run-up to Amazon Prime Day 2026.

The 50-series range doesn't have the most impressive gen-on-gen performance uplifts on pure rasterization power compared to the 40-series, but it does support new software and tech such as 5th Gen Tensor cores, 4th Gen Ray Tracing cores, DLSS 4.5 with Multi-Frame Generation tech, and Reflex 2. Some of those technologies, like DLSS and frame gen, can help wring the most performance out of those lower-tier cards with less VRAM.

There are 8GB variants of the RTX 5060 and 5060 Ti, available at near MSRP prices, with the higher-tier GPUs like the RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 5080 in poor supply at any reasonable price.

Nvidia RTX 40-Series: Lowest Graphics Cards Prices

Nvidia's 40-series Ada Lovelace architecture graphics cards include the powerful GeForce RTX 4090 and 4080 Super. The 4090 combines a massive 24GB of GDDR6X VRAM and Nvidia's 4th generation of Tensor cores for increased ray-tracing ability.

The RTX 40-series cards also feature support for Nvidia's DLSS 3 software for AI frame generation, which helps to increase frame rates on higher resolutions and settings. In general, Nvidia cards are the best choice for ray tracing, with more features than the competition. You'll also generally pay more for Nvidia GPUs relative to similarly performing AMD GPUs.

Unfortunately, RTX 40-series GPUs are no longer being produced, so stock levels have dried up on many card variants. Any available cards for sale have a high chance of being either second-hand or ex-mining hardware, yet still ask for exorbitant prices. Be extra vigilant when shopping for 40-series graphics cards, and buy from a reputable seller. Prices for 40-series cards are also much higher than they should be. They can be a good choice for a second-hand purchase if you can get one at the right price and accept all associated risks.

AMD Radeon RX 9000-Series: Lowest Graphics Cards Prices

AMD's competition to Nvidia includes the Radeon RX 9060, RX 9070, and RX 9070 XT graphics cards with MSRP prices of $269, $549, and $599, respectively. Finding one of these GPUs for that price, however, could prove to be a struggle as prices of Radeon graphics cards rise due to ever-expanding memory price hikes. These new cards go toe-to-toe with Nvidia's RTX 5070 and RTX 5070 Ti and offer a great alternative to Team Green.

The RX 9070 XT comes with 16GB of GDDR6 VRAM for those texture-heavy games and provides a large generational increase compared to RDNA 3. Improvements to AI and ray tracing tech have made this generation of AMD cards perform much better in games with ray tracing, but they still fall behind Nvidia in overall performance for ray/path tracing.

There are also 8GB and 16GB versions of the RX 9060 XT available, and they are selling for a fair price at the moment. However, 8GB of VRAM means the card isn't terribly futureproofed, as game requirements continually grow regarding shader and texture memory requirements.

AMD Radeon RX 7000-Series: Lowest Graphics Cards Prices

AMD's 7000-series GPUs are still a great option for a graphics card in your gaming rig if you can find one at a good price. Not the best choice if you're looking for pure ray-tracing performance, but if you want raw computational performance, they are a winner. Combined with AMD's FSR software, these 7000-series GPUs can still crank out high frame rates in the latest games.

The RX 7900 XTX in particular represents a great blend of power and performance, with it being the halo-tier card from the 7000-series and AMD not replicating a super-high-end card for the 9000-series. The RX 7900 XTX still ranks highly in our GPU Benchmark Hierarchy charts.

Here are all the lowest prices for the 7000-series models currently available.

Intel Arc GPUs: Lowest Graphics Card Prices

Intel's entry into the GPU market has been a little hit-and-miss. In some titles, these cards perform relatively well, but in older DirectX games, the cards suffer from some poor performance issues.

Frequent driver updates have made many improvements to the performance of Intel's Arc lineup and turned them into a much more viable choice for a budget gaming PC build. The prices of these GPUs have hit a price sweet spot that has been abandoned by Nvidia and AMD, especially for 1080p gaming. The Arc series of GPUs should certainly not be discounted when considering any budget gaming system build.

Intel's most recent launches include the Arc B580 and Arc B570, with the cards having 12GB of VRAM for the B580 and 10GB for the B570. Pricing is very competitive with the Intel cards, but the manufacturer's variety is limited, as is stock.

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AI currently serves as Nvidia's money-printing machine; thus, the chipmaker must ensure that it's properly fed at all times. Although it may not rival the best graphics cards for gaming, the newly introduced RTX Pro 5000 72GB (via TechPowerUp) will cut through AI workloads as if they were butter.

The RTX Pro 5000 72GB represents an upgraded iteration of the standard RTX Pro 5000, distinguished primarily by increased memory capacity. The former boasts an additional 24GB of GDDR7 memory, a substantial 50% increase in capacity. This significant enhancement in the memory subsystem is expected to be accompanied by a proportionate increase in cost.

The sole modification to the RTX Pro 5000 72GB is an increase in capacity, as the memory modules remain 28 Gbps chips operating over a 384-bit memory interface, which yields a maximum memory bandwidth of 1.3 GB/s. The Blackwell AI graphics card comprises 24 memory modules arranged in a clamshell configuration, each with a capacity of 3GB. In terms of capacity, it is only 25% less than the flagship RTX Pro 6000.

Nvidia RTX Pro 5000 72GB Blackwell Specifications

The other specifications of the RTX Pro 5000 72GB remain unchanged. Utilizing the GB202 silicon—also employed in the GeForce RTX 5090 and RTX Pro 6000—the die of the RTX Pro 5000 72GB features 110 SMs enabled out of the maximum 192 SMs. It corresponds to approximately 57% utilization of the GB202 silicon. Given its enhanced capacity, the RTX Pro 5000 72GB effectively positions itself between the RTX Pro 6000 and the RTX Pro 5000.

According to Nvidia's specification sheet, the 50% additional memory didn't alter the RTX Pro 5000's power draw. The RTX Pro 5000 72GB is still a 300W graphics card that pulls power from a 16-pin power connector. The modest power requirements, combined with its dual-slot, blower-style cooler, make it easy to have up to four of these Blackwell AI graphics cards in a modern system.

The RTX Pro 5000 72GB represents a strategic move by Nvidia, with the potential to yield significant dividends. As an intermediary model, the RTX Pro 5000 72GB offers a viable option for consumers seeking greater memory capacity than the RTX Pro 5000, yet wishing to avoid the exorbitant price of the RTX Pro 6000, which can reach up to $10,000.

Nvidia has not announced the release date or pricing details for the RTX Pro 5000 72GB on its website. The pricing of the standard RTX Pro 5000 varies significantly, ranging from $4,400 to $7,500, although availability is infrequent. The increased memory capacity of the RTX Pro 5000 72GB is likely to elevate its price by approximately 20% to 25%.

The best graphics cards don't always have to be expensive. Unfortunately, in today's market, even buying them at MSRP feels like a good deal. It was already a rare sight to see someone purchase a GeForce RTX 5090 below MSRP at Walmart, but there have been two instances in a short period of time. The stars must have aligned for the two fortunate Redditors.

Two days prior, Redditor NestyHowk showcased the acquisition of a GeForce RTX 5090, priced at $1,399.99, which is $600 or 30% below the MSRP, sparking envy within the PCMR Reddit community. Nonetheless, today, DCole1847 has surpassed this achievement. Evidently, the hardware deities appear to favor the former, as the user recently acquired a GeForce RTX 5090 for $1,119.99, representing a reduction of $880, or 44% below the MSRP.

MSRP, particularly for Nvidia's current GeForce RTX 50 (codenamed Blackwell) series, is almost irrelevant. Even during special promotional occasions, such as Amazon Prime Day, it is nearly impossible to acquire Blackwell products at a price below the MSRP. However, based on the photographs of the two Reddit users, we may have a slight idea of where you could find a GeForce RTX 5090 at a reasonable price.

Nvidia has dropped the prices for some of its RTX 50-series GPUs in Europe — with the RTX 5090, 5080, and 5070 seeing a reduction of almost 10%.

These lower prices are likely tied to a weakening dollar, Videocardz notes, making the import of American goods into Europe relatively cheaper than before. The USD was at its peak when Nvidia’s latest gaming GPUs launched, with the exchange rate hovering around $1.04 for every Euro. Today, it now sits at around $1.16 — a more than 10% drop in value since January.

This currency shift likely influenced the AI tech giant’s decision to drop the MSRP of its Founders Edition GPUs. When you visit Nvidia Germany’s marketplace, you will see lower prices on the aforementioned cards versus their launch prices. This also holds true for other European Nvidia sites, like France, Belgium, and Spain. Hopefully, other manufacturers will soon follow suit, as they haven’t reduced prices at the time of writing.

A few months ago, popular enthusiast der8auer took a look at the RTX Titan Ada, an unreleased card from Nvidia's Ada Lovelace lineup that was supposed to take full advantage of the AD102 GPU, purportedly featuring 18,432 cores and 48 GB VRAM. While this card never made it to market, a working prototype of it featuring dual 12VHPWR connectors does exist. And, today, we get to see the insane adapter that ships with it to make the whole thing compatible with older power supplies (that don't adhere to the ATX 3.0/3.1 spec).

The Titan series from Nvidia always represented the best-in-class mainstream GPU the company had to offer. Since 2018's RTX Titan, Nvidia has replaced this with its 90-class GPUs like the RTX 3090 and 5090. The RTX Titan Ada was, therefore, supposed to be the flagship offering of the Ada Lovelace lineup, superceding even the RTX 4090. It was the largest reference card Nvidia had ever built, but alas, we never got to enjoy the brutality of it.

All that performance requires a lot of power, and this card came well-equipped. With not only one but two 12VHPWR connectors, the Titan Ada can technically handle up to 1200W of power, but due to driver and BIOS limitations, it only peaked at around 600W (with overclocking) when der8bauer tested it earlier. Now, in his latest video, he specifically breaks down this power delivery system and, most interestingly, the mystery dual 12VHPWR to 6x 8-pin adapter.

As the name suggests, Nvidia made an adapter that can take the power from six standard 8-pin PCIe connectors, so 900W, and supply that across two 12VHPWR connectors. This adapter has no load balancing, and there are no sense pins on the connector either, so the GPU will run regardless of how many 8-pins are actually plugged in. Der8auer demonstrates this by literally unplugging the 8-pin connectors one by one while the card is running, and it doesn't shut down even when down to just two 8-pins.

Design-wise, the Titan Ada adapter, despite featuring an angled housing, is much stiffer compared to the newer 12V-2x6 to quad 8-pin adapter that ships with the RTX 5090. There's no smart functionality in that either. Still, at least the 5090's adapter has an extra communication wire that can detect whether every 8-pin is properly plugged in or not—unlike the Titan Ada, which will just run willy-nilly. However, this behavior could be attributed to its prototype nature. The Titan adapter also features much longer cables that are not braided.

Der8auer otherwise praised the construction of the adapter, noting how it's all one piece of plastic instead of smaller bits attached together. That could indicate Nvidia was quite far into the process of finalizing it, and this is proven by the date of manufacture. Der8auer disassembled the 12VHPWR side of the adapter and found "20220121" mentioned on the PCB—corresponding to 21 January, 2022—and reiterated that Nvidia likely made a new mold specifically for the connectors.

A far cry from the ultimate expense of yesterday's deal on the Nvidia Flagship RTX 5090 GPU deal, where the best GPU for gaming was still $2400 even on a sale, today's focus is on a more mainstream offering that is multitudes more affordable. Checking over the price history for the latest 50-series graphics cards from Nvidia, I came across this GPU deal from Newegg that smashes through the MSRP ceiling to offer the very latest RTX graphics card at an all-time low price, but there is a little hoop-jumping to go through to get the full deal.

MSI's Ventus 2X OC GeForce RTX 5070 GPU is now available at Newegg for a record-low $529. To achieve this price, the graphics card first received a discount from its original $629 to $559, and then you need to apply for a rebate of $15 that brings the price to $544, and finally, add the code MSIVTS at the checkout for a further $15 discount; bringing the total to $529.99. Checking PCPartPicker, this is a new record-low price for MSI's RTX 5070 GPU, and is now actually priced under the mythical RTX 5070 MSRP figure.

• Check out the deal at Newegg

The RTX 5070 is one of Nvidia's mid-range entries for PC graphics and a capable card for most gamers. Being a 50-series card also means it can access all the benefits of Nvidia's latest software developments, such as DLSS 4 and Reflex 2. The MSI Ventus 2X OC is an overclocked variant of the RTX 5070 and features a twin-fan design over a large heatsink for greater heat dissipation. The GPU uses 6144 CUDA cores, has 12GB of the latest GDDR7 VRAM running on a 192-bit memory bus, and can reach a boost clock speed of 2542 MHz. On compatible hardware, the GPU can also make use of the latest PCI Express 5.0 integration.

You can check out our review of the RTX 5070, where in our benchmark testing, we note how the RTX 5070 is 19% faster than the previous generation's RTX 4070 at 1440p, with that percentage improvement increasing to 22% at 4K resolutions. In our chart of game averages, you can see how it compares to other cards tested.

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, or CPU Deals pages.

The RTX 5050 has already been tipped to feature GDDR6 memory rather than GDDR7 found in the RTX 5060 through RTX 5090. However, what was still unknown was the speed bin Nvidia would choose. Leaker MEGAsizeGPU on X reports that the RTX 5050 will allegedly utilize the fastest version of GDDR6 in mass production — 20 Gbps modules, which are used in AMD's RX 9070 series GPUs and Nvidia's GDDR6 variant of the RTX 4070.

If the X leak is accurate, the RTX 5050 will feature 320GB/s of memory bandwidth, 40% of the bandwidth of the RTX 5060 (which boasts 448GB/s of memory bandwidth). The massive drop-off in memory bandwidth goes hand in hand with the RTX 5050's 50% drop in CUDA cores from the RTX 5060. It remains to be seen what the RTX 5050 would be capable of with GDDR7, but it is likely the GPU's significantly cut-down compute power will prevent the 20 Gbps GDDR6 modules from being a major bottleneck.

Earlier in the week, we reported on an Nvidia driver change which opened up crazy new possibilities for PC DIYers. However, the dreams of Intel Core 2 system makers enjoying outlandish high jinks with Nvidia RTX50 GPUs have now partially evaporated. Twitter(X)-based tech enthusiast Bob Pony, who first surfaced the driver change, is back, but his tales of “struggles,” aren’t exactly the news we wanted to hear.

To recap, the latest Nvidia GeForce driver re-enabled support for Intel processors dating back to the Core 2 era, as it no longer required CPU support for the POPCNT instruction. That is all well and good, and Pony took to Twitter yesterday to “happily confirm that it's possible to use an NVIDIA RTX 50 series graphics card in an old system such as an Intel Core 2 Quad.” Specifically, they partnered their old Core 2 Quad Q9450 with an unashamedly modern RTX 5060 Ti. “It works!” Pony celebrated, and tipped followers to avoid trying the same with an RTX 5060 non-Ti due to its PCIe x8 interface.

What happened next is that Pony quickly went from fiddling around in Windows 11 to trying to get some modern games running on their May-to-September combo.

Concerned and bemused owners of Gigabyte graphics cards continue to document harrowing signs of thermal putty leaking out of their graphics cards despite the company's efforts to assuage fears that there's nothing to worry about.

Last month, Gigabyte addressed issues of thermal gel creep in its RTX 50-Series and AMD Radeon RX 9000 series GPUs, telling customers that in early production a slightly higher volume of gel was applied, which "may cause the excessive gel to appear more prominent, extended, and could potentially be separated from the designated area."

The company says there's nothing to worry about and the creep won't affect performance, reliability, or lifespan, but that hasn't stopped concerned users from continuing to document worrying signs of the dreaded thermal creep.

In particular, Reddit users u/supatx uploaded a series of images, which you can see in the Reddit embed below, documenting the problem unfolding over the course of a couple of weeks. The first two images show the first signs of the issue, small leakages on the main board. Images three and four "show where the thermal putty has dripped down onto the riser," they shared. Five and six "shows where the thermal putty has dripped down and no longer provides heat dissipation to most of what seems to be a VRAM chip." The final harrowing images show the gap in the system where the putty used to be from photo four.

5070ti Aorus Master Leaking Thermal Putty from r/gigabyte

The Gigabyte subreddit is awash with such reports. "I got my card about a week ago and seeing all those posts made me want to double check," another user shared. After a week of light use, their images show putty leaking from all the usual spots after just five hours of total use, with the card horizontal the whole time. "Is it ok?" another asked sheepishly.

While plenty of comments recommend just wiping up the excess and cracking on, Supatx's images appear to show that eventually, all of the putty in question will leak out, leaving nothing behind and presumably no thermal performance either. That could cast some doubt on Gigabyte's claim that the problem is caused merely by excess, with the images on display here apparently showing no thermal putty left behind on at least some parts of the board.

Gigabyte says that users with more questions or who require further assistance should contact their regional Gigabyte customer service center.

Several Nvidia GeForce RTX 50-series GPUs have been missing ROPs, suggesting that some GB202 and GB203 chips used in those cards are defective. This has led to many graphics cards from different manufacturers, including Zotac, MSI, Gigabyte, and even Nvidia’s Founders Edition GPUs, having eight fewer ROPs than specified. The company has stated Tom’s Hardware, saying this only affected a few of its GPUs.

“We have identified a rare issue affecting less than 0.5% (half a percent) of GeForce RTX 5090 / 5090D and 5070 Ti GPUs, which have one fewer ROP than specified. The average graphical performance impact is 4%, with no impact on AI and Compute workloads,” an Nvidia representative told Tom's Hardware. “Affected consumers can contact the board manufacturer for a replacement. The production anomaly has been corrected.”

So, the problem is indeed caused by an issue in production and quality control, which allowed a few defective GB202 and GB203 chips to pass inspection and be installed on GPUs. It’s a good thing that the issue was caught early, though, as Nvidia said that even its RTX 5070 Ti GPUs, which were released a couple of days ago, were also affected. Consumers who bought any affected cards would not get the expected performance.

Team Green said those affected by the missing ROPs should contact their board manufacturer to RMA their less performant GPUs. Hopefully, they won’t have to wait long to get a proper replacement despite the ongoing RTX 50-series shortage. A few retailers expect supply to stabilize in four months.

This has been one of the many issues plaguing the RTX 50 series since its highly anticipated launch. A major concern returning from the RTX 4090 is the melting power cable problem, which the company has previously claimed was already fixed. Several RTX 50-series GPUs are also experiencing crashes and instability, resulting in BSODs and black screens. Nvidia said it’s already investigating the issue but hasn’t yet released a timeline for a fix.

Many gamers and enthusiasts are predictably disappointed with this launch. Many say that the performance improvements do not match the price increases. With all these issues cropping up less than a month after their release, Nvidia has its hands full, trying to fix them.

Melting power cable issues for the Nvidia RTX 4090 and now RTX 5090 GPUs still exists, even though Nvidia claims that it has resolved the problem. Because of this, some manufacturers have taken things into their own hands, like MSI using yellow-tipped 16-pin adapters or Zotac implementing a Safety Light feature to ensure that the GPU cable is fully inserted before powering up. However, it seems that overheating could still be a problem, even if your cable is properly connected. That’s why a few experts are proposing over-temperature and over-current protections on each wire. The engineering and testing of this solution is going to take some time, but one Taobao seller (h/t HXL) has seemingly beat everyone to the punch by launching an RTX 4090 16-pin adapter with active cooling and power and temperature monitoring.

This adapter, has a built-in fan to help alleviate the issue by cooling down the connector. This would help manage temperatures in day-to-day use and could prevent situations where a cable would melt without showing any outward signs, even after years of normal usage. But it doesn't address the fault at the heart of the connector.

The adapter does not offer any automatic protection, it at least lets you see the current running through it and its temperature in real time as the fan keeps the connector cool. It shows the overall readings, though, not how much power each wire is consuming. Some tests showed that uneven power distribution is the culprit behind the melting cables, pushing too much current across one of the 12 wires. This causes it to go way over its rated power capacity and overheat the cable, causing it to melt.

In the end, all these solutions are just stop-gap measures made by third-party manufacturers. What we need is a proper cable connector that can handle the massive amounts of power top-end GPUs demand from PSUs. A recall would likely have already been enforced if this were to happen with other appliances — we just hope Nvidia and other PC manufacturers reconsider their stand on this outdated power cable before it makes mainstream new headlines for all the wrong reasons.

Although the adapter is designed for the RTX 4090, it has technically the same pin configuration as the RTX 5090, so you could use it with the newer GPU, but it is best not for now. Cable maker Moddiy is warning against using old 12VHPWR cables with Nvidia’s latest GPU, especially as the old cables are missing the protections and improvements that the 12V-2x6 connectors have. Despite that, this 180-degree adapter ensures that you don’t have to bend the power cable, which is often identified as the source of the overheating issue.

Although the GeForce RTX 5090 and RTX 5080, two of the best graphics cards, were launched a week ago, Nvidia's partners have already started hiking their prices. Asus and MSI were among the first to increase prices in their U.S. online stores, although the GPUs are out of stock.

The price hike is likely due to the limited Blackwell supply, Trump tariffs, scalpers, or a combination of these. Depending on the variant, MSI was selling its custom GeForce RTX 5090 at launch for between $2,000 and $2,400. The Ventus 3X, the budget model in MSI's product stack, had the lowest price tag at $2,000. The pricing has increased by an additional $400, an 18% increase on the flagship Blackwell GPU.

The MSI RTX 5080 16GB Ventus 3X will set you back by $1,140, initially costing $ 1,000 when it was launched if the stock was available. The price increase on the MSI RTX 50-series GPUs can also be seen on Newegg, with no stocks available.

The price increase is also seen on custom Asus RTX 50-series graphics cards. The Asus Astral RTX 5090 has increased from $2,799 to $3,079, with zero availability. Similarly, the RTX 5080, made by Asus, has experienced a $200 price increase, just like MSI variants.

Many would argue that the price hikes are due to high-volume sales, as the RTX 50-series inventories were out of stock within twenty minutes at retailers like Newegg. However, Trump's tariffs had a bigger role in price increases. Last month, tariffs were announced on TSMC between 25% to 100%. Naturally, this will reflect on the final pricing of graphics cards and tariffs on other components such as VRAMs. Irrespective of the price tag, the graphics cards are selling off quickly, and scalpers added to the nuisance by selling the Blackwell graphics cards at ridiculous prices on eBay.

Many PC gamers blame other factors, such as cryptocurrency, AI, and even Nvidia, for pushing EVGA out of the GPU business. The early adopters were the only lucky buyers who could dodge this price hike. As for others, they'll have to wait until there is more stock and, hopefully, the prices stabilize. Those with a previous-generation GeForce RTX 40-series GPU may not see the urge to upgrade since the generation-over-generation uplift isn't extraordinary.

Nvidia’s RTX 50 series laptop GPUs are expected to start shipping in March 2025, but retailers and OEMs are already putting up listings with prices. We’ve already seen laptops equipped with RTX 5070 Ti, RTX 5080, and RTX 5090 graphics cards go live on the Polish e-commerce website Dream Machines. And in January Best Buy listings for RTX 50 series laptops paired with either an Intel Arrow Lake-HX or AMD Dragon Range Refresh CPU, were spotted, with prices ranging from $1,899 to $4,199.

Aside from these retailers, we’ve also started seeing some major laptop manufacturers going live with RTX 50-series laptop listings. For example, if you check the Asus U.S. store page, you’ll find 16 laptops listed with Blackwell GPUs, ranging from the RTX 5070 to the RTX 5090. Unfortunately, only six of these laptops have price tags at the time of writing, with the most affordable being the ROG Strix Scar 16 which sports an RTX 5080 laptop GPU and an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX priced at $3,199.99.

Those interested in the other end of the spectrum will have the ROG Strix Scar 18 which is powered by the RTX 5090 laptop GPU and the same processor for $4,299.99. HP is also offering a single laptop model, the HP Omen Max, that comes with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 Laptop GPU and an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX CPU, priced at $2,699.99 at Best Buy.

If we look through the table above, the price for RTX 5090 laptops ranges from $3,999.99 to $4,199.99, while those with an RTX 5080 are priced between $2,699.99 and $3,399.99. Lastly, an RTX 5070 Ti laptop will set you back by $1,899.99. These prices stay on track with Nvidia’s pricing for these laptop GPUs, which shows how much GPU prices have inflated through the years. Gaming laptops powered by an RTX 40-series laptop GPU debuted in 2023, with enthusiast-class laptops equipped with an RTX 4080 starting at $1,999 — a nearly 35% increase in pricing based on currently available data.

Hopefully, we will find more laptop models equipped with RTX 50-series Blackwell GPUs as March 2025 comes nearer. This should deliver more competition and maybe lower prices for consumers. But given that the laptop GPU itself is priced so high, it’s unlikely that we’ll get an “enthusiast-class” laptop with an RTX 5080 and up for less than $2,500.

The GeForce RTX 5080 is set to arrive in the next few days, and performance benchmark leaks have started appearing. A Redditor has unearthed Blender results for the GeForce RTX 5080, providing a glimpse of its capabilities.

According to benchmark results, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 has a median score of 9077.3 points across two results, which is only a little over 700 points or 8% above the previous generation RTX 4080 Super. Compared to the RTX 4080, the RTX 5080 delivered up to 10% higher performance in Blender.

The numbers may look disappointing, especially as previously leaked benchmarks showed a 22% uplift over the RTX 4080. However, the results were from Geekbench, a questionable benchmark for evaluating graphics card performance. Many would argue that Blender is a more solid benchmark. The RTX 5090 performs about 25% better than the RTX 4090. It'll be interesting to see how the RTX 5080 stacks up to its predecessor, as the gap in actual gaming FPS you get with the RTX 5080 versus the RTX 4080 Super and RTX 4080 might even be smaller.

Still, we will have to wait until Nvidia lifts the embargo on the RTX 5080 on January 29 until we see real-world results for this GPU. We still have our fingers crossed that it will deliver a performance uplift that will make it a worthy upgrade over the previous generation GPU and a viable option for gamers who don’t want to spend $2,000 on a high-end graphics card.

If these leaked Blender benchmarks would track with the real-world FPS that the RTX 5080 would deliver, then it makes no sense to spend over a thousand dollars just to get between 8% to 10% better performance from your RTX 4080-series GPU. But if you’re coming from an RTX 3080 Ti, the near doubling of performance might make it a good upgrade.

You might have to be patient if you plan to upgrade at launch, though, as the RTX 5090 currently has limited stocks. Some scalpers are even taking advantage of this situation and selling the rights to buy the $2,000 GPU for over three times the MSRP. So, if Nvidia doesn’t fix the situation with the RTX 5080, you can expect the same, with the card selling for way over the MSRP.

Nvidia says that its flagship RTX 5090 GPUs will not experience the melting 16-pin connectors that plagued RTX 4090 graphics cards. Company representatives made this announcement during Nvidia RTX AI Day 2025 in South Korea, as reported by Quasar Zone (machine translated). Nvidia is confident that the changes it made to the connector design will avoid the issue, despite the RTX 5090 having a higher TDP of 575 watts (versus the 4090’s 450 watts).

The company, represented by Nvidia APAC Director of Tech Marketing Jeff Yen, GeForce Tech Director for Marketing Sean Cleveland, and Nvidia Korea Senior VP Sunwook Kim, was answering some questions during the Nvidia RTX AI Day 2025 event. Someone in the audience asked if the RTX 5090 solved the problem that plagued the RTX 4090. The issue being "where the connector overheated and melted”. Nvidia answered, “We don’t expect that to happen with the RTX 50 series. We made some changes to the connector to respond to the issue at the time, and we know that it is not happening now, about two years later.”

The root cause of the overheating connector is often seen as an improperly or loosely attached cable, or if the cable is bent near the plug, causing too much stress at the connection point. Because of this, the industry developed the new 12V-2x6 connector, which replaced the 12VHPWR connector.

This new connector seemingly solved the overheating issue, although it’s been reported as late as April 2024 that many RTX 4090s continue to melt—but these were often older cards that used the older standard or those that used defective Cablemod 16-pin GPU power adapters that have since been recalled and discontinued.

Since Nvidia has released the RTX 5090 some two years after it started using the 12V-2x6 connector, we can safely assume that overheating power connectors will no longer be an issue. Still, some AIBs are erring on the side of caution to avoid a repeat of the melting RTX 4090 connectors.

Zotac added a Safety Light feature that prevents the GPU from turning on until the power cable is fully and securely inserted. On the other hand, MSI introduced a simpler solution: it used a yellow-tipped 16-pin power adapter as a visual indicator. A fully seated power cable wouldn’t show any of the yellow parts—so if you still spot it after plugging it into your GPU, then the power cable is not properly attached.

With the introduction of Nvidia's RTX 50-series (Blackwell) GPU lineup last night, the trillion-dollar GPU manufacturer has updated its SFF-Ready list of supported Nvidia GPUs to incorporate the new Blackwell GPUs. The updated list reveals that the RTX 5090 Founders Edition is the only RTX 5090 variant that qualified as an SFF-Ready product.

Nvidia's SFF-Ready guidelines dictate that a 70-class Nvidia RTX 40 series (Ada Lovelace) or 50 series graphics card must not be taller than 151 mm, including the power cable bend radius, no longer than 304mm, and no thicker than 50mm or 2.5 PCIe slots. Nvidia's brand-new RTX 5090 Founders Edition graphics card is well within those specifications, featuring a length of 137mm, a height of 304mm, and a thickness of 40mm or two PCIe slots.

This makes the RTX 5090 Founders Edition the first and only 90-class flagship Nvidia GPU to fit within Nvidia's small form factor regulations. None of Nvidia's previous-generation Ada Lovelace GPUs, including the RTX 4090, were compact enough to fit within Nvidia's regulations, and, apparently, none of the RTX 5090-based AIB partner cards are small enough, either. For perspective, the RTX 5090 Founders Edition cooler is so small that it comes in at the same size (down to the millimeter) as the RTX 5080 Founders Edition, despite the RTX 5080 consuming almost half the power as the RTX 5090.

To achieve this, Nvidia has reworked its Founders Edition design compared to the 40-series to improve cooling performance while slimming down the cooler's size compared to the RTX 4090 Founders Edition. Parts of the re-design include thermal metal, a more efficient double flow-through cooler design, and a three-piece PCB. This has enabled Nvidia to provide enough cooling performance to cool the RTX 5090 and its very power-hungry 575W TDP while maintaining a slim two-slot thickness. By contrast, the RTX 4090 Founders Edition consumed 450W but took up three PCIe slots in raw thickness, which knocked it out of Nvidia's SFF-Ready qualifications.

The RTX 5090 is the only graphics card with this "problem." Founders Edition (where applicable) and AIB-partner variants of the RTX 5080, RTX 5070 Ti, and RTX 5070 can be found to be SFF-Ready.

The RTX 5090's Founders Edition's small size will inevitably make this GPU the go-to option for small form factor builds or anyone looking to build a high-performance system with a "normal-sized" graphics card. We are anticipating the RTX 50 series to launch by the end of this month.

Gigabyte has just announced 30 new GPU models at CES 2025, comprised of 27 Nvidia GPUs, which should soon be available, and three AMD Radeon RX 9000-series cards expected to arrive later this year. The Nvidia GeForce RTX 50-series comprises seven RTX 5090 cards, eight RTX 5080 GPUs, six RTX 5070 Ti graphics cards, and six RTX 5070 GPUs. The company also listed the following AMD cards: Aorus Radeon RX 9070 XT Elite, RX 9070 XT Gaming OC, and RX 9070 Gaming OC.

If you’re building a PC with a custom water loop, Gigabyte makes it easy to add the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 to your system. They’re both available in the Xtreme Waterforce WB variant. These two GPUs are also available in AIO versions for those who don’t want to deal with the intricacies of custom liquid cooling.

Small form factor (SFF) PC fans can also celebrate, as you’re getting nine SFF GPUs in the Gigabyte lineup — from the RTX 5080 to the RTX 5070—giving you three options per performance level. There’s also at least one white or light-colored GPU per level so that you can build an all-white SFF PC with a Gigabyte GPU.

Gigabyte’s new GPUs, both from Nvidia and AMD (except for the water block-only models), come with three fans. The company says that all these graphics cards use its new Hawk Fan design, reducing air resistance, thus making it more efficient at cooling these more power-hungry cards. They also reduce noise levels, allowing you to better enjoy your games without hearing the whine of a turbo et under your desk or beside your monitor.

As usual, Gigabyte is introducing these cards under the following trims: Xtreme Waterforce, Master, Gaming, Aero, Eagle, and Windforce. The Xtreme Waterforce is only available for the RTX 5090 and 5080, while you can choose Master, Gaming, and Windforce variants across all of Gigabyte’s RTX 50-series models. On the other hand, you can get an Aero GPU from 5080 and below, while Gigabyte’s Eagle is only an option for the 5070 Ti and the 5070.

All these options mean you can get an Nvidia GPU from Gigabyte that will fit your exact performance, aesthetics, and budgetary needs. The company will also launch AMD’s next-gen GPUs, but since they’re yet to arrive on the market, with an expected arrival date of Q1 2025, you’ll have to wait a few more months to get your hands on one.

Nvidia's CES 2025 presentation showed off its new RTX 50-series graphics cards proudly, with the RTX 5090 through RTX 5070 all offering around double the performance of their previous-gen counterparts in the RTX 40-series. Nvidia credited this in its keynote to the brand-new Blackwell architecture. However, a look at Nvidia's in-house benchmarks reveals that the 2X improvements in games come more from the software suite of DLSS 4 than pure silicon vs. silicon matchups.

Deep Learning Super Sampling, or DLSS, has been a tentpole feature in Nvidia's consumer graphics cards since the RTX 20-series. DLSS 4's software suite includes a bevy of new and improved AI features that increase in-game performance and visual quality over last-gen's DLSS 3/3.5. Software and hardware improvements lead to upgrades in DLSS's Super Resolution upscaling, ray reconstruction, and frame generation, a feature which AI generates one extra frame per rendered frame.

DLSS 4 steps this up to Multi Frame Generation, a process that can generate up to three frames based on one rendered frame. This can effectively step a 30 FPS experience up to 120 FPS by generating and inserting the extra frames. But as with regular framegen, it's really about frame smoothing than truly boosting performance — user input still gets sampled at a far slower rate, and latency concerns linger.

The DLSS 4 suite is, per Nvidia's testing, better in every way than DLSS 3. Nvidia's own relative performance benchmarks for the RTX 5090, 5080, 5070 Ti, and 5070, which pit the new cards against their previous-generation counterparts (RTX 4090, etc.), seek to prove this point exactly.

All the upcoming cards more than double last-gen performance in Cyberpunk 2077, Black Myth: Wukong, and Alan Wake 2, all in 4K Max settings with full RT. There's also a D5 Render productivity benchmark. However, the fine print reveals that though some DLSS 4 features will come to 40-series and older cards, DLSS 3 was used on the 40-series cards in testing.

It's not exactly wrong to test this way; DLSS 4 has not yet rolled out to older cards and Multi Frame Generation will only ever be available on the 50-series cards thanks to its specific hardware upgrades (or at least, that's the story Nvidia is telling). But the lead shrinks to a 1.5x boost or lower in games where DLSS 4 isn't available.

A Plague Tale: Requiem was tested with DLSS 3 on all cards, while Far Cry 6 was tested without DLSS (which it doesn't support) and turned in a meager 1.25X generational improvement.

Any gamers who purchase the RTX 50-series will want to crank all the DLSS 4 settings and features up to eleven to see true performance improvements beyond the 40-series. When the 50-series arrives, beginning this month, some DLSS 4 upgrades will also roll down to older cards, improving visuals and performance alongside the 50 series.

DLSS 4's Multi Frame Generation is also made interesting thanks to how it plays with input latency. Because of how Multi Frame Generation works (after two frames are rendered in the usual way, up to three intermediate frames get generated to fill in the gaps), some amount of input latency gets introduced as the generated frames are created without any new input data. But it's no worse than regular framegen in that regard; Multi Frame Generation simply creates the intermediate frames faster than the 40-series framegen. There's also Reflex 2, a technology that seeks to squash input lag and further help make up for Multi Frame Generation's extra required headroom.

The appropriately named sequel to 2020's Reflex, Reflex 2 reduces latency in games by up to 75%, beating Reflex 1's 50% reduction. A standard latency pipeline follows mouse/keyboard inputs from the CPU, to the render queue, to the GPU, which then outputs an image around 58 milliseconds later. Reflex is an SDK that seeks to better synchronize the CPU and GPU, submitting updated input data from CPU to GPU just before it's needed, bypassing the render queue and taking latency as low as 28ms. 90% of gamers keep Reflex on in its over 100 supported games, per Nvidia.

Reflex 2 performs this improved queueing process even faster than Reflex 1, and adds a bonus layer to its pipeline. "Frame Warp" can take super-quick mouse movements and, rather than render the new angle, simply warp the existing frame in the direction of the input, further reducing input lag by removing the need for a full render. A predictive algorithm paints in the gaps in the new warped frame's edges, and voila; latency is further cut down to 14ms.

If you're confused by this witchcraft, the simplified explanation is that Reflex 2 further improves input lag and can help overcome the added frame latency of DLSS 4's Multi Frame Gen for those who buy an RTX 50-series GPU. A much deeper explanation can be found in Nvidia's Reflex 2 video below.

Nvidia's RTX 50-series on Blackwell has been long awaited by consumers, and its twice-as-fast performance numbers over the RTX 40-series seem incredibly impressive. But while Blackwell may have more memory bandwidth and more powerful ray tracing cores compared to Ada silicon, the claimed gap in real-world performance between the two generations really come from DLSS 4's software-side improvements over the last gen. And of course, this is all based on Nvidia's own in-house benchmarks; once RTX 5090 and 5080 arrive for testing sometime this month, we will be able to more quantitatively support these numbers.

Check back for our full testing of the RTX 50-series once the cards launch beginning sometime this month, and be sure to keep an eye on Tom's Hardware's CES 2025 coverage as the conference continues this week.

Zotac's, not first, not second, but third count of accidentally listing GPUs prematurely has shed light on what Nvidia has been preparing behind the scenes for its RTX 50 lineup of GPUs. Zotac had accidentally put up entries for the RTX 5090/D, RTX 5080, and the RTX 5070 family across its website, which were promptly taken down (H/T to Videocardz for spotting the listings). While most of the aforementioned GPUs have already been leaked, Zotac's recently updated filtering options are the first official source to confirm that the RTX 5090 will ship with 32GB of GDDR7 memory.

The catalog of GPUs includes the RTX 5090 in tandem with its China-specific RTX 5090D variant. Down the stack, we have the RTX 5080 and the RTX 5070 family featuring the base RTX 5070 and the RTX 5070 Ti. It isn't like Nvidia to launch the Ti variants at the beginning of a new generation, as these products typically arrive later as a refresh. Still, this is probably the lineup of GPUs that we should expect from Jensen Huang next month at CES.

The leaked screenshots hint that the RTX 5090 will be as massive as its predecessor, taking up 3.5-4 slots of space in your case. In addition, Zotac updated the filtering criteria in its Graphics Card section to include "GDDR7" and "32GB" options. Drawing a few parallels with everything we know about the RTX 5090, it should be clear that Nvidia is packing its flagship with 32GB of GDDR7 memory - up from 24GB on the RTX 4090.

Summing up everything we know thus far, the RTX 5090 is rumored to be based on Nvidia's GB202 chip - at over 744mm-squared - with 170-enabled SMs (out of 192 in total) and 32GB of GDDR7 memory. The slightly nerfed RTX 5090D should also be built using GB202 with fewer Streaming Multiprocessors - at 150 SMs per our calculations. Further down the list, the RTX 5080 using GB203 silicon drops to just 84 SMs - which is less than half that of the RTX 5090 - and 16GB of memory.

Lastly, the RTX 5070 Ti, per Kopite, will offer 70 SMs featuring the GB203 chip. Other than that, not much is known about the RTX 5070 family apart from a few rumors that slate it for retail in February.

The RTX 50 lineup is expected to employ TSMC's 4NP process (5nm-grade) - said to deliver 30% higher density than 4N used on the RTX 40 series. It is fair to assume Nvidia might introduce the FP4 and FP6 data types natively with the Blackwell on desktop, similar to its server counterpart (B100/B200). Still, there are a lot of nitty-gritty details we don't know so let's leave the architectural changes and pricing structure for Jensen next month.

We've said before that it's not a good time to buy a high-end graphics card. We expect new releases from Nvidia, AMD and Intel within the next couple of months. In fact, we'd be very surprised if we don't have an RTX 5080 and 5090 launch in January.

However, you might be sitting here in early December thinking "I don't care about what happens in January, I want the best graphics card I can buy today." And that card would be the RTX 4090. 

If you care about ray tracing, the differences are quite stark. With an RTX 4090, at 4K resolution, you get a playable 55 fps on the RTX 4090 and 103.9 fps at 2K resolution. However, there's a huge step down on those frame rates when you use the next card down, the RTX 4080 Super.

There may be a huge difference when we finally see the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080, but for now, the RTX 4090 is the leader. Unfortunately, the cards themselves are selling out like crazy. 

When I started writing this article, I intended to include links to RTX 4090 cards that were available for $1,799 and $1,819 at Best Buy. By the time I'd written a couple of paragraphs, they were all sold out. You could probably still find an RTX 4090 for $2,300 or more, but that's an insane price to pay.

Our advice: if you really want an RTX 4090 for your build, buy a prebuilt desktop with an RTX 4090 inside. Here are a few examples (while they last).

We are working hard to find the best computer deals for you this Cyber Monday. If you're looking for more savings, check out our Cyber Monday Computer Hardware Deals Live blog for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals Live blog, Monitor Deals Live, Graphics Card Deals, or CPU Deals pages.

If you've been in the market for a dedicated gaming rig, you've got to check out this discount on the Alienware Aurora R16 RTX 4070i gaming desktop. It usually goes for around $2099 but today it's discounted to $1499 as part of a Black Friday promotion. This saves you $600 off the asking price, netting an RTX 4070i GPU, Intel Core i7-14700F CPU, 16GB of RAM and 1TB of internal storage.

We reviewed a slightly different version of the Aurora R16 gaming desktop that had some spec differences and were very pleased with our experience. We ended up giving it a rating of 3.5/5 stars, remarking on its port selection and small footprint. Our biggest gripes were that the fans can occasionally get loud and the fact that it uses a proprietary motherboard.

The main processor powering the Alienware Aurora R16 gaming desktop is an Intel Core i7-14700F. It works alongside an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070i Super graphics card that has 16GB of GDDR6X. For memory, it comes with 16GB of DDR5-5600 via two 8GB modules and a 1TB internal SSD. It's also powered by a 1000W Platinum SSD.

As far as networking support goes, it has WiFI 6E AX210 802.11ax support and an Ethernet port for wired connections. Like we mentioned above, it's got quite a bit to choose from as far as ports go. The front panel has three USB Type-A 3.2 Gen 1 ports and a USB Type-C Gen 2 3.2 port. The rear ports include an assortment of audio ports, two USB Type-C ports and six USB Type-C Gen 2 3.2 ports.

It's not clear for how long this offer will be made available so we can't guarantee it will last past Black Friday. Visit the Alienware Aurora R16 gaming desktop product page at Dell while supplies last.

The PCI ID repository has added fresh entries for Nvidia's upcoming Blackwell mobile (RTX 50) GPU lineup. As spotted by Harukaze on X, the RTX 50 mobile family features GPUs from the RTX 5090M down to the RTX 5050M, covering a broad market segment akin to its predecessor. Since this leak only focuses on mobile SKUs, there's a high possibility that Nvidia is sending RTX 50 mobile engineering samples to OEMs as we speak.

The PCI ID database is an archive for hardware devices conforming to the PCI standard. Members of PCI-SIG and other contributors maintain this database, which helps to identify hardware components - GPUs in our case. It is entirely possible that these new PCI IDs were added by an OEM or found through driver patches.

We should remind readers that PCI IDs don't mention the specifications of said products. However, some SKUs have been listed with their respective GPU model. Both RTX 5090M and the RTX 5080M are said to utilize the GB203M GPU, with varying levels of binning. Interestingly, the list also includes an RTX 5070 Ti mobile, which may be a typo since Nvidia typically reveals Ti and SUPER refreshes halfway through any given generation. Echoing its Ada Lovelace lineup, Nvidia is also prepping an RTX 5050 for laptops to serve the budget market.

There are two instances of GB102, which we presume is GB202 since Blackwell for mainstream consumers are expected to use the GB2XX moniker. Given its beefy layout, laptop chips will likely not make use of GB202 so it makes sense that this chip is reserved for the RTX 5090 desktop alongside a workstation GPU for professionals.

Based on previous rumors, the RTX 50 mobile family will see no increase in memory capacity as compared to the last-generation. In fact, as per leaks, Blackwell on mobile will only offer up to just 16GB of VRAM - so enthusiasts will need to consider their choices carefully.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is expected to reveal the RTX 50 series at CES 2025, probably rubbing shoulders with rivals like the AMD Radeon 8000 GPUs and even Intel's Battlemage GPUs. Mid- and entry-level Blackwell on desktop and laptop, as is tradition, will be announced at a later date - possibly by Computex 2025 but that is mere speculation.

Preliminary specifications of Nvidia's GeForce RTX 5080 and GeForce RTX 5090 graphics cards have been published by @kopite7kimi, a reputable hardware leaker who tends to have access to accurate information about Nvidia's upcoming products. If the specifications are correct, then Nvidia's forthcoming GeForce RTX 5090 will be a monster with a 600W total graphics power rating (TGP). Many of these specs line up with previous leaks, just with a bit more detail in some areas. You can see our Nvidia Blackwell RTX 50-series GPUs guide for more details.

Nvidia's GeForce RTX 5090 — the flagship Blackwell GPU for desktop PCs — is expected to be based on the GB202 graphics processor with 21,760 CUDA cores, mated with 32GB of GDDR7 memory using a 512-bit interface. That massive number of FP32 cores will consume enormous amount of power, up to 600W if the leak is accurate. The card will certainly rank among the best graphics cards when it's released, even if the final specifications end up being slightly less impressive. Just don't ask about pricing...

By contrast, Nvidia's GeForce RTX 5080 is said to be powered by the GB203 GPU and will feature 10,752 CUDA cores, which is roughly half of the range-topping offering. RTX 5080 graphics cards are now projected to come with 16GB of GDDR7 memory with a 256-bit interface, with a TGP rating of 400W. With a decent bandwidth uplift enabled by GDDR7, the RTX 5080 should significantly outperform its predecessor in high resolutions and should be a potent graphics card.  

Preliminary specifications of Nvidia's GeForce RTX 5000-series graphics cards

While the potentially massive performance of the GeForce RTX 5090 certainly draws attention, another thing that strikes the eye is the huge performance gulf between the flagship RTX 5090 and its smaller RTX 5080 sibling. It's almost exactly half of the range-topping graphics processor in terms of the number of stream processors and memory interfaces. The TGP will be two-thirds of the top-tier card, so clocks might be higher to try to narrow the gap, but this represents an even bigger difference than with the 40-series GPUs.

That potential performance disparity looks strange to say the least, and suggests Nvidia may want to try and create a new tier of performance — or perhaps limit the appeal of certain consumer cards as AI compute alternatives. The RTX 4090 on paper offers 68% more GPU cores, 50% more VRAM, 41% more memory bandwidth, and 13% more L2 cache than the RTX 4080. In practice, CPU limits hold the 4090 back at lower settings, but at 4K ultra it ended up being about 35% faster than the second tier 40-series GPU — and the RTX 3090 was only about 15% faster than the RTX 3080. But these specs, if correct, suggest the 5090 could be up to twice the performance of the 4080.

While we can't say for certain why Nvidia decided to build its next-generation lineup this way, one of the technical explanations could be that Nvidia's GB202 processor may consist of two GB203 dies. Using a multi-chiplet design for Blackwell GPUs has been rumored for a while and the GB100/GB200 datacenter GPUs indeed adopt this architecture. However, using CoWoS-L packaging to enable the high-speed (~10 TB/s) interconnect between dies for a consumer-grade product seems like a very expensive idea.

An alternative to building a multi-chiplet GPU would be to build a monolithic graphics processor with over 21,760 CUDA cores at TSMC's 4nm-class process technology, which would result in a circa 650 mm^2 die. Such a design is hard to yield because of the large die size, which is why redundancies are usually present — the 4090's AD102 chip for example has a maximum of 144 Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs), but only 128 are enabled. So it's not impossible for Nvidia to go that route if it wants to. A monolithic chip would also be very expensive, however, and it would be weird to have such a huge gap between the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090. Other GPUs could try to plug the holes, though, and we could eventually see lower tier parts that might have something like 18,000 functional CUDA cores.

What we do know is that Nvidia uses the same chips for a variety of products: desktop, mobile, professional, and data center GPUs are all based on the same silicon designs. With AI being such a hot item right now, Nvidia might be creating a massive data center part as the first priority, and then productizing it as a consumer offering as well. If that's the case, don't be surprised if pricing ends up being quite a bit higher than the already exorbitantly priced RTX 4090 — and we could even see AI variants arrive before the consumer models.

For now, all the information we have about Blackwell-based graphics cards for client PCs is strictly unofficial. Apply the usual skepticism and know that, until Nvidia says something directly, things can and likely will change. There are still conflicting rumors on the release date as well, with some saying the RTX 50-series won't arrive until early 2025. If correct, that gives ample time for continued tweaking ahead of the launch. Until the official announcement, we can expect the rumor mill to stay busy churning out various theories and specifications.

Those in the market for a new gaming laptop in the $1000 range should take a look at this offer from Best Buy on the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 gaming laptop. This laptop has a recommended price of $1599 but right now it's marked down to just $1099. 

The laptop has everything you need for solid, low-to-mid-range gaming on the go, including RTX 4060 graphics, a Ryzen 9 8945HS CPU, 16GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD and a 14-inch, 2880 x 1800 display. It weighs a mere 3.31 pounds.

We had the opportunity to review another higher-end model of the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 and were overall pleased with the experience. However, we weren't completely floored, rating it at 3.5 out of 5 stars. It's important to note that there are a few key differences between the edition we reviewed and the model that's on sale today so some of the points, like GPU performance, won't apply.

What is the same, however, was the OLED 2880 x 1800 screen (Best Buy lists the screen as 2560 x 1440 but this appears to be a mistake on Best Buy's part). As you can see, it's very bright and fairly colorful.

We found the keyboard solid if unimpressive and the audio output was really good. We also appreciated the wide variety of ports, which including USB 4 Type-C, USB 3.2 Gen Type-A, HDMI and a headphone jack.

Nvidia’s 50-series GPUs are expected to arrive by October or November this year, just in time for the holiday season. As usual, we expect the company to release the flagship RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 GPUs first, showing the way with its Founders Edition (FE) models. However, rumors of a hulking 5090 FE design have been rebuffed by a well-regarded leaker, who says previously touted super-fat graphics card designs are inaccurate.

It was initially thought that the 5090 FE would be based on the unreleased 4090 Ti, taking up four slots inside a PC case. It would thus probably have a triple-PCB layout, with three fans interspersed throughout the GPU shroud, according to various sources. Now, popular leaker @kopite7kimi has denied the rumors on X, saying that the RTX 5090 FE will come with a twin-slot, twin-fan design.

If this new information is true, it makes the RTX 5090 a much slimmer design than the 4090 FE, which was delivered with a triple-slot cooling solution. Other AIB partners offer larger even 4090 designs that could take up almost four slots. A smaller and slimmer flagship GPU would be a welcome change after several generations of larger and larger GPUs. The problem of heavier graphics cards has come to the point that Gigabyte introduced a motherboard that can support 128-pound GPUs, but still didn’t solve the issue with the GPU itself cracking under its own massive weight.

The leaker doesn’t share information about whether the 5090 will have lower power consumption than the 4090, but they said that the new GPU’s cooling design will be more efficient. We wouldn’t be surprised if the 5090 turns out to require less power for its performance level. Nvidia has been at the forefront of AI chip development, and it powers the top three most efficient supercomputers as of May 2024. We would like to think that Nvidia’s developments in this sector would trickle down to its consumer and gaming business, allowing end-users to enjoy more power without requiring the largest possible PC cases.

However, the 5090’s size and specifications are just rumors, and Nvidia has neither confirmed nor denied any information. We will have to wait a few more weeks or even months until we can see whether the company is indeed making its top-end graphics card slimmer, or if it’s going full-steam ahead and giving us a full-fat four-slot GPU with three fans, three PCBs, and require over 600 watts for peak performance.

It's that time of the year again when Nvidia releases existing products with recycled or lower-binned silicon. According to hardware leaker MEGAsizeGPU, at least three of the chipmaker's GeForce RTX 40-series products, among the best graphics cards, will receive the treatment.

The GeForce RTX 4070 currently utilizes Nvidia's AD104 silicon, which also powers the other variants, including the GeForce RTX 4070 Super and GeForce RTX 4070 Ti. Nvidia will also start using the AD103 silicon for the GeForce RTX 4070. By contrast, AD103 is significantly larger than AD104 and houses more Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs), so it's a convenient way for Nvidia to maximize its silicon inventory.

The AD103 silicon is at the heart of the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super, GeForce RTX 4080, and GeForce RTX 4080 Super. Silicon that doesn't make the cut for the GeForce RTX 4080 is passed down to the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super. And now that Nvidia has added the GeForce RTX 4070 to the list, what doesn't qualify for the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super will find its way into the GeForce RTX 4070.

The present choice for the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti is the AD106 silicon. However, AD104 dies, which don't meet the requirements of the GeForce RTX 4070, will start finding their way into the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti. MEGAsizeGPU didn't specify whether the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16GB, which employs the same AD106 die, will face the same transition.

Meanwhile, the GeForce RTX 4060 is currently using the AD107 silicon but won't last long. Nvidia will substitute it with the AD106 silicon. It's the typical domino effect: Defective silicon from the GeForce RTX 4070 goes into the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti, and what isn't fit for the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti will end up in the GeForce RTX 4060.

The GeForce RTX 4070 (AD103) is slated for the second half of this month, so we should start seeing these graphics cards on the market. On the other hand, the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti (AD104) and GeForce RTX 4060 (AD106) won't show up until April. The latest GeForce 551.86 graphics driver, which came out on March 19, already supports the trio of reworked graphics cards, paving the way for a painless shift.

The only difference is the silicon inside the new graphics cards. Their specifications and performance remain unchanged, so the pricing should remain the same. Custom GeForce RTX 4070 models start at $519, whereas custom GeForce RTX 4060 Ti and GeForce RTX 4060 graphics cards have starting prices of $380 and $294, respectively.

Although burn damage is often fatal for computer parts, especially in areas like the PCIe connector, PC repair shop Northwest Repair revived a burned RTX 4090. Part of the 4090's PCIe connector was burned, rendering it inoperable, but Northwest Repair fixed it by cutting off the damaged portion and replacing it.

Northwest Repair worked on an RTX 4090 with burn damage that would have realistically made the GPU a total paperweight. Five PCIe pins used for 12-volt power delivery were toast, and they are absolutely necessary for any GPU to function. Even Northwest Repair said it wasn't sure it could fix the graphics card since it was in such a bad state; that's saying something, considering it fixed an RTX 3090 with liquid metal damage last week.

The repair started by cutting off all of the burned parts of the board, including the PCIe pins. Though this left the GPU lacking five crucial PCIe pins, it did resolve the shorting issue that the GPU exhibited before the amputation. Eliminating the short meant the remaining electrical connections were working fine, and while the 12-volt pins were gone, Northwest Repair was able to manually wire the connection to see if the GPU would at least turn on, and it did just fine.

However, without a full array of PCIe pins, the 4090 wouldn't be able to draw power from the PCIe slot, preventing it from working normally. While the original pins were long gone, Northwest Repair was able to cut off the same pins from a donor board and attach them to the 4090 using epoxy and solder. He used regular copper wiring to connect the salvaged PCIe pins to the 4090, which repairers typically use when the traces on the board aren't an option.

While Northwest Repair didn't show how the resurrected RTX 4090 performed in a stress test after being reassembled, it did at least verify that power was being drawn from the PCIe slot, proving that the repair worked partially at minimum. It's unclear how long this 4090 will live, but that it works at all after such severe damage is remarkable.

Nvidia is readying the company's GeForce RTX 50-series (Blackwell) products to rival the best graphics cards. While the launch date is still uncertain, renowned hardware leaker @kopite7kimi claims that based on his information, the memory interface configurations of the Blackwell family will not be too much different from the Ada Lovelace series. Since this is a leak, take it with a grain of salt. We gather from some previously released leaks that the company plans to retain a 384-bit memory bus with its next-generation range-topping GB202 GPU based on the Blackwell architecture.

Nvidia's Blackwell will likely be the company's first family to support GDDR7 memory, whose higher data transfer rates and architectural peculiarities promise to significantly increase performance compared to existing GDDR6 and GDDR6X-base memory solutions. Given that the 1st Generation GDDR7 SGRAM ICs will feature a data transfer rate of 32 GT/s, a 384-bit memory subsystem featuring these chips would offer around 1,536 GB/s of bandwidth, so a 512-bit memory interface will hardly be missed.

Micron says that 16 Gb and 24 Gb GDDR7 chips will be available in 2025, though its roadmap does not indicate whether these devices will be launched simultaneously or 16 Gb will come out earlier. That said, what remains to be seen is whether Nvidia will use 16 Gb or 24 Gb GDDR7 memory ICs with its initial GeForce RTX 50-series graphics boards.

GeForce RTX 50-series Blackwell GPU Memory Configurations*

*Specifications are unconfirmed.

With Nvidia's Blackwell family being at least two or three-quarters away, it is hardly a good business to make predictions by now. Yet, we have outlined possible memory configurations of the GB200-series powered offerings in the table.

For several generations now, Nvidia's top-of-the-range consumer graphics cards have used a 384-bit memory interface (AD102, GA102), which has proven to be optimal from a performance and cost point of view. Cut-down versions of Nvidia's range-topping consumer graphics products featured a 320-bit memory interface, whereas high-end GPUs featured a 256-bit bus (e.g., AD103, GA103, and GA104). Meanwhile, there are also GPUs in performance mainstream segments with a 192-bit memory bus (e.g., AD104, GA106) and a mainstream segment with a 128-bit memory interface (e.g., AD106, AD107, GA107).

While the comment by the leaker indicates the Blackwell family will largely retain memory interface configurations of the current Ada Lovelace family, it should be kept in mind that based on the same leaker, the Blackwell series will lack the GB204 GPU. In contrast, the rumored GB205 will likely not directly succeed AD104.

A Mesa 3D Graphics Library developer has implemented support for CPU-based ray-tracing in Vulkan, reports Phoronix. While we applaud the effort, early testing of the driver in Quake II RTX indicates mainstream modern CPUs aren't going to convince anyone to give up their graphics card. Developer Konstantin Seurer's screenshot shows that the ray-traced version of Quake II only runs at 1 frame per second after all his Vulkan Lavapipe driver travails.

Linux developer Seurer admits his work is "mostly" based on porting code from the RADV Vulkan drivers, which were designed for owners of old and new AMD Radeon graphics cards (including emulated RT on pre-RDNA2 GPUs). The new code is implemented in Lavapipe, a CPU-based software Vulkan driver (for Mesa version 21.1 or newer). Specifically, Seurer's work supports VK_KHR_acceleration_structure, VK_KHR_deferred_host_operations, and VK_KHR_ray_query, in Lavapipe. This is enough to get real-time ray-tracing working via a CPU-based render path, but performance leaves much to be desired.

The Lavapipe: Implement VK_KHR_ray_query merge request by Seurer raises many questions. He provides evidence that CPU-based ray-tracing isn't going to scare GPU makers and their partners in 2024, but some more data would have been very welcome. It would have been more illuminating to know what kind of CPU was used in the developer's Quake II RTX test system, for example. The embedded screengrab shows the game was being played at 720p, but it could be a downsampled image. Moreover, Quake II RTX gamers have lots of settings to play with to fine-tune their experience. Adjusting levels of global illumination, texture filtering, reflection/refraction depth, sharpness, and more can all impact performance. We don't know what graphics/video settings were used in the 1 fps 'gaming' session.

While the consumer CPUs we have in 2024 might not be powerful enough for enjoyable real-time ray-traced gaming, we don't know what kind of crazy CPU power we will have access to in five or ten years. Thus, CPU-based ray-tracing support has a chance of being useful one day. We also wonder what one of the newest AMD Threadripper chips could manage using this Lavapipe Vulkan ray-tracing implementation coming to Mesa 24.1 (RC1 is due in April this year).

It's been over five years since Nvidia launched it's RTX 20-series GPUs back in 2018. There were a lot of promises made, about how ray tracing would become the next big thing for graphics. Also announced at the same times was DLSS, Deep Learning Super Sampling, an AI-trained upscaling solution that was supposed to make RT possible at decent levels of performance. Fast forward to today, and many of the best graphics cards are indeed Nvidia RTX models — just two generations on from the original, with a lot of other changes for good measure. Not only has the hardware changed, but Nvidia has now surpassed the 500 DLSS and RTX games and applications milestone.

You can see the full list — updated regularly — of all the RTX-enabled games and applications over at Nvidia. At present, there are 388 games that make use of one of the RTX features: DLSS, ray tracing, or AI. There are also 119 applications listed, so if you only care about games, Nvidia still has a long way to go before it reaches the 500 mark. There are some other interesting bits of information.

So far, only eight games have reached the holy grail of offering full ray tracing support, and two of those are basically duplicates — Cyberpunk 2077 and Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty are effectively the same listing, as are Portal RTX and Portal: Prelude RTX. Not coincidentally, three of those games (two if you don't give Phantom Liberty a second tally) are the only DLSS 3.5 Ray Reconstruction offerings so far.

By far the most abundant category is for DLSS 2 upscaling support: 375 total games and apps support the feature, of which 361 are games. Many of these also feature ray tracing support, but that number in total still only stands at 138 games and 72 applications. Also telling is that only five games had DLSS 1 support (technically there were more, but several of them were later upgraded to DLSS 2).

What about anti-aliasing without upscaling? That was originally discussed clear back in 2018, but the official feature — DLAA, or Deep Learning Anti-Aliasing — didn't show up until 2021 with The Elder Scrolls Online. There are currently 41 games with DLAA support.

Nvidia's latest AI technology is DLSS 3 Frame Generation, which requires an RTX 40-series GPU. It uses the enhanced Optical Flow Accelerator (OFA) that's part of all Ada Lovelace GPUs to run the AI workloads that generate a new frame from two fully rendered frames. It ends up being more of a frame smoothing technique, as it adds latency, but there are now 65 games and apps (four of which are apps) that support DLSS 3.

Considering we now see thousands of new games released in a year, 500+ RTX-enabled games and apps might not seem like a lot. However, we've noticed a marked increase in the number of major releases that now support one or more RTX features. It took some time, but we're finally getting to the point where ray tracing, upscaling, and even frame generation are becoming standard fare for a lot of releases.

There's also plenty of buzz about the future potential for AI to continue to enhance games. We've only really seen AI used for upscaling and image quality improvements so far, but there's a lot of experimenting going on with using AI to allow real-time generated conversations and even quests in games. And hey, maybe EA will soon allow you to play yourself (badly, we presume) in future games.

Outside of games, AI has caused a major change in content creation in just the past year or so, with Stable Diffusion, ChatGPT, speech recognition, video generation, and more. Certainly, there are concerns about what's happening in the realm of AI, and the U.S. government is working hard to limit China's access to the fastest AI hardware with its latest export restrictions — which have also extended to blocking the RTX 4090 from export to China (only about a year too late on that one).

I remember thinking back when the RTX 20-series was first revealed that the Tensor cores that were part of the new hardware might prove more important over time than the ray tracing technologies. Given everything happening right now, I'm more convinced than ever that AI will ultimately trump ray tracing in terms of usefulness. Opinions will vary, but even now, I generally find a good DLSS 2 upscaling implementation to be more important in games than ray tracing or path tracing.

So, congratulations on five years and 500 RTX-enabled games and apps, Nvidia. It's been a bit of a bumpy road at times, and the RTX 20-series certainly hasn't held up as well as some would have liked (at least with full ray tracing), but it paved the way for future architectures that are opening the door to new experiences. I can't wait to see where we are in another five years.

Finding the right graphics card for your PC involves research, along with an assessment of the things you need, not to mention your finances. We've been checking retail prices in the U.S. monthly, on all of the latest graphics cards, and we decided to take a closer look at the trends as 2023 winds down. Many of these rank among the best graphics cards, including the Nvidia RTX 40-series, AMD RX 7000-series, and Intel Arc GPUs.

Prices do fluctuate quite a bit within a month — for example, during November's Black Friday and Cyber Monday madness, we saw prices on many of these GPUs drop by up to 20%. Except, some of those "drops" were relative to pre-inflated prices from the start of November. That's just one of the many things that show up in our charts. The other major highlight is just how much RTX 4090 prices have increased in the past few months. Overall, though, we see surprising consistency in pricing on most models since June, with just a few wild swings up or down.

We have pricing tables alongside the charts below with U.S. prices as of December 1, 2023, though if you want up-to-date pricing, check our GPU price index. We've dropped Nvidia's RTX 30-series from the list, as it's mostly discontinued now (other than 3050/3060 cards). And again, note that these are retail prices for new graphics cards — we've eliminated refurbished, used, and open-box listings from consideration.

Most of the RTX 40-series pricing has been relatively static, perhaps with a very slight downward trend. The major exception is the RTX 4090, which has shot up from a low of around $1,550 back in June, to over $2,000 at present. The primary cause appears to be the U.S. export restrictions on the RTX 4090, which has caused some people to begin hoarding RTX 4090 cards — which they'll have to try to sneak into China, most likely.

This, in turn, appears to have had a slight knock-on effect where the RTX 4080 prices have increased around 10% since early November, though we did at least see some decent sales on that GPU during the Black Friday / Cyber Monday timeframe. There's also the rumored impending launch of the RTX 4080 Super, which will likely replace the vanilla 4080. So clearing out "old" inventory before that launch (likely in January) makes sense.

The RTX 4070 Ti and below are all basically flat in terms of price trends, though the 4070 Ti has dropped a bit from its $799 launch price, and the same goes for the RTX 4060 Ti. Those both had... well, let's just call them overly ambitious prices on the part of Nvidia. The Black Friday deals on several of those brought them down to where we really feel they should have stayed, but we'll have to see where the various rumored RTX 40-series Super models land. RTX 4060 has dropped $10 from its launch MSRP, with a few minor fluctuations — though note that, as with all of the least expensive GPUs, sometimes the cheapest models have worse cooling and noise characteristics.

AMD's RX 7000-series has been a bit sporadic of late, particularly on the top RTX 7900 XTX and RTX 7900 XT models. Those hit their best relative lows in October, but again we saw some good deals near the end of last month. There are rumors the RX 7900 XTX could start to see higher prices, due to the RTX 4090 shenanigans mentioned above, though so far it's at least staying below its launch MSRP. The 7900 XT meanwhile saw an upward blip at the start of November, before falling back to roughly the same price as in October — likely an attempt to make those BF/CM "deals" look more enticing.

The RX 7800 XT and RX 7700 XT have seen very little movement since they launched in mid-July. As noted at the time, the 7800 XT was the more desirable card, and with only a $50 price premium, most people should look to that GPU. This is probably why the 7700 XT has dropped $20. RX 7600 meanwhile shows the same minor blip at the start of November, but has generally been selling in the $240–$250 range.

We've split the AMD RX 6000-series into two charts, as there are so many of them available. Obviously, availability of the RX 6950 XT and RX 6900 XT has become far less predictable, and we suspect most of those were sold off during BF/CM this past month — one final hurrah for the highest performance RDNA 2 GPUs. Just in time, too, as there's not much reason to pay more for one of those GPUs when the RX 7800 XT delivers similar performance alongside some new features.

Nearly everything below the top two models has been on a steady downward trend, basically going back to last year's RDNA 3 launches. The only exception is the RX 6700 10GB, which was never widely available and now seems to be largely out of stock — Newegg no longer lists any cards, and prices are flat since last month, after increasing from August through November.

The RX 6600-class and below also saw a jump in prices between June and July, and in many cases we haven't quite matched the previous low.

Intel's Arc GPUs had some of the best deals during Black Friday, but now they're back to "normal." The Arc A750 remains an impressive deal, currently matching the newer (and slower) Arc A580 on price. The A770 8GB seems to be largely out of stock, or at least prices increased a lot since October's low of $239 — and it was briefly on sale for $199 for Black Friday. Now it costs as much as the more desirable A770 16GB, and it's hard to justify the existence of the A770 8GB when the A750 and A580 overlap it in so many ways.

As for the bottom-tier A380 (we haven't tracked the A310), we've routinely seen it selling at $100, including during much of November. But now the cheapest models are back to $120. If you're still thinking about picking up an A380, we suggest waiting for the next sale to drop it below $100. There's not much point in spending more than that when the sales are so frequent.

At an event in China earlier this week Lenovo took the wraps off its latest Legion series gaming laptop. The new Lenovo Legion 9i's claim to fame is that it includes the "thinnest water cooling in the industry." It will also be on many portable PC gaming enthusiast wish lists due to other premium components such as the Core i9-13980HX CPU and GeForce RTX 4090 GPU. 

Tech site MSPowerUser shared rendered images of the laptop in its coverage of this announcement, but VideoCardz helped make the announcement more interesting by confirming the presence of a water cooling system in this upcoming flagship, as well as unearthing a tech specs list.

According to some of the supporting presentation slides at the Lenovo Legion 9i unveiling event, the cooling system is one of the slimmest water cooling implementations yet. In some official renders we see the liquid cooling loop, various heatsinks and the position of a trio of cooling fans. It is explained that the liquid cooling isn't necessary until the GPU temperature hits 84+ degrees Celsius. After this threshold "the liquid pump starts to work quickly to reduce the GPU temperature," says a translated slide. An AI-based system is claimed to optimize the cooling / performance of this laptop.

So, the text confirms the liquid cooling and twin fans on the GPU side of the motherboard are all to keep the GPU cool, while the fan on the right will be there for the CPU. Some other information from the source asserts that Lenovo has used '3D blades' in its cooling fans and used liquid metal for its hard to beat thermal interface properties. All of this is housed in a slim 18.9mm profile, with a distinctive finish to the laptop provided by a carbon fiber material.

This new flagship gaming laptop is claimed to be destined for a fuller reveal at IFA 2023 (Sept 1 to Sept 5, in Berlin). We don't have details about pricing or release dates as yet. We hope it will be released in time to be a contender for our regularly updated Best gaming laptops of 2023 feature.

Nvidia DLSS — Deep Learning Super Sampling — has come a long way over the past five years since it was first introduced. While the deep learning aspect of the name remains, the latest iterations have focused on other techniques besides super sampling. At Gamescom 2023, Nvidia revealed DLSS 3.5 with AI-powered ray reconstruction, the newest feature under the DLSS umbrella, and it's available on all RTX GPUs, unlike DLSS 3's Frame Generation.

The Nvidia RTX GPUs are some of the best graphics cards, but if there's one thing you can count on, it's that tomorrow's games and graphics technologies will be even more demanding than current offerings. Leveraging the power of AI to reduce some of the rendering work can potentially extend the life of older GPUs. That's assuming that future games implement the new techniques, naturally.

Ray tracing remains one of the most demanding graphics rendering techniques, some would even call it the holy grail of graphics rendering. Calculating the final pixel colors based on reflections, refractions, and the physical properties of various materials takes a lot of computational power. Rather than doing ray tracing calculations on every pixel on the screen — with multiple rays per pixel — DLSS 3.5 uses AI to fill in the gaps. Nvidia calls this "ray reconstruction."

The same process can be done in other ways, via denoisers — algorithms designs to interpolate between ray traced pixels. This can be both temporal accumulation (pixels over multiple frames) or spatial interpolation (blending between neighboring pixels). In professional 3D rendering applications, you'll often see multiple passes where the initial results are a fast and approximate rendering, then as more rays are cast and the results improve, the speckled nature of the resulting view improves. DLSS 3.5 can be used in both games and applications to similar effect.

Most games with ray tracing effects already use denoisers to improve the overall quality, but just as image upscaling has benefited from deep learning, denoising can similarly benefit. Nvidia says that Ray Reconstruction has been trained to recognize different ray-traced effects, and it also leverages both temporal and spatial pixels to deliver the best result.

To demonstrate the potential of DLSS 3.5, Nvidia provided several sample slides showing the current rendering compared with DLSS 3.5's Ray Reconstruction.

Most of the DLSS 3.5 versus "standard" images should be pretty obvious about what Ray Reconstruction brings to bear, but in Portal RTX, the enhanced graphics show much smoother gradients and blending with less splotchiness.

For Cyberpunk 2077, running in RT Overdrive, there are several improvements. First, there's again an improvement in quality with less splotchiness. There are also clearer reflections, for example on the top of the vehicle, or in the puddles on the street. Without Ray Reconstruction, the (upside-down) text in the puddle ends up smeared and illegible, while with DLSS 3.5 you can make out the letters. Finally, the headlights of the car in the first image light up more distant objects like the railing, which appears to be a change facilitated by having fewer, higher quality rays plus Ray Reconstruction.

Nvidia also provided a rough performance comparison in Cyberpunk 2077 between native (DLSS off), DLSS 2 upscaled (Super Resolution), DLSS 3 (SR plus Frame Generation), and DLSS 3.5 (SR + FG + Ray Reconstruction). We were told that Cyberpunk 2077 has relatively complex denoisers normally, and DLSS 3.5 is able to replace those, resulting in the performance increase along with improved lighting quality.

Finally, as a non-gaming example of DLSS 3.5, Nvidia showed D5 Render running in full ray tracing preview mode, with and without Ray Reconstruction. On the left, the preview looks speckled and splotchy — this would improve in quality the longer you leave the camera unchanged. DLSS 3.5 meanwhile provides a much better quality result much faster.

Again, it's important to emphasize that Ray Reconstruction and DLSS 3.5 will be available on all RTX graphics cards, from the original 20-series, through the previous 30-series, and on to the current 40-series and future offerings. If you have an Nvidia RTX GPU and you run a game that supports DLSS 3.5, you can benefit from the feature.

At the same time, let's also be clear that this only benefits games that use ray tracing effects, and it also requires the games to adopt DLSS 3.5. And while DLSS 3.5 might work on all Nvidia RTX GPUs, it will provide zero benefit for AMD and Intel GPU owners. That's going to limit its appeal somewhat, but for games that are already adding DLSS 3 support — which only runs on RTX 40-series cards — this seems like it would potentially be at least as interesting as Frame Generation.

DLSS 3.5 will come out this fall, and support has already been announced for Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, Portal with RTX, and Alan Wake 2. Yeah, that's not a lot of games right now, but we expect more will be announced in the coming months. Support will also be present in Nvidia's Omniverse platform, Chaos Vantage, and D5 Render.

Nvidia also had other items of interest, though by far the most exciting will be the announcement of a community mod using RTX Remix for Half-Life 2. Don't get too excited, though, as work is only just starting. It does have support from Nvidia, though, which means the mod should eventually get finished and released rather than ending up as vaporware.

Elsewhere, Nvidia was pushing GeForce NOW Ultimate, with RTX 4080 (equivalent) SuperPods now deployed across the U.S. and Europe and supporting up to 240 fps streaming — for those who have a 240 Hz monitor but not a powerful GPU to go with it. Xbox Game Pass support is also coming to GeForce NOW, starting on August 24.

Nvidia also showed off some updates to its Avatar Cloud Engine, now with SteerLM — a language model that allows more customization in the types of responses you might get from an AI. This could be used with future games to allow NPCs to have real-time responses to human speech, or perhaps for more interesting (but still just as likely to be... questionable) ChatGPT-type sessions.

We may soon have a new contender to rival the best graphics cards. The latest rumor in China is that AMD is reportedly preparing a Radeon RX 6750 GRE with the pricing of a GeForce RTX 4060 and the performance of a GeForce RTX 4060 Ti.

The Radeon RX 7900 GRE was only the tip of the iceberg for AMD's Green Rabbit Edition (GRE) series of graphics cards. According to one Weibo user, AMD purportedly is readying to launch another GRE graphics card, except this time, the chipmaker borrowing an RDNA 2 SKU rather than using one of its latest RDNA 3 silicon. The hearsay points to a Radeon RX 6750 GRE, which could be a beefed-up version of the existing Radeon RX 6750 XT.

The tech blogger allegedly confirmed the Radeon RX 6750 GRE with the boss of Yeston, a popular manufacturer with little presence outside the Asia-Pacific region. During their conversation, Yeston was reportedly the only authorized AMD AIB partner to produce the Radeon RX 6750 GRE. The leaker didn't reveal the specifications of the Radeon RX 6750 GRE. Our only information so far is that the RDNA 2 graphics card delivers similar performance to Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4060 Ti, which retails for $399. However, the Weibo blogger claims the Radeon RX 6750 GRE will have the same $299 MSRP as the GeForce RTX 4060.

The Radeon RX 6750 XT already uses the full Navi 22 silicon, which has 2,560 Stream Processors (SPs). Assuming that the Radeon RX 6750 GRE is an upgraded variant of the Radeon RX 6750 XT, it'll likely have to come with higher clock speeds or switch to another silicon, such as Navi 21, to obtain more SPs. One plausible theory is that AMD could recycle defective Navi 21 dies that don't meet the requirements of a Radeon RX 6800 or Radeon RX 6800 XT while keeping the same number of SPs as the Radeon RX 6750 XT but upgrade the memory subsystem.

For now, it's hard to speculate which route AMD will go. With the Radeon RX 7900 GRE, the Navi 31-based SKU was fundamentally a lower-specced Radeon RX 7900 XT with fewer SPs and memory, lower clock speeds, and a narrower memory interface. The thing with the Radeon RX 6750 XT is that it's already the highest-tier Navi 21 model. Weakening the Radeon RX 6750 GRE would destroy its ability to compete with the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti.

The Radeon RX 7900 GRE is only available at retail in China. Nonetheless, the graphics card is available outside the Chinese market via prebuilt systems. We're inclined to think that the Radeon RX 6750 GRE may follow a similar route. There's no word when the Radeon RX 6750 GRE will launch. AMD will announce new "enthusiast-grade" Radeon RX 7000-series graphics cards at Gamescom 2023 between August 23 and 27. We wouldn't be surprised if AMD included the Radeon RX 6750 GRE as a side dish in its announcement.

Some would say the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16GB is the card that Nvidia and its partners don't want to see reviewed. No add-in board (AIB) partner would send us a card, and Nvidia didn't sample anyone... so we bought one, at retail, after searching for over a week to find one in stock. Is it one of the best graphics cards? You can probably already guess the answer to that question.

Based on the same Ada Lovelace architecture and with the same core specs as the RTX 4060 Ti Founders Edition, the sole difference is the use of two 2GB memory chips on each memory channel, doubling the capacity to 16GB. More memory should be good in certain workloads, though the 128-bit memory interface remains and will sometimes hold the GPU back.

More critically, tacking on $100 for the extra VRAM represents yet another cynical move from Nvidia. Yes, some people will be willing to pay the price, but Intel's Arc A770 comes in both 8GB and 16GB variants (albeit with a 256-bit interface), with about a $50 gap in pricing. Put bluntly, Nvidia charges as much as it feels it can get away with, and sometimes more.

There's no Founders Edition for the 4060 Ti 16GB, which makes the definition of a "reference" card somewhat nebulous. We figure anything available at the base $499 MSRP qualifies, and after looking at the options available at Newegg, Amazon, and elsewhere, we opted for the Gigabyte RTX 4060 Ti 16GB Gaming OC. Other MSRP models include the MSI Ventus 2X and the Zotac Amp (that's the Across the Spider-Verse bundle, in case that's a selling point for you).

Supposedly over 20 other 4060 Ti 16GB variants are available from other AIBs, but most are currently out of stock. We figured the triple fans on the Gigabyte card would provide a better overall cooling solution, so let's hit the speeds and feeds.

The RTX 4060 Ti 16GB has the same specs as the 8GB variant, other than VRAM capacity. The Gigabyte model we're using for this review gets an extra 60 MHz for its boost clock, which in practice usually won't matter much — the 4060 Ti Founders Edition averaged just under 2.8 GHz across our test suite, while the Gigabyte card was closer to 2.75 GHz. Paper specs aren't everything, in other words.

As you can imagine, there's quite a bit of healthy competition for the 4060 Ti 16GB. AMD's RX 6800 can now be picked up starting at $450, while the RX 6800 XT has frequently been on sale for $500 over the past couple of months — the cheapest price at the time of writing is $520. Previous generation RTX 3070 and RTX 3070 Ti cards also cost less than the 4060 Ti 16GB now — as they should, considering the overall performance. We'll also toss in some Intel Arc cards for the benchmarks as well, but we'll get to those in a few pages.

The bump in memory capacity will definitely help, but raw bandwidth remains a potential problem. If you're playing games that don't need or use more than 8GB of VRAM, we'd expect similar performance — with a bit of wiggle room since we're comparing a factory overclocked card to the reference models. 1440p, and especially 4K, could benefit from the extra VRAM, but Nvidia isn't marketing the RTX 4060 Ti as a 1440p or 4K gaming solution. That's probably thanks to its lack of compute and bandwidth, even though the RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3070 both targeted 1440p.

Note also that the 16GB cards, in the same power envelope, may perform slightly worse than the 8GB models. We definitely saw that in some of our benchmarks. It's not clear precisely how much power the extra memory uses, but it's more than zero watts, and that could, in some cases, reduce the maximum boost clocks. Or perhaps it's just the Gigabyte card in particular, but the difference in favor of the 8GB Founders Edition was generally in the low single-digit percentage points and was basically within the margin of error.

Here's the block diagram for the RTX 4060 Ti, along with the full AD106 chip. Nothing is changed for the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB. There's one disabled NVDEC (Nvidia Decoder) block and two disabled SMs (Streaming Multiprocessors). Manufacturing would be more complex, as GDDR6 chips need to be mounted on both sides of the PCB. That used to be relatively common, but in recent years such cards are usually professional models or "prosumer" cards like the Titan series.

All the other Ada Lovelace architectural features are present, including the heavily marketed DLSS 3 Frame Generation. If you're willing to trade latency for a bit more visual smoothness, that's what it gives you, but the performance charts with DLSS 3 enabled can be rather misleading in our experience. A 50% or larger boost in frames via DLSS 3 doesn't feel 50% faster — we'd say more like 10–20 percent at best.

Besides gaming, VRAM capacity can also be a factor in AI workloads. Many large language models (LLMs) benefit from lots of memory, and 8GB isn't enough for even "medium" sized models in many cases. I have to wonder if some of the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB scarcity at launch was from AI researchers and companies grabbing it for experimentation just because of its memory capacity. It still feels like a bit of a throwback to 2021, where GPUs just were sold out at launch, though at least now there are cards priced at MSRP.

Let's go ahead and move on to the specifics of the Gigabyte RTX 4060 Ti Gaming OC.

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Gigabyte RTX 4060 Ti 16GB Gaming OC

We purchased our RTX 4060 Ti 16GB sample at retail from Newegg. It sells at the base $499 MSRP and comes with a triple-fan cooler and a factory overclock, which we figured would represent something of a best-case scenario for performance. Whether that's correct or not, we can't say, as this is the only 4060 Ti 16GB we've tested.

There's no Founders Edition, as mentioned already, so if you're interested in the 4060 Ti 16GB, you'll have to decide from among the various AIB models. The Gaming OC comes with typical Gigabyte packaging, with no extras to speak of in the box. There's a warranty pamphlet, padding around the card itself, and that's it.

One interesting bit of detail is that the card doesn't come with plastic cling-wrap covering the surfaces. That became a trend a decade ago, a trend that Nvidia and AMD generally skip on their reference cards. The idea is to keep fingerprints off the card, we think, until the end-user has unpacked and installed the card into a PC. Some people probably love peeling it off, but we don't miss it because the card is already protected by an anti-static bag.

The box is also relatively compact for a triple-fan GPU, which means less waste packaging material for the environment. As for dimensions, the Gigabyte Gaming OC measures 281x117x52mm, so it's a 2.5-slot width. It also weighs 830g, which is relatively lightweight. The fans are 74mm in diameter and not particularly large, and they lack the integrated rims found on higher-end fans. For a 160W TGP card, the three fans should be more than sufficient, but fan RPMs will end up slightly higher due to the design.

There's very little in the way of RGB lighting on tap here, with the only lit-up portion of the card being the Gigabyte logo on top. That's perhaps to be expected from a base-price model, and some will appreciate the lack of extra lighting. Others will want to look elsewhere for an appropriately blinged-out graphics card.

As is typical these days for Nvidia's RTX 40-series cards, there are four video outputs. However, Gigabyte opts for a dual DisplayPort 1.4a and dual HDMI 2.1 configuration. DisplayPort 1.4a has a maximum data bandwidth of 25.92 Gbps, compared to HDMI 2.1's 42 Gbps (after subtracting encoding overhead), so theoretically, this is a win for higher-resolution display use. Still, both are capable of driving 4K at 240Hz with DSC (Display Stream Compression), which is what our Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 supports.

One final item of note is that Gigabyte opted for a single 8-pin power connector on top. That's plenty, and it avoids the often janky 8-pin to 16-pin adapters found on Nvidia's Founders Edition, plus many of the higher-end RTX 40-series cards. There's no need for a single 8-pin to 16-pin adapter, and we haven't really seen anything useful in terms of the four sense pins. It's good to see common sense at play here.

Gigabyte RTX 4060 Ti 16GB Overclocking 

Our overclocking process doesn't aim to fully redline the hardware, but instead looks to find "reasonably stable and safe" overclocks. We start by maxing out the power limit (using MSI Afterburner), which is 130% for the Gigabyte 4060 Ti 16GB Gaming OC — that varies by card manufacturer and model. 130% is on the higher end of what we typically see, and it does suggest that Gigabyte didn't increase the default TGP. Given that the card has twice as much memory, that might actually reduce performance at stock settings.

Next, we look for the maximum stable GPU core overclock. We were able to hit up to +225 MHz on the RTX 4060 Ti with our initial testing, but eventually settled in at +215 MHz after experiencing intermittent crashes. There's no way to increase the GPU voltage short of doing a voltage mod, which is often a limiting factor for RTX 40-series cards, and that's likely at play here.

The memory is rated for 18 Gbps, and we eventually settled in on a +1500 MHz overclock. (+1750 MHz showed display corruption followed by a game crash.) That gives a final 21 Gbps clock speed. As we've mentioned, Nvidia has error detection and retry for the VRAM, so you don't want to fully max out the memory speed. But with the 128-bit memory interface, pushing the clocks a bit higher might be beneficial.

With both the GPU and VRAM overclocks and a fan curve set to ramp from 30% at 30C up to 100% at 75C, we could run our full suite of gaming tests at 1080p and 1440p ultra without any issues. We'll include those results in the charts. Across our test suite, the manual overclock improved performance by about 8% on average.

Gigabyte RTX 4060 Ti 16GB Test Setup

We updated our GPU test PC at the end of last year with a Core i9-13900K, though we continue to also test reference GPUs on our 2022 system that includes a Core i9-12900K for our GPU benchmarks hierarchy. (We'll be updating that shortly.) Our RTX 4060 Ti 16GB review uses the 13900K results for gaming tests, which ensures, as much as possible, that we're not CPU limited. We also use the 2022 PC for AI tests and professional workloads.

Multiple games have been updated over the past few months. We tested the Gigabyte RTX 4060 Ti 16GB using Nvidia's latest 536.99 drivers, and retested the 4060 Ti 8GB Founders Edition with those same drivers for good measure. The remaining cards use the previously tested results from the past few months, though we've updated and retested every card in Minecraft.

Our current test suite consists of 15 games. Of these, nine support DirectX Raytracing (DXR), but we only enable the DXR features in six games. At the time of testing, 12 games support DLSS 2, five support DLSS 3, and five support FSR 2. We covered DLSS performance in our initial RTX 4060 Ti review, and feel those results are sufficient for the 16GB model as well.

For this review, we're adding three additional games with limited testing: F1 2023, Hogwarts Legacy, and The Last of Us: Part 1. These are all using the latest patches and drivers, and we're mostly interested in seeing if a few recent games that are generally more demanding of VRAM show larger differences in performance than our existing and somewhat older test suite.

We tested the 4060 Ti 16GB at 1080p (medium and ultra), 1440p ultra, and 4K ultra — ultra being the highest supported preset if there is one, and in some cases maxing out all the other settings for good measure (except for MSAA or super sampling). We'll only have limited commentary on the 4K results, as the 4060 Ti 16GB generally isn't intended to work well at that resolution (at least not in more demanding games).

Our PC is hooked up to a Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 32, one of the best gaming monitors around, allowing us to fully experience some of the higher frame rates that might be available. G-Sync and FreeSync were enabled, as appropriate. As you can imagine, getting anywhere close to the 240 Hz limit of the monitor proved difficult, as we don't have any esports games in our test suite.

We installed all the then-latest Windows 11 updates when we assembled the new test PC. We're running Windows 11 22H2, but we've used InControl to lock our test PC to that major release for the foreseeable future (though critical security updates still get installed monthly).

Our new test PC includes Nvidia's PCAT v2 (Power Capture and Analysis Tool) hardware, which means we can grab real power use, GPU clocks, and more during all of our gaming benchmarks. We'll cover those results on our page on power use.

Finally, because GPUs aren't purely for gaming these days, we've run some professional application tests, and we also ran some Stable Diffusion benchmarks to see how AI workloads scale on the various GPUs.

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The RTX 4060 Ti 16GB costs $499, which makes Nvidia's assertions that it's mostly for 1080p gaming somewhat ludicrous. Even accounting for inflation, $499 sits firmly in the high-end category, and as such, we'd expect it to handle 1440p gaming and even 4K at reduced settings. Saying that it's for 1080p feels more like a way to try and save face, as relative performance tends to drop off at higher resolutions thanks to the 128-bit memory interface. But let's go ahead and start with the 1080p results, with both medium and ultra settings — ultra first, considering the price of the 4060 Ti 16GB.

Our new test regimen gives us a global view of performance using the geometric mean of all 15 games, including both the ray tracing and rasterization test suites. Then we've got separate charts for the rasterization and ray tracing suites, plus charts for the individual games. If you don't like the "overall performance" chart, the other two are the same view that we've previously presented.

Our test suite is intentionally heavier on ray tracing games than what you might normally encounter. That's largely because ray tracing games tend to be the most demanding options, so if a new card can handle ray tracing reasonably well, it should do just fine with less demanding games. Ray tracing also feels increasingly like something we can expect to run well when optimized properly, and Nvidia's hardware proves that's possible. Mainstream and certainly high-end graphics cards need to be capable of running demanding settings, including ray tracing, at reasonable frame rates.

At 1080p ultra, ostensibly the target market for this card — it's the "most popular Steam gaming resolution," if such things hold any weight with you — there's little to no benefit to the extra VRAM in our test suite. That's not too surprising, as most games don't need a ton of memory at 1080p (see: Why does 4K require so much VRAM?). It doesn't matter whether we look at the rasterization or ray tracing results, either: both generally run within the margin of error on the 4060 Ti 8GB and 4060 Ti 16GB.

That's not the only takeaway, however. While the 4060 Ti 16GB card isn't clearly better (or worse) than the 8GB model, look at the other results. RTX 3070, which was originally a $499 card, delivers effectively the same level of performance. That's over 2.5 years later with no increase in performance (unless you include DLSS 3 Frame Generation, which is a different can of worms). The RX 6800, which now starts at around $450, also keeps pace, even with a lot of DXR testing included, and the RX 6800 XT, which only costs a bit more at $520, delivers superior performance.

There are workloads besides 1080p gaming, some of which can make use of the extra VRAM. They will mostly be special cases, however, rather than the rule. Gaming, in general, needs more than just 16GB of VRAM — if VRAM is a factor, then so is memory bandwidth and compute, and the 4060 Ti is somewhat lacking in both those areas.

Looking just at the nine rasterization games, the overall Nvidia versus Nvidia story doesn't change: The 4060 Ti 16GB card basically matches the 8GB variant, as well as the previous generation RTX 3070. Meanwhile, the Nvidia versus AMD story skews in favor of the red team.

The RX 6800 delivers 11% better rasterization performance overall, while the RX 6800 XT increases that to 26%. That's a pretty huge difference, and yes, the AMD cards do use quite a bit more power to get there. How important is efficiency compared to performance, though? That's more of a personal decision, and plenty of gamers would accept worse efficiency for more performance.

As for the individual game results, the 8GB model often beats the 16GB card by up to a few percent. That's probably due to variance between the card models, boost clocks, power limits, and increased VRAM — the same L2 cache size with double the VRAM may end up with slightly lowered hit rates. But it's all basically margin of error.

With AMD GPUs, there's a much wider level of variance among the games. Total War: Warhammer 3 ends up as the best result for the 4060 Ti 16GB: it's only 11% slower than the 6800 XT. We could also include Flight Simulator, but that's still hitting CPU limits and so the 3% difference isn't particularly meaningful. Elsewhere, AMD's GPU is up to 55% faster in Borderlands 3, which is a long-standing trend for that AMD-promoted game.

Naturally, the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB improves its relative standings with ray tracing games, at least relative to AMD GPUs. But the 8GB card and RTX 3070 are still equivalent in performance, while the 3070 Ti comes out slightly ahead. For AMD, the 4060 Ti delivers 5% better performance overall than the 6800 XT and 22% better performance than the vanilla RX 6800.

Turning to the individual game charts, there's a wide range of relative performance when looking at AMD and Nvidia GPUs. The 4060 Ti 16GB only beats the RX 6800 by 3.5% in Metro Exodus Enhanced, 7.7% in Spider-Man: Miles Morales, and 6.9% in Control Ultimate Edition. But then you get stuff like the Bright Memory Infinite Benchmark, where Nvidia is 24% faster, Cyberpunk 2077, where it's 37% faster, and Minecraft, where the gap is a whopping 65%.

We should note that we have retested all of the GPUs in Minecraft for this review. Long story short, we found that vsync was still not fully disengaged even though forced off in the various driver options. Actually, Intel Arc doesn't have a "vsync off" option, with Smooth Sync being the closest alternative. But if you manually edit the configuration file (located in %LocalAppData%\Packages\Microsoft.MinecraftUWP_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalState\games\com.mojang\minecraftpe, open the options.txt file) and change gfx_vsync from 1 to 0, you can force it off.

We found that Minecraft performance improved by about 5–10 percent for AMD GPUs, around 20 percent for Nvidia GPUs, and 50–100 percent for Intel Arc GPUs. So, Intel benefited the most, but this also affected the other cards. If you don't play Minecraft and don't care about its full ray tracing graphics, the DXR gap narrows quite a bit.

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Dropping to 1080p medium settings means the CPU and other system bottlenecks will become more of a factor, and of course, the added VRAM on the 4060 Ti 16GB really won't help here. These results are more for completeness than because we feel they're super important, so we'll limit our commentary.

As expected, the 4060 Ti 16GB and 8GB again deliver equivalent results, with the RTX 3070 dropping just slightly behind them. That's probably because the larger L2 cache on the 4060 Ti has even better hit rates when running lighter workloads, thus improving overall throughput.

AMD's RX 6800 is also right in the same ballpark overall, while the 6800 XT delivers 9% more performance overall. Let's move on to the rasterization and ray tracing suites for additional detail.

As we saw at 1080p ultra, AMD also holds an advantage at 1080p medium. The 6800 is 10% faster than the 4060 Ti 16GB, while the 6800 XT delivers 19% better performance — both of those margins are lower than what we saw at ultra settings, as other factors start limiting performance.

Looking just at the 6800 XT, since it's the closest competitor to the 4060 Ti 16GB, the performance advantage here ranges from 8% (Flight Simulator, Warhammer 3) to as much as 34% (Borderlands 3). The AMD lead in a few games, like Watch Dogs Legion, shrank a lot compared to ultra settings, though A Plague Tale: Requiem did increase AMD's lead to 30%. (That and Flight Simulator are the only two games where 1080p favored AMD more than 1080p ultra.)

Ray tracing still favors Nvidia GPUs, though overall, it's a margin of error (3%) difference between the RX 6800 XT and the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB. Nvidia does claim that win, thanks in particular to Minecraft, where it still holds on to a 34% lead — the other five games are less than a 10% lead for Nvidia, with half of the games favoring AMD's GPU.

There's still the matter of upscaling and DLSS, which skews things far more in favor of the Nvidia GPUs. Even if FSR2 could deliver equivalent quality (it doesn't), DLSS upscaling support is more prevalent, particularly in ray tracing games. Thankfully, the majority of new releases that support ray tracing also have FSR2 and even XeSS support, in addition to DLSS and DLSS 3.

Anyway, that's enough of 1080p testing. Let's see what happens at higher resolutions.

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In theory, the move to 1440p ultra should help the 16GB RTX 4060 Ti to strut its stuff. Except, it still has that 128-bit memory interface, which means maybe there's not as much strutting to be had. Let's start with the high-level overview.

Hrmph. So much for the benefits of 16GB, right? Except, it's more a case of there not being much benefit in our particular suite of benchmarks. There are some instances where the 16GB card clearly beats the 8GB model, but when you average that out across 15 games, it's not as visible.

Overall, then, the 16GB and 8GB 4060 Ti are still tied. Interestingly, the RTX 3070 goes from being just slightly behind the 4060 Ti to just slightly ahead. They're still tied, but that does show that the 128-bit interface isn't helping. Less cache with a 256-bit interface, even when paired with an older architecture that offers 10% lower theoretical compute, clearly indicates raw memory bandwidth is at least partially to blame for the lackluster performance.

Against AMD, things are also worse. While the 4060 Ti (both variants) and the 6800 are basically still tied, there's an overall swing again from the 6800 being a couple of percent slower to now being a couple of percent faster. And Nvidia certainly gets help from the ray tracing results, which means there are cases where the 6800 offers a lot better performance at 1440p in rasterization games. The 6800 XT meanwhile improves from a 13% lead at 1080p ultra to a 19% lead at 1440p ultra.

Rasterization performance still looks basically the same when comparing the 8GB and 16GB models — even the 1% low average fps doesn't really differ much. The 16GB 4060 Ti was slower in a few tests and slightly faster in others, leading to a 0.1% difference in overall performance for the nine rasterization games. For the 1% lows, the 16GB does manage a 2.2% overall lead, mostly thanks to a few games in our suite that benefited from the extra VRAM.

Forza Horizon 5 and Horizon Zero Dawn both had 4–5 percent higher minimum (1% low) fps, while the biggest swing was in Watch Dogs Legion, where the 16GB card had 12% higher minimum fps. All of those games were still hanging out above 60 fps average performance, while the minimum fps in Watch Dogs Legion went from 52 to 58 fps — which means it was still dropping below 60 fps on occasion, and for fixed refresh rate displays, you'd want a bit more muscle.

While on the subject of Nvidia GPUs, let's also mention the RTX 4070 here. Its 12GB of VRAM on a 192-bit interface, coupled with higher compute performance, ends up being a far better option unless VRAM capacity is your sole goal. Even at 1080p, it's around 20–30 percent faster than the 4060 Ti 16GB. If you're even considering spending $100 extra to go from 8GB to 16GB with an otherwise equivalent GPU, you'd be much better off forking over another $100 to go from the 16GB card to the RTX 4070. Or alternatively, look to the AMD GPUs.

At 1440p ultra, the RX 6800 XT and RTX 4070 are basically tied in rasterization performance, and both are over 30% faster than the RTX 4060 Ti 16TGB. If you want an Nvidia GPU, paying more for the 4070 still represents the better choice: 32% more performance for 20% more money. If you're open to AMD, you can get 36% more performance at 1440p while only paying about 4% extra (at current prices).

Among the individual games, the AMD 6800 XT ranges from being 13% faster (Warhammer 3) to as much as 60% faster (Borderlands 3). Those are the bookends, but for rasterization games, AMD consistently offers 30% or more performance (outside of Warhammer 3, the only exception in our testing). Having lots of VRAM, a big L3 cache, and a 256-bit interface helps quite a bit, in other words.

Ray tracing at 1440p ultra still favors Nvidia over AMD, however, if that's important to you. It's a relatively slim advantage when looking at the 4060 Ti and 6800 XT, still skewed by Minecraft, where Nvidia holds a 27% lead. Otherwise, you get a generally superior experience from AMD — slightly slower in some games, but faster in others.

Of course, there's still the question of power use, and there's no getting around the fact that the 6800 XT uses quite a bit more power than the 4060 Ti 16GB — roughly 100W more. And there's also still DLSS upscaling and Frame Generation to consider. Still, the 4060 Ti 16GB costs too much for the amount of performance you get.

Again, looking at the previous generation RTX 3070, there's been no gain in performance per dollar at 1440p, whether in ray tracing or rasterization. Frame Generation can help, but it's by no means a panacea. If you already have a mid-tier 30-series GPU and don't want to move up to the more expensive 40-series models, this looks like yet another good generation to sit out.

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Nvidia doesn't market the RTX 4060 Ti as a 4K gaming solution, not even the 16GB model. That's because performance really isn't sufficient. But if you want proof that 16GB is better than 8GB while using the same GPU? Well, we finally have some good news.

Hoorah! Look at that gap! The 4060 Ti 16GB can now spread its VRAM-laden wings and soar to a whopping 5% lead over the 8GB card. Even better, both models have dropped to just under 30 fps average across our test suite. (That's all sarcasm, if it's not clear.)

It would be interesting to see what a wider memory interface would have done for the 4060 Ti, but that obviously didn't happen. What we do know is that even the RX 6800 now pulls ahead of the 4060 Ti 16GB by 5%, the 6800 XT increases the lead to 22%, and if you want to stick with Nvidia GPUs, the RTX 4070 delivers 36% more performance overall. So, 12GB with more compute and a 192-bit interface beats 16GB with less compute and a 128-bit interface. None of that should be a surprise.

There's no good way around this. The 4060 Ti doesn't have the raw compute or memory bandwidth to really handle 4K gaming on recent releases. It's fractionally faster than the RTX 3070, at least, as that GPU also has to try and survive with 8GB of VRAM, but the one place where the extra memory helps most (in gaming, at least) is the place where the GPU proves inadequate.

For our rasterization suite, other than the increasing leads delivered by the AMD GPUs — the RX 6750 XT now manages to match the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB while costing about $150 less — the extra memory still didn't help much in most of these games, at the chosen settings. Far Cry 6, Forza Horizon 5, and Watch Dogs Legion are the only three games that showed even slightly more than the margin of error (3% or less) gains from the doubled VRAM.

Though I will say, Far Cry 6, in particular, can have wild swings in benchmark performance at 4K ultra on cards with 8GB. It's consistently inconsistent at these unless you have 10GB or more VRAM. We had runs of around 10 fps, runs of around 20 fps, and occasional runs of the indicated 52 fps. Which is "correct?" All of them, but other GPUs with 8GB don't seem to have these issues (for example, Intel's Arc A750, usually runs about the same, even at 4K). It's probably due to the DX12 memory management, where the code doesn't always work well at these settings.

The RX 6800 XT now delivers 41% higher rasterization performance, if you're keeping score. About half of the games can break 60 fps on that GPU at 4K, while only one game (Forza) gets there, barely, on the 4060 Ti 16GB. The RX 6800 lead likewise grows, this time to 22%. And if you look to the RTX 4070, it's 36% faster now — 12GB is generally still sufficient for 4K, in other words.

4K ultra with ray tracing generally isn't viable on any of these GPUs. Even the RTX 4070 only averaged 25 fps, with two games squeaking past the 30 fps mark. The 4060 Ti 16GB flounders along at 19 fps, 9% faster than the 8GB cards at 17 fps. AMD's alternatives are equally bad choices, with 15 fps from the 6800 and 18 fps from the 6800 XT.

4K resolution gaming, on mainstream to high-end GPUs, with all the ray tracing effects enabled? Yeah, this is prime upscaling territory. DLSS, FSR2, and XeSS aren't just nice extras if you want 4K output (potentially with artifacts). But honestly, if you're not pixel peeping, you can do Performance mode 4x upscaling (from 1080p) and generally be happy. That's the only way consoles generally manage 4K output, and even then, they're often targeting 30 fps rather than 60 fps.

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So far, the additional VRAM hasn't proven to be particularly helpful on the RTX 4060 Ti. But all the games in our standard benchmark suite are at least a year old, sometimes three or four years old. What about more modern games?

To check this, we picked three relatively recent releases: F1 2023, Hogwarts Legacy, and The Last of Us: Part 1. None of these are brand-spanking new, which was intentional. At launch, we've seen many cases over the past year or so where the launch performance of a new release was terrible, and future patches fixed things up quite a bit. But Hogwarts and The Last of Us at least still have a reputation for wanting more than 8GB of VRAM at maxed-out settings.

These three games have slightly different takes on graphics settings and APIs as well. For example, F1 2023 supports several ray tracing effects but doesn't enable them on the medium preset — only on ultra. Hogwarts Legacy has several ray tracing effects as well, but the presets never enable them. We opted to turn them all on, with lighting set to "medium" or "ultra" as appropriate. Finally, The Last of Us has no ray tracing effects and is an AMD-sponsored game. We also confined our testing to just six GPUs (RTX 4070, 4060 Ti 16GB, 4060 Ti 8GB from Nvidia, and RX 6800 XT, 6800, and 6750 XT for AMD).

We'll do a gallery of the benchmarks from each game, so swipe through the images to see the results at the various settings/resolutions.

F1 2023 mostly echoes what we saw in our primary gaming tests. For reference, we tested on the Australia track, in the rain, for one loop of the track (130 seconds).

At 1080p, the extra VRAM does basically nothing — the 4060 Ti 8GB slightly outperforms the 16GB model, possibly due to differences in card design, power, or other factors. At 1440p, the 16GB card at least gains a slight lead in 1% lows, and finally, at 4K, it ends up delivering 15% higher performance.

As before, the RTX 4070 represents a relatively large step up in performance, with about 30% higher performance than the 4060 Ti at ultra settings. 1080p medium is closer, but both GPUs are breaking 200 fps there.

Against AMD, the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB universally falls behind the 6800 XT: It's 23% slower at 1080p medium, and then about 6–7 percent slower at ultra settings with ray tracing. (Side note: The ray tracing in F1 2023 doesn't seem to be particularly impressive, at least based on what I've seen so far, but maybe other tracks would put it in a better... um... light.) The RX 6800 was still about 10% faster at 1080p medium, but the 4060 Ti 16GB takes a 7–12 percent lead in the ultra tests. The RTX 4060 Ti 16GB also has substantially better 1% lows when using the ultra preset.

Hogwarts Legacy can be a bit finicky about the settings you use. It explicitly warned us when it felt we exceeded settings that were viable for our hardware, which basically meant all of the ultra tests with maxed-out ray tracing effects were concerned with our choices. And for good reason.

At 1080p medium — with RT reflections, RT shadows, and RT ambient occlusion, plus the overall RT quality set to medium — there was again no real difference between the 16GB and 8GB RTX 4060 Ti. Bumping up to ultra settings, with RT quality also set to ultra, was a different matter.

You might look at the charts and think, "Big deal, a 2% or 8% difference." Except, on the RTX 4060 Ti 8GB card, we experienced repeated game crashes. 1080p ultra often allowed us to complete one or two benchmark runs (running a circuit through Hogsmeade village) before dumping us to the desktop. At 1440p ultra, the crashes were so frequent as to make the game utterly unplayable.

For the AMD GPUs, the RX 6800 XT basically tied the 4060 Ti 16GB — slightly higher average fps, lower 1% lows at ultra settings. Meanwhile, the vanilla 6800 ended up trailing the RTX 4060 Ti by 11–15 percent, depending on the resolution and settings.

Curiously, even the RTX 4070 crashed at 1440p ultra. The RX 6750 XT, also with 12GB VRAM, didn't have that problem. Regardless, VRAM clearly matters for this game, particularly if you're trying to run maxed-out settings. It may not directly boost performance all that much, but cards with less than 12GB VRAM were unstable.

The Last of Us: Part I wraps up our bonus coverage, with a game that's widely "known" to need a lot of VRAM. Except, more recent patches seem to have curtailed the demands somewhat. The initial launch (on a "new" GPU) still takes a long time to compile all the shaders, probably around 10 minutes on the Nvidia GPUs and 15–20 minutes on the AMD GPUs. I would literally launch the game and walk away while I waited for the shader compilation to finish.

For testing, I ran a circuit around an area with a pond (on the way to the city with Ellie and Tess), as that seemed to be fairly demanding and was also void of creatures that could cause variation between benchmark runs.

At 1080p and 1440p, the benefits of 16GB versus 8GB on the 4060 Ti are again negligible. 4K shows an 18% gain in average fps, and 1% lows are up to 50% better... but neither card delivers a great experience at 4K ultra, with performance in the mid-to-low 20s. The RTX 4070 manages to clear 30 fps, which means it's playable even if it's not 60+ fps.

AMD's GPUs, meanwhile, completely demolish the Nvidia options. The RX 6800 XT is about 45% faster than the 4060 Ti 16GB, with 1% lows showing similar gains (give or take — it's a 37–52 percent spread, though 1% lows tend to be far more variable to begin with). The RX 6800 likewise beats the 4060 Ti 16GB by around 25%. Even the RX 6750 XT generally matches or exceeds the performance of the Nvidia card.

Obviously, there's more going on here than just VRAM. As an AMD-promoted game, it's not too shocking to see better performance on AMD GPUs than on Nvidia. The question is why there's such a gap, and we're not certain what the game is doing internally that favors AMD this much. But we've seen similar results elsewhere (i.e. Borderlands 3).

Recent Games Summary

Bottom line: Even in more recent games, it's hard to make a compelling case for the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB. It's never substantially worse than the 8GB model, but it's also not usually all that superior at settings and resolutions that make sense. The biggest differences inevitably come at 4K, but often with both GPUs running at unacceptably low framerates.

Could there be other games, or future games, where the extra VRAM proves more useful? Perhaps, but as usual, tuning your settings generally proves more important than VRAM capacity. Simply maxing out every setting in order to go beyond 8GB of VRAM use is possible, but at 1440p and especially 1080p in recent games — which is where a GPU with this level of performance belongs — there's not a massive benefit to having the extra memory.

Let's move on to the non-gaming tests.

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Nvidia RTX 4060 Ti 16GB AI Performance

GPUs are also used with professional applications, AI training and inferencing, and more. Along with our usual professional tests, we've added Stable Diffusion benchmarks on the various GPUs. AI is a fast-moving sector, and it seems like 95% or more of the publicly available projects are designed for Nvidia GPUs. Those Tensor cores aren't just for DLSS, in other words. Let's start with our AI testing and then hit the professional apps.

We're using Automatic1111's Stable Diffusion version for the Nvidia cards, while for AMD we're using a recent Nod.ai Shark variant — we retested the AMD cards for this review using build version 20230713_819 for testing, as results have improved substantially compared to our previous testing. The Nvidia GPUs were tested after replacing the default CUDA DLL files with newer versions, as recommended by Nvidia.

Intel meanwhile has finally added an OpenVINO fork of Automatic1111's webui, which shows about a 50% improvement over our previous testing. Except, we had to run with the Stable Diffusion v1.5 model as the v2.1 model (base and otherwise) didn't work or generated garbage outputs. Also, going beyond a 720x720 resolution on the A770 16GB card resulted in various problems (this is a known issue), so we still don't have 768x768 results for Intel's GPUs.

While the AMD and Intel GPUs improved in performance, the overall standings remain unchanged. Nvidia's RTX GPUs rank at the top, with the Arc A770 16GB landing just behind the 4060 Ti now, and AMD's GPUs occupy the bottom portion of the charts. Note that we haven't seen any major improvements in Nvidia GPU performance since our previous testing, so other than adding tests with the 16GB card, those results haven't changed.

As we saw with many of the gaming benchmarks, the new 4060 Ti 16GB often falls behind its 8GB sibling. Whether that's due to the difference in cards, VBIOS, VRAM, or something else isn't clear. We'll see on the next page that, despite the higher boost clocks on specs, the Gigabyte card actually runs at generally lower clocks than the 4060 Ti Founders Edition, and that could explain the minor gap in performance.

There are other AI workloads, some that utilize very large LLMs (Large Language Models). ChatGPT and its ilk for example need hundreds of gigabytes of memory. Locally running chatbots meanwhile often have to sacrifice quality due to VRAM constraints. It's harder to quantify how much doubling the VRAM can help, but the 16GB card at least has the option to use larger models. That's a pretty niche market, but if you want an Nvidia card with 16GB or more VRAM, most other qualifying GPUs cost twice as much as the 4060 Ti 16GB.

Nvidia RTX 4060 Ti 16GB Professional Workloads

SPECviewperf 2020 v3 consists of eight different benchmarks, and we use the geometric mean from those to generate an aggregate score. Note that this is not an official score, but it gives equal weight to the individual tests and provides a nice high-level overview of performance. Few professionals will use all these programs, however, so it's often more important to look at the results for the application(s) you plan to use.

Nvidia's RTX 4060 Ti 16GB generally matches the 8GB, as expected. There's one instance where the added memory does seem to help: 3dsmax-07 has the 16GB card performing 16.5% better than the 8GB card. Most of the remaining tests slightly favor the 8GB model, due once again presumably to the slightly higher boost clocks. Generationally, it's also worth noting that the RTX 3070 still typically beats both 4060 Ti variants.

If you're looking to use consumer hardware on these apps, AMD's GPUs generally provide a much better value. They likely wouldn't match actual professional GPUs running the pro / Studio drivers in some tests (i.e. something like the AMD Radeon Pro W7600), but there's not a single case where the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB can beat the RX 6750 XT, never mind the RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT.

Moving on to 3D rendering, Blender repeats the same story we've seen throughout this review. The RTX 4060 Ti 16GB comes in slightly behind the 8GB card, though this time it's at least able to surpass the RTX 3070 by 10%, and it's 2.35 times as fast as the RX 6800 XT. As good as the AMD GPUs look in SPECviewperf, then, they look equally poor in Blender.

Our final two professional applications only support ray tracing hardware on Nvidia's GPUs. OctaneBench puts the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB a few percent behind the 8GB card as well as just behind the RTX 3070, yet again. V-ray on the other hand shows some performance gains using the RTX path, where the 16GB card is 8% faster than the 8GB card. That doesn't apply when using the CUDA path, however.

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Our new test PC uses an Nvidia PCAT v2 device, and we've switched from the Powenetics hardware and software we've previously used to PCAT, as it gives us far more data without the need to run separate tests. PCAT with FrameView allows us to capture power, temperature, and clocks from our full gaming suite. The charts are the geometric mean across all 15 games, though we'll also have full tables showing the individual results — some games are more taxing than others, as you'd expect.

If you're wondering: No, PCAT does not favor Nvidia GPUs in any measurable way. We checked power with our previous setup for the same workload and compared that with the PCAT, and any differences were well within the margin of error (less than 1%).

We have separate charts for 1080p ultra, 1080p medium, 1440p ultra, and 4K ultra. Besides the power testing, we also check noise levels using an SPL meter. This is done at a distance of 10cm in order to minimize noise pollution from other sources (like the CPU cooler).

Starting with power consumption, the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB and 8GB models both have a 160W TGP (Total Graphics Power) rating. However, on average, the 16GB card tends to consume about 10W more power — 9W at 1080p, 7W at 1440p, and 11W at 4K if you want to be specific. While it still fell under the 160W mark in aggregate, being closer to that limit likely restricts the amount of boost clock headroom and would explain the frequent 1–3 percent drop in performance we measured in our various tests.

Using slightly more power than the 8GB card is expected behavior, and the overall standings in terms of efficiency clearly favor Nvidia's RTX 40-series over the competition. The RX 6800 XT might have a similar retail price now, while delivering superior performance (outside of a few ray tracing games), but it also consumes 130W more power on average. That could potentially sway your purchasing decision, as the added power also means you need a bigger PSU.

The cost of the added power use in electrical bills can also add up. If you play games a lot, like 40 hours a week, that 130W difference equates to 270 kWh. Some people pay around $0.10 per kWh, so $27 per year. Other areas may pay as much as $0.30 per kWh, and in Europe, people could pay $0.50 per kWh. $135 extra in power per year could justify stepping up to an RTX 4070 instead of an RX 6800 XT, as an example. But at the lower end of the scale, and if you only average 20 hours per week, it's not critical: $13.50 per year at $0.10 per kWh.

As you can see in the tables further down the page, power use while gaming on the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB ranged from just under 120W (1080p in Spider-Man: Miles Morales) to a high of just under 170W (A Plague Tale: Requiem). The overclocking results are also interesting, in that we saw an average performance improvement of around 9%, while power use only increased by about 5%.

In terms of efficiency (FPS/W), the 4060 Ti 16GB looks pretty good, but the 8GB card does better as it was typically slightly faster while using less power. AMD's previous generation GPUs are, as expected, far behind in the efficiency metric.

GPU clock speed comparisons aren't a major concern, unless you're comparing the same architecture and even the same core GPU. Here, the Nvidia RTX 4060 Ti Founders Edition averaged about 65 MHz higher clocks than the Gigabyte RTX 4060 Ti 16GB Gaming OC across our testing suite. That's in spite of the fact that the official boost clock of the Gigabyte card is 2595 MHz, while the Founders Edition has a 2535 MHz official spec.

There's variation among the individual games, but nothing too significant. The lowest average clock we saw across any of the tested settings and games was 2644 MHz (4K in Cyberpunk 2077), while the highest clock was 2745 MHz (Forza Horizon 5 at 1080p Extreme settings). This does imply that Gigabyte has implemented a hard limit at stock settings that are lower than the limit of the Founders Edition card.

Overclocking, as you might expect, helps a lot. The Gigabyte card didn't ever break the 3.0 GHz barrier, but it came close, averaging 2,957 MHz at 1080p and 1440p ultra settings.

With triple fans and a 160W TGP, temperatures are also generally good. Of course, we still need to factor in noise levels, but at stock, we saw average temperatures of around 60C, with the highest result being 63.3C (Borderlands 3 at 1440p Badass settings). Our overclocking temperatures were lower, as we used a more aggressive fan speed curve.

While the Gigabyte card's temperatures are good, it's worth pointing out yet again that the Nvidia RTX 4060 Ti Founders Edition did slightly better. It's only a 1–2 degrees Celsius delta, but let's check the noise levels before drawing any final conclusions about the cooling performance...

Gigabyte's RTX 4060 Ti 16GB Gaming OC does decently well in our noise testing. It's not the quietest card around, and the 4060 Ti Founders Edition still beats it by 1.5 dB(A), but considering there are three fans all on the same side of the card, compared to two fans on opposite sides with the Founders Edition, the results are good.

Good, but not exceptional. The AMD RX 6800 XT reference card has lower noise levels thanks to its thicker cooler. Nvidia's 40-series Founders Edition cards, along with the Sapphire RX 6700 10GB, also have lower noise footprints. Considering the 6700 10GB also uses about 30W more power, that means Gigabyte's competitor is able to do better with two fans and more heat than Gigabyte can do with three fans. But it's still sufficient for most people.

For reference, we run Metro Exodus Enhanced for our noise testing, as it's one of the more power hungry games, and let it sit for at least 15 minutes before checking noise levels. We place the SPL (sound pressure level) meter 10cm from the card, with the mic aimed at the center of the middle fan (or the back fan if there are only two). This helps minimize the impact of other noise sources, like the fans on the CPU cooler. The noise floor of our test environment and equipment is around 31–32 dB(A).

We also test with a static fan speed of 75%, and the Gigabyte RTX 4060 Ti 16GB generated 54.4 dB(A) of noise. That means there's plenty of headroom for additional cooling, should you want to engage in some manual overclocking.

Here's the full rundown of all of our test results, including performance per watt and performance per dollar columns. The prices are based on the best retail price we could find for a new card — which can change rapidly on now-discontinued parts like the RTX 30-series. (This doesn't include used cards on eBay, incidentally.)

You'll be absolutely shocked to discover that, based on our testing and among the twelve candidate cards used for this review, the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB delivers the worst value of all the GPUs. Makes you wonder why Nvidia and its partners didn't want to seed reviewers and influencers with the part, right? The best value of these cards is the RTX 4060, with the discounted RTX 3060 Ti right behind it. Costlier GPUs normally deliver worse values, but in this case, even the RTX 4070 beats the 4060 Ti 16GB.

But talking about value while only looking at FPS/$ from the GPU doesn't really tell the whole picture. You have to factor in what resolution and settings you use, power requirements, the cost of the rest of your PC, the games you play, and any extra features as well. Still, even at 4K, doubling the VRAM for an extra $100 represents a questionable choice.

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If there's one GPU to sum up Nvidia's RTX 40-series so far, it's the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB. Nvidia knew it wouldn't perform that well and that the extra VRAM was of questionable value. It said as much. But people have been complaining about the lack of VRAM on Nvidia GPUs, and so it attempted to address this by doubling the capacity to 16GB.

The problem, as we've reiterated throughout this review, is that VRAM capacity is only half of the equation. With the same amount of L2 cache and the same 128-bit interface, raw bandwidth remains a concern, and there are only select situations in which the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB can clearly surpass the existing 8GB card. If you happen to need a card specifically for one of those edge cases — for example, you want to run an LLM that requires more than 12GB but less than 16GB of VRAM — it might be worth purchasing. For everyone else, there are plenty of better options.

AMD's RX 6800 and 6800 XT generally win out on performance, especially if you don't intend to enable ray tracing in the games that support it. Even Nvidia's previous generation RTX 3070 basically matches the 4060 Ti 16GB, and it's now on clearance starting at $379 (though we don't expect that to last).

If you're not happy about the level of performance offered by the RTX 4060 Ti 8GB, spending $100 more to get double the VRAM isn't a good move. You'd be much better off moving up to the RTX 4070, as it hits the middle ground with 50% more memory and L2 cache, but also higher memory clocks give it 75% more bandwidth. Then for good measure, you also get a 32% boost in computational performance.

Does that make the 4060 Ti 16GB a horrible card? Not really. It's just overpriced for what you get, much like most of the rest of Nvidia's current RTX 40-series lineup. Decisions were made two or three years ago about what features and specs would deliver the most value — to Nvidia — and this is what we got.

Shift everything down a pricing bracket, and the Ada generation would be much better. RTX 4060 for $249 as a 3050 replacement, 4060 Ti 8GB at $299 to replace the 3060, 4060 Ti 16GB at $349, and so on. But that's not likely to happen, especially not when Nvidia can sell as many H100 GPUs at 1000% profit margins as it can produce. Even a $50 price cut would make this card more worthy of consideration, but it still feels like this should have been the 3060 Ti replacement at $399, rather than having that slot filled by an 8GB card with half the bus width of the previous generation.

Nvidia has put a lot of marketing effort into DLSS 3 and Frame Generation to try to improve the overall story. It's an interesting feature, for sure, from a technical view. But it's not without drawbacks. It needs Reflex to make it at all palatable, but you still get better responsiveness and latency by leaving Reflex enabled and turning Frame Generation off. Even if every game you want to play supports DLSS 3, the experiential benefits are more like 10–20 percent rather than the 40–100 percent increases in FPS that you'll see in Nvidia's performance slides.

The further along we get with the RTX 40-series, the more it feels like a generation that most people can skip if their current GPU isn't too old. The RTX 4090 is a great halo product, but every step down from there has been mediocre compared to the previous generation. With the 4060 Ti, we now get the choice of $399 for slightly better than RTX 3060 Ti performance (not counting DLSS 3), or $499 with double the VRAM but only similar performance to the RTX 3070. About the best thing going for the GPU market right now is that cryptocurrency mining hasn't made a comeback.

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If you're on the hunt for a powerful gaming laptop with some of the most recent hardware inside, then consider the Lenovo Legion 5i gaming laptop that's on sale for $1,249 at B&H Photo. Reduced from $1,799, this Gen 8 variant of the Legion 5i contains a 13th Gen Intel Core i7-13700HX 16-core processor, 32GB of DDR5 RAM, and Nvidia's RTX 4060 GPU which help to power the blisteringly fast 2560 x 1600 QHD screen with 240Hz refresh rate. 

A favorite keyboard amongst professional typists and productivity users, the full-sized Logitech MX Mechanical wireless keyboard is down to $139, the cheapest it's ever been on Amazon. With proximity-based reactive lighting and good battery life over Bluetooth, the Logitech MX Mechanical also features tactile mechanical keys that have been quietened slightly to help keep the noise down in your work environment. 

One of the best deals on this fairly recently released GPU sees the XFX Speedster SWFT210 AMD Radeon RX 7600 GPU reduced to $257 at Best Buy. Not requiring any mail-in rebates, this deal has a small $12 reduction off of its usual retail price. Classified as a budget 1080p GPU even though it's still over $250, the RX 7600 offers 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM, a 2.66GHz boost clock speed, and a modest 165-watt TDP.

Keep scrolling for more of today's Real Deals.

TL;DR — Today’s Best Deals

• Lenovo Legion 5i Gaming Laptop (13700H/RTX 4060): now $1,249 at B&H (was $1,799)
• Logitech MX Mechanical Wireless Full-Sized Keyboard: now $139 at Amazon (was $169)
• XFX Speedster SWFT210 AMD Radeon RX 7600 GPU: now $257 at Best Buy (was $269)
• Intel 670p Series M.2 2280 1TB SSD: now $34 at Amazon (was $39)
• Solidigm P44 Pro 1TB SSD: now $54 at Newegg with promo code (was $79)

Today’s best deals in detail

Looking for more deals?

Asus has started to sell some of the best graphics cards under the company's Tianxuan (Heavenly Chosen) portfolio. Marketed under the TX Gaming moniker, the new trio of graphics cards encompasses the GeForce RTX 4070, GeForce RTX 4060 Ti, and GeForce RTX 4060.

The Tianxuan series may be new to some since it's one of Asus' China-exclusive sub-brands. The company has launched many gaming laptops from the Tianxuan series but is extending the product portfolio to graphics cards, specifically the GeForce RTX 40-series parts.

The TX Gaming graphics cards spit images of Asus' Atlas Shark (Megalodon) series. They're using the same cooler but with a different color theme. While the Atlas Shark series cooler stick to a black and grey combination, the TX Gaming series arrives with a white and grey theme with teal accents. There aren't any visible changes to the cooling solution. It's still a thick shroud with three axial, dual-ball bearing cooling fans. The graphics cards also have a reinforced metal backplate that helps with cooling.

Regardless of the model, the TX Gaming graphics card measures 12.48 x 5.35 x 2.13 inches (317 x 136 x 54mm), so we're looking at a triple-slot design. The size of the cooler seems a bit overkill for the lower-tier SKUs, such as the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti (160W) or GeForce RTX 4060 (115W). However, it looks like Asus didn't want to waste resources redesigning the cooler for each SKU. Instead, the company used the same cooler for all three graphics cards.

As their part numbers insinuate, the TX Gaming graphics cards feature a factory overclock. However, Asus didn't share this information on its product pages or online store. We only know that the graphics cards require one 8-pin PCIe power connector for external power. Many will be glad that Asus didn't opt for the pesky 16-pin power connector. At any rate, you'd want a power supply with a minimum capacity of 650W for whichever model you pick up. Asus didn't alter the design of the display outputs. Therefore, the TX Gaming graphics cards provide one HDMI 2.1 port and up to three DisplayPort 1.4a outputs.

Asus sells the TX Gaming GeForce RTX 4070 (TX-RTX4070-O12G-Gaming) for $733.54. Meanwhile, the TX Gaming GeForce RTX 4060 Ti (TX-RTX4060TI-O8G-Gaming) and TX Gaming GeForce RTX 4060 (TX-RTX4060-O8G-Gaming) retail for $526.91 and $386.82, respectively.

Nvidia has introduced three high-performance professional graphics cards based on the Ada Lovelace architecture for workstations as well as a server-grade grade professional board that can be used both for remote graphics and light AI applications. The introduction completes transition of Nvidia's ProViz family of high-performance products to its latest Ada Lovelace architecture.

To address performance-demanding professional graphics applications, such as computer aided design and digital content creation, Nvidia add three new products: the RTX 4000 20GB, the RTX 4500 24GB, and the RTX 5000 32GB boards based on the Ada Lovelace architecture. In addition, Nvidia is rolling out its L40S datacenter board with 48GB of memory.

The new Nvidia RTX 4000 20GB workstation graphics card largely mimics the RTX 4000 SFF product released several month ago, but it uses a full-height PCB albeit comes with a single-slot cooling system and is rated for 130W. The part is powered by the AD104 GPU with 6144 CUDA cores that is clocked higher compared to the SFF variant and thus delivers up to 26.7 FP32 TFLOPS of compute throughput, which is comparable to compute performance of Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4070. This board will offer higher performance than the RTX 4000 SFF for the same price of $1,250 in September.

The green company is also rolling out its Nvidia RTX 4500 24GB featuring the AD104 GPU with 7,680 CUDA cores that offers up to 39.6 FP32 TFLOPS of compute performance, which is on par with the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti. The ProViz graphics card is equipped with a dual-slot cooling system with a blower fan and is rated for up to 210W of power. The product is set to be available in October for the price of $2,250.

Yet another graphics cards that is being rolled out today is the Nvidia RTX 5000 32GB based on the severely cut-down AD102 graphics processor with 12,800 CUDA cores that delivers compute performance of 65.3 FP32 TFLOPS. This unit is positioned to sit below the flagship RTX 6000 Ada and the whopping performance difference between the two parts implies that over time Nvidia might offer a solution that will sit between these models. In the meantime, Nvidia will have its RTX 5000 32GB for $4,000 and RTX 6000 48GB Ada for $6,800.

The new workstation boards will be used by companies like Boxx, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Lambda in their upcoming workstations this fall. In addition, these boards will be available from Nvidia's resellers, such as Arrow and Ingram from such AIB suppliers as Leadtek, PNY, and Ryoyo,

But as there are professionals who use remote workstations, Nvidia is also rolling out its L40S Ada datacenter card that uses the AD102 GPU with 18,176 CUDA cores that delivers a whopping 91.6 FP32 TFLOPS, which is in line with performance of the RTX 6000 Ada. The L40S Ada will be first used in Nvidia's OVX servers used for graphics AI, and video processing, but eventually they will likely end up in different machines as well. While the L40S Ada is clearly a datacenter product with a passive cooling solution, it still has display outputs, so it can be installed into a workstation assuming that there is enough airflow inside or a special blower attached to the board. 

"As generative AI transforms every industry, enterprises are increasingly seeking large-scale compute resources in the data center," said Bob Pette, vice president of professional visualization at NVIDIA. "OVX systems with NVIDIA L40S GPUs accelerate AI, graphics and video processing workloads, and meet the demanding performance requirements of an ever-increasing set of complex and diverse applications."

The RTX 4060 Ti 16GB might be one of the least attractive GPUs due to its $500 price point, but according to a review by Daniel Owen, the GPU is substantially quicker than the $100 cheaper 8GB model in several modern games. In his review, Owen compared the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB to the 8GB model to see how much of a performance difference the extra VRAM capacity would provide. He found the RTX 4060 16GB provides roughly 40% extra performance in several modern 2023 titles at 1080p and 1440p resolutions. At 4K resolution, the additional VRAM is even more beneficial, giving the 16GB card twice the performance of the 8GB model (on average).

It's worth mentioning that the 4060 Ti 16GB's capacity is only advantageous in games that spill over 8GB of memory capacity. Nonetheless, Owen's review found that quite a few 2023 titles will take advantage of more than 8GB of memory.

The tech YouTuber compared the 16GB version of the RTX 4060 Ti to the 8GB version in seven modern AAA 2023 titles, including Rachet and Clank: Rift Apart, Jedi Survivor, Forespoken, Cyberpunk 2077, Resident Evil 4, Remnant 2 and The Last of Us Part 1. Testing was also conducted at 1080p, 1440p, and 4K resolutions with various game settings (including RT settings) to see how the GPUs behave in different scenarios.

Rachet and Clank: Rift Apart is one of the most sensitive applications to the 4060 Ti 16GB's extra memory capacity. At 1080p Very High with RT enabled, the 16GB was 34% faster than the 8GB model. At 1440p, this lead was boosted to 43% and at 4K, the 4060 Ti 16GB was 85% quicker. With RT disabled, the 4060 Ti 16GB lost a bit of its lead but was still more than 30% faster at 1080p and 1440p, and over 50% quicker at 4K.

Lowering graphics quality settings to High (with no RT) made the 16GB card a whopping 50% quicker than the 8GB model at 1080p. We're not sure how this is possible, but we suspect this might be a bug with the game. So take this result with a grain of salt.

Another VRAM-sensitive title is Resident Evil 4 (2023), where the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB was 12% faster at 1080p, 9% faster at 1440p, and 24% quicker at 4K — with the game running at its maximum settings with RT effects. Tho interestingly, the 1% lows in this game are particularly sensitive to the 8GB limitation on the lower-end 4060 Ti, revealing a 77% to 113% performance advantage in 1% lows for the 16GB card at 1080P, 1440P, and 4K.

However, not all of the latest 2023 releases need more than 8GB of memory to perform well. Owen found that the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB saw no noteworthy performance improvements with Remant 2 and Jedi: Survivor at 1080P or 1440P — even with both games running in their highest graphical settings (with RT enabled on Survivor). The only exception is at 4K resolution, where the 16GB card was 7% faster in Remant 2 and 14% more performant in Jedi: Survivor compared to the 8GB model.

For a full breakdown of the rest of the games Daniel Owen tested, check out his full review on his YouTube channel.

As far as VRAM utilization is concerned, all of the games that performed better on the 16GB card did not use the whole 16GB. The most demanding title was Resident Evil 4, utilizing just 12.1GB of memory at the game's maximum settings at 4K resolution. The rest of the games (and tested resolutions) sat below 12GB, with most hovering in the 9GB to 11GB range. This is great to see and means the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB will have the additional memory capacity to spare as it ages.

Turns Out, DLSS 3 Frame Gen Consumes Extra VRAM

Daniel Owen also tested VRAM utilization with resolution upscaling to see how that might benefit the RTX 4060 Ti 8GB. Interestingly Owen found that DLSS 3 frame generation negatively affects VRAM consumption and consumes more video memory than standard DLSS upscaling with frame generation disabled.

In testing with Cyberpunk 2077, he found that the game will consume 8426MB of VRAM at 1440P RT Ultra settings on the 16GB 4060 Ti. With DLSS Quality, memory usage drops by over a full Gigabyte down to just 7249MB, but with Frame Generation enabled, VRAM usage goes back up to 8GB (or 8000MB) roughly.

The RTX 4060 Ti 8GB suffers from the same problem, but less so since the game is approaching the hardware's 8GB limit. The 8GB memory is still a bottleneck, providing less FPS than the 16GB card, even with DLSS enabled. (To clarify, DLSS quality mode saw the closest performance gap between the two cards.)

Overall, Owen found that the more expensive RTX 4060 Ti 16GB can be substantially faster in some games, particularly at 4K resolutions, than its 8GB counterpart, proving that 8GB can be a bottleneck even on a mid-range GPU like the 4060 Ti. However, Owen's results also demonstrate that the 16GB's additional capacity is not-beneficial in all games, at least for now. It'll be interesting to see how games evolve down the road and if we'll see more of a performance gap between the two cards if games utilize more than 8GB of memory.

Chinese AIB Colorful has quietly launched a compact new GeForce RTX 4060 Ti graphics card design. The new Colorful iGame RTX 4060 Ti Mini is only 199.5mm long, and this pleasingly minimal design, first spotted by VideoCardz, is destined to be available in 8 GB or 16 GB configurations. Whichever you choose, a tiny factory overclock is applied, so the card earns the ‘OC’ suffix.

Your first impressions of this new graphics card might make you think it is a Mini-ITX compatible design, but this product is a little too tall for such a designation, at 145 mm. Also, its 199.5 mm length makes it significantly longer than Colorful’s GeForce RTX 4060 Mini-V, which is just 170 mm long. However, the headlining new graphics card is a Ti model with higher power demands, so the larger cooling shroud (199.5 x 145 x 45.8 mm total size) may be necessary.

In the intro, we mentioned that the new Colorful iGame RTX 4060 Ti Mini is slightly overclocked out of the box. The 8 GB and 16 GB variants share the same quoted 2,580 MHz max GPU boost clock. This is only 40 MHz faster than reference, or 1.8% faster in percentage terms. However, these are some other differences between the 8 GB and 16 GB models. Specifically, the 16 GB model has a 5 W greater TDP than its stablemate at 165 W, and it has a beefier VRM design with a 6+2 configuration, rather than 6+1. Lastly, the 16 GB model is 20g weightier than the 8GB version of the iGame RTX 4060 Ti Mini, with a total weight of 810g.

For some more perspective regarding the RTX 4060 Ti, please check out our extensive (8 GB) product review. You can also see how it fits in the modern graphics card hierarchy.

If you are particularly interested in compact graphics cards, you may want to read about Lenovo’s RTX 4060 Mini-ITX card and the recent launch of the Gigabyte GeForce RTX 4060 OC Low Profile 8G. Obviously, neither of these are Ti cards.

There are no retail listings for the new Colorful iGame RTX 4060 Ti Mini to be found at the time of writing, so we can’t really comment on availability or pricing. However, it should become available in China shortly, now that the product pages are published.

Gigabyte has quietly launched a new GeForce RTX 4060 graphics card with a low profile (LP) design. We first caught a glimpse of this sleek and compact RTX 4060 in early July. Now we have the full details and specifications and can be quite confident this product will be on shelves soon. HTPC and compact PC upgraders and DIYers may be particularly interested in this card.

From Nvidia’s existing range of Ada Lovelace GPU-based products, the RTX 4060 is the best suited to cramped form factors due to its thrifty 115 W TDP, the lowest power consumption in the family until some RTX 4050 cards come along. Mini-ITX RTX 4060 designs from Nvidia AIBs are quite common already, but LP cards are much thinner on the ground. This is actually Gigabyte’s first Ada Lovelace LP product.

We have seen Gigabyte’s previous generations feature LP designs, but this Gigabyte GeForce RTX 4060 OC Low Profile 8G (GV-N4060OC-8GL) is the first outing for what seems like a new triple fan cooler. Gigabyte says this new custom design is 182mm long, 40mm thick, and 69mm tall (LP bracket) and features “pure copper heat pipes that make direct contact with the GPU.” The heat pipes are threaded through a heat sink, and cooled by the trio of fans.

In nearly all the gallery and promotional images of this graphics card, the full-height bracket is affixed to the card, but Gigabyte says there is an LP bracket in the box. We didn’t really doubt it, but it is good to see it confirmed. As per the previous leak, the connectivity provided allows for up to four simultaneous displays via two DP and two HDMI ports.

From the name of this graphics card model, you will be expecting a factory overclock, but you aren't going to be thrilled by the speed. According to Gigabyte, this LP card’s GPU runs up to 2,475 MHz out of the box, which is a mere 15 MHz better than the reference card. All other technical specifications of this 3,072 CUDA core and 8 GB of GDDR6 memory graphics card follow the reference. Check out our GeForce RTX 4060 review for the performance levels this LP card should be capable of delivering.

So, the Gigabyte GeForce RTX 4060 OC Low Profile 8G is very much a ‘known quantity’ as it launches. However, potential buyers should wait for third-party reviews to hear about the triple fan cooler’s noise profile (smaller fans can be more irritating). Also, there might be a price premium for this compact design.

ComputerBase revealed that Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart is suffering from a serious performance bug that is tanking performance on GeForce RTX hardware. The culprit is a bug related to DirectStorage, where deleting the game's DirectStorage DLL files will significantly improve the game's performance on team green's best graphics cards. Thankfully, the issue does not affect AMD Radeon GPUs; ComputerBase reports that Intel Arc GPUs could be affected, though they did not test any Arc GPUs.

In testing with an RTX 4080 at 4K, ComputerBase found that deleting the game's "dstorage.dll" and "dstoragecore.dll" files resulted in 10% higher frame rates, starting from 118.6 FPS with the game in its original state, and boosting to 129.7 FPS after the files were removed. The 1% percentile frame rates were even more sensitive, improving by a whopping 26% after executing the same modifications. The game minimum fps was 85 in its original state, increasing to 107.4 FPS after the DirectStorage files were deleted.

The German outlet also tested an RX 7900 XTX and found that the AMD GPU did not suffer from the same problems. Removing the files only improved performance by 1% which is well within margin of error.

Going back to GeForce users, the DirectStorage issues go beyond the GPUs performance problems. Apparently, the game's performance on GeForce hardware is also affected by the SSD speed when leaving the DirectStorage files intact. ComputerBase's RTX 4080 ran the game slower on a SATA-based SSD compared to running the game on a faster NVMe drive.

But the most bizarre issue with the DirectStorage files is that they don't appear to do anything of value, and removing them does not result in any issues. ComputerBase reports that removing the files does not slow down storage-demanding aspects of the game, but in fact improves load times and asset streaming performance. Rift jumps, for instance, are smoother on RTX hardware and load slightly quicker with the DirectStorage files gone.

It's difficult to say what's going on here, but there's clearly a serious bug surrounding Nixxes' DirectStorage implementation in Rachet and Clank: Rift Apart that is hampering performance on GeForce hardware. Given the game is supposed to use RTX IO, an Nvidia-tuned variant of DirectStorage, it's possible there are RTX-specific extras that are taking away from GPU compute time in order to decompress assets. Even so, a 10% or larger drop in frame rates definitely shouldn't be part of the package.

Nixxes has not announced a fix at this time, but we expect one to come out once knowledge of the issue spreads.

A fresh benchmark run featuring a purported Intel Arc A580 graphics card has been spotted. According to a screenshot shared by ITHome (Chinese language) the A580 scores nearly 83K in Geekbench 5 OpenCL tests which is over 10K clear of scores achieved by systems relying on Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3050 graphics card.

The Geekbench database sighting of this 'lost' Intel Arc graphics card appears to be from a benchmark run earlier today. This particular Arc A580 is part of a well-specified Windows 11 desktop PC system which also features an Intel Core i7-12700 CPU, an Asus ROG Strix Z690-E motherboard, and 32 GB of DDR5 RAM. Take the Geekbench results with a pinch of salt for now.

We have already mentioned a Geekbench 5 Open CL score comparison in the intro (vs RTX 3050), but let's build a fuller table, including the established Intel Arc cards that we are now quite familiar with.

*= leaked single result

In September 2022 we covered, in depth, the technical details of the Intel Arc A580 alongside stable mates and now well known desktop GPUs like the Arc A770, Arc A750, and Arc A380. In summary, the GPU configuration of the A580 is derived from a cut-down ACM-G10 GPU, and is much closer in spec / performance to the A750 than the little A380. This fact is quite immediately evident not just from benchmarks, but from the Arc A-Series Desktop GPUs infographic published by Intel, reproduced below.

It is curious that Intel has not yet launched its Arc A580 graphics card, as it was announced alongside the above products nearly a year ago. 

After a long gap in any leaks or spills regarding the Arc A580 we saw it pop up in GFXBench 5.0 results in mid-July, so perhaps Intel and partners are at last readying this model for release. In our recently updated GPU pricing Index feature, we noted that the best price of an Arc A750 is around $200, and the A380 around $100. If we had to guess the Arc A580's price it would probably not be right down the middle, but nearer to the A750 price level.

After three years in early access, Larian Studio's Baldur's Gate 3 is finally getting a retail launch on August 3. In conjunction with its official release, Nvidia has announced that DLSS 2 will come with the game, providing RTX gamers access to Nvidia's performance-enhancing upscaling technology on day 1.

Baldur's Gate 3 is a turn-based RPG set in the Sword Coast region of the Forgotten Realms in the world of Dungeons and Dragons. The gameplay focuses on gathering and managing a squad of fantasy heroes and exploring their own stories while questing about the massive world. According to PC Gamer, combat is driven with a D&D 5e ruleset that adds complexity and gives players lots of different strategies to achieve victory. The game is very diverse with options to play in single-player or co-op and has 2000 interactive characters on top of 174 hours of cinematics.

It's very strange to see a major release not supporting DLSS 3, but the game's not that difficult to run, even without DLSS. According to initial Nvidia's benchmarks, the mid-range RTX 4060 Ti achieves 78FPS at 4K with maxed-out settings using DLSS 2 Performance mode upscaling. With the same settings, the RTX 4070 pulls 130 FPS, RTX 4070 Ti get 159 FPS, RTX 4080 sits at 193 FPS, and the RTX 4090 manages a modest (kidding) 215 FPS.

Alternatively, for those with GPU power to spare, Baldur's Gate 3 also has support for DLAA. That's basically all the anti-aliasing goodness of DLSS, minus the upscaling, providing for optimal image quality. That will naturally be more taxing than native or DLSS modes, but the RTX 4090 managed 150 fps in Nvidia's benchmarks, so if you're fine with 100–120 fps rates (our estimate based on other DLAA games), DLAA could be your preferred anti-aliasing solution.

One thing you won't find in Baldur's Gate 3, at least not initially, is support for other upscaling solutions like AMD's FSR 2 or Intel's XeSS. But FSR 2 support is at least coming. Yesterday's community update states, "We'll continue to work on implementing FSR 2.0, but that will be closer to September 6." There's no mention of XeSS as yet, though you'd think that with DLSS 2 and FSR 2 already, adding XeSS shouldn't be too hard.

Nvidia announced a few other updates, including the puzzle-adventure game Desordre, which uses Unreal Engine 5.2. The game features a lot of graphical enhancements as well as new ray tracing effects like RTX Direct Illumination. With DLSS 3, gamers can expect over 2x higher frame rates on modern RTX 40 series hardware. Initial benchmarks from Nvidia show that the RTX 4070 Ti archives 2.57x higher frame rates at 4K max settings with DLSS 3 performance mode, with a frame rate of 19.8 FPS without DLSS and 70.8 with DLSS.

As always, note Nvidia's use of Performance mode upscaling. While we've often said that the differences between Quality mode and native resolution are hard to spot, the same can't be said for the 4X upscaling. It may look good enough for some users, but it's definitely trading image fidelity for performance.

Nvidia also highlighted four additional titles that have or are going to get DLSS support, including Rachet and Clank: Rift Apart (DLSS 3), Lost Soul Aside (DLSS 3), Remnant 2 (it already had DLSS 2 but will not get upgraded to DLSS 3), and Grand Emprise: Time Travel Survival (DLSS 2). You can check Nvidia's full list of more than 300 games (currently 323 with DLSS 2) that have now incorporated some version of DLSS, 41 of which support DLSS 3.

Here's a mid to high-end desktop gaming PC from MSI that's reduced in price saving you money on the latest hardware. This MSI Aegis RS (model - 13NUE-450US) is now $1,749 - that's a reduction of $249. Contained in this gaming PC is the latest Intel 13th Gen Core i7-13700KF processor, and one of Nvidia's current best GPUs the RTX 4070 with 12GB of VRAM. 

Another RTX 4070 powered computer, albeit the laptop GPU version with 8GB of VRAM, Lenovo's Legion 5i (model - 16IRX8) is on sale for $1,569. Containing one of the best CPUs the Intel Core i9-13900HX, a whopping 32GB of DDR5 RAM, and a 1TB SSD. These components power the 16-inch display and help to pump the refresh rate up to 240Hz.

At half its original price, this condenser microphone from Razer is an attractive purchase if you're in the market for a new desktop mic. Currently, the Razer Seiren V2 X is available for $49. 

See below for more deals.

TL;DR — Today’s Best Deals

• MSI Aegis RS 13NUE-450US Gaming Desktop: now $1,749 at Newegg (was $1,999)
• Lenovo Legion 5i 16-inch Legion Pro 7 (Model - 16IRX8): now $1,569 at B&H Photo (was $2,069)
• Razer Seiren V2 X USB Condenser Microphone: now $49 at Amazon (was $99)
• TeamGroup 128GB C186 USB 3.2 Flash Drive: now $6 at Newegg (was $10)
• UGREEN Revodok 7 in 1 USB-C Hub: now $27 at Amazon (was $32)

Today’s best deals in detail

Looking for more deals?

Corsair has released a handy 180-degree 12VHPWR power adapter for some of the best graphics cards that use the 16-pin power connector. The right-angle adapter aims to mitigate the possibility of an improper installation of the 16-pin power cable that could lead to meltdowns on Ada Lovelace graphics cards, such as the GeForce RTX 4090.

Two potential scenarios may induce a meltdown on the 16-pin power connector. One involves bending the cable too close to the connector, and the other is when the 16-pin power connector isn't fully inserted into the header on the graphics card. Corsair's 12VHPWR power adapter (CP-8920335) will help minimize the possibility of either occurring.

The power adapter features a minimalistic but sleek design worthy of the Corsair branding. It can tolerate extreme temperatures up to 105 degrees Celsius so not even the most power-demanding graphics cards can faze the power adapter. Although the product page is live, some information about the adapter is missing. For example, Corsair (via a Corsair representative) bundles a black and white snap-on cover for the adapter so that you can swap them back and forth, depending on the theme of your build. 

The Corsair 12VHPWR power adapter product page also lacks a compatibility list. Still, the adapter isn't compatible with Asus ROG Strix and TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 40-series graphics cards due to the rotated power connectors. As a result of the PCB width, Corsair's 12VHPWR power adapter probably doesn't work on many custom models. According to the company's representative, Corsair is revising the adapter to space out the connectors away from the PCB.

The market is already filled with 12VHPWR power adapters; therefore, Corsair will face tough competition. Cablemod currently offers 12VHPWR 90-degree and 180-degree adapters at $39.90. ModDIY sells one for $24.99, and you also have the non-branded Chinese adapters that start at $12.89.

Corsair told Tom's Hardware that the 12VHPWR power adapter has an MSRP of $24.99. Once the product page is ready, you can order the adapter directly from Corsair.

Nvidia's prototype quad-slot cooling system for never-released 40-series graphics card has made quite a splash among enthusiasts in the recent months partly because of an unusual PCB mounting and partly because of its size. But the cooler apparently has an interesting wrinkle: it has a third fan inside to boost its performance even further.

 @Harukaze5719 has found more pictures of the ultimate GeForce RTX 40-series cooling system published by Hayaka, the owner of the cooler who once wanted to sell it for $120,000. This time around, Hayaka disassembled the cooling system and discovered that in addition to two large fans, it has a small fan inside that is meant to generate additional airflow. It also turned out that the prototype cooling system has 22 heat pipes to effectively distribute heat dissipated by the AD102 graphics processor as well as its voltage regulating module.

PCB placement, 22 heat pipes, and three fans indicate that the prototype of the monstrous graphics card was meant to deliver maximum possible performance at maximum possible power. To that end, we are dealing with a prototype cooling system that is meant to deliver overkill performance for simply the best graphics card available.

Meanwhile, an interesting thing about the current prototype is that it only has one 12VHPWR auxiliary PCIe power connector that can deliver up to 600W of power, so a cooler this large might be an overkill for the board. Then again, if Nvidia's plan was to develop the world's highest-performing air cooler for an ultimate graphics card, then this monstrous unit was a way to go.

Yet, it would be interesting to literally hear a cooling system with three fans one of which is located inside the cooler. While Nvidia's cooling systems for Founders Edition graphics cards tend to be rather quiet, it is unlikely that this particular device aimed at the graphics cards sometimes referred to as 'The Beast' was ever meant to be quiet.

The market is awash in gaming laptops that promise to offer good performance for not a lot of money. Today, you can get a gaming laptop for around $1,000 that gives you playable 1080p frame rates in modern games. HP is looking to tap into the low- to mid-range segment with the Victus 16, its latest 16.1-inch gaming notebook that eschews the flashy designs and bold colors that often grace this segment with something more akin to business casual. 

Our review configuration of the Victus 16 plays it safe with a Core i7-13700H processor, GeForce RTX 4050 GPU and a 144Hz 1080p screen. However, some confusing choices regarding configurations, pricing, and store-specific SKUs make this a hard laptop to pin down. However, if you can catch the Victus 15 on sale (as it is currently), it’s worth considering among the best laptops under $1,500. 

HP Victus 16 Specifications

Design of the HP Victus 16

The Victus 16 has an understated, attractive design. The entire chassis is constructed of sturdy, grey plastic, while the keyboard is finished in a slightly lighter shade of grey. There aren’t design embellishments drawing attention to the laptop other than a large chromed “V” that graces the lid. That also means you won’t find any RGB lighting for the keyboard, just simple white LEDs.

At the top of the keyboard are a large grouping of ventilation holes. They are shaped as an alternating set of V (upright and then inverted). A similar pattern is found on the lower front corners of the laptop for the speaker grills, although the V shape is swapped out for triangles.

One thing that I’d like to point out is the obnoxious stickers that HP slaps on the keyboard deck. I get it; this is hard to avoid with Windows laptops. OEMs must satisfy advertising agreements by adorning their laptops with these Intel Core and Nvidia GeForce RTX badges. However, would it kill HP to at least put the stickers on straight? The crooked placement of the stickers is just an insult to injury.

The Victus 16’s port layout is quite robust for a mainstream system. The right side is home to two USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-A ports, one USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-C port, a HDMI 2.1 port and a proprietary barrel-style jack for power. On the left side, you’ll find a third USB 3.1 Gen 1 port and a Gigabit Ethernet jack that retracts to accept a cable. On the one hand, the retracting mechanism is an obvious point for future failure due to its fragility. However, the fact that HP even includes a full-size LAN port should be applauded.

Nearly half of the bottom part of the chassis is dedicated to a ventilation array that supplies the twin internal fans with cool air. Hot air is then exhausted from vents positioned on the left and rear of the chassis.

The Victus 16 measures 14.53 x 10.21 x 0.90 inches and weighs 5.15 pounds. The assembled competition – the MSI Katana 15, Acer Nitro 5 and Lenovo Legion Pro 5i – are similar in size (roughly an inch thick) and weight (5 to 5.5 pounds).

Gaming Performance on the HP Victus 16

The Victus 16 has an Intel Core i7-13700H processor, 16GB of DDR5-5600 memory and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4050 discrete GPU.

I started things off by playing a bit of Cyberpunk 2077, which is a notoriously resource-intensive game that delivers a big payoff with its lush graphics. With the resolution set to 1080p, I used the High quality preset with ray tracing (including ray traced lighting), DLSS Balanced, and DLSS frame generation enabled. I averaged around 90 fps under these conditions.

We’ve only tested one other RTX 4050 laptop, the MSI Katana 15 (i7-13620H, RTX 4050), which I’ve included in this roundup. We also brought in a last-gen Acer Nitro 5 (i5-12500H, RTX 3050 Ti) along with the Lenovo Legion Pro 5i (Gen 8) (i7-13700HX, RTX 4060) to give some perspective for the next step up on the graphics performance ladder.

The Victus 16 comes out of the gate strong in Shadow of the Tomb Raider (highest settings), delivering 79 frames per second (fps) at 1080p. The Katana 15, with a less performant Core i7-13260H processor, wasn’t too far behind at 73 fps. The RTX 4050-equipped machines offer a notable increase in performance over the Nitro 5 with its previous generation RTX 3050 Ti.

In the Far Cry 6 (very high settings), the Katana 15 hit 81 fps compared to 77 fps for the Victus 16. Again, the RTX 4050 laptops left the Nitro 5 behind, while the Legion Pro 5i opened up a 13 fps advantage over the Katana 15 thanks to its more powerful RTX 4060 GPU.

Grand Theft Auto V (very high settings) saw the Victus 16 and Katana 15 neck and neck, hitting 71 fps and 70 fps, respectively. This represents a 10 fps advantage over the Nitro 5, while the Legion 5i Pro pulled well ahead at nearly 100 fps.

Borderlands 3 (badass settings) again saw a tight race between the Victus 16 (66 fps) and the Katana 15 (68 fps), while the Nitro 5 (45 fps) and Legion 5i Pro (90 fps) took up their usual positions as bookends for this comparison test.

In Red Dead Redemption 2 (very high settings), the Victus 16 garnered 53 fps compared to 52 for the Katana 15. These two laptops are about as evenly matched as you can get regarding gaming performance at 1080p resolution.

I rounded out the gaming tests with our Metro Exodus (RTX settings) stress test, comprising 15 benchmark loops at 1080p resolution. The benchmark ran at an average of 57.43 fps (consistently ranging between 57.26 to 57.63 fps). During the run, the Core i7-13700H averaged 3.46GHz and 2.32GHz for the performance and efficiency cores, respectively. The CPU package averaged 73.59 degrees Celsius (164.46 degrees Fahrenheit). The GeForce RTX 4050 GPU ran at an average of 2.33 GHz and measured 69.35 C (156.83 F).

Productivity Performance on the HP Victus 16

My Victus 16 review unit arrived with an Intel Core i7-13700H processor, 16GB of DDR5-5600 memory and a 1TB SSD.

Starting with the Geekbench 5 synthetic CPU test, the Victus 16 scores of 1,913 and 12,024 for single-core and multi-core performance, respectively. The Katana 15 with its Core i7-13620H CPU wasn’t too far behind with scores of 1,787 and 12,017, respectively.

Moving on to our file transfer test, which involved copying 25GB of data, the Victus 16 bested all challengers at 1,807.92 MBps. The Legion 5i Pro was the next closest at 1,792.63 MBps, while the Katana 15 pulled up the rear at 1,045.33 MBps.

The Victus 16 fared well in our Handbrake benchmark, which involves transcoding a video from 4K to 1080p. The Victus 16 took four minutes and 40 seconds to accomplish the feat. This was 24 seconds faster than the Nitro 5 and just 13 seconds slower than the Katana 15.

Display on the HP Victus 16

The Victus 16 uses a 16.1-inch 1080p display rated for 300 nits and has a refresh rate of 144Hz. All Victus 16 configurations come with a 1080p display.

Despite the lower resolution on a relatively large display, I had no major issues with the panel. The display is rated for 300 nits by the factory, yet our light meter showed that the Victus 16 hit 313 nits. We rarely see a display exceed the manufacturer’s claim, so I was pleasantly surprised. That figure put it on an even footing with the Nitro 5’s 314 nits and behind the Legion Pro 5i’s 349 nits.

The anti-reflective coating was adept at keeping away reflections, and cranking up the brightness while outdoors (overcast conditions) allowed me to enjoy the display. Our colorimeter showed that the Victus 16’s display covers 75.2 percent of the DCI-P3 color gamut and 106 percent of sRGB, which put it well ahead of the budget panels used in the Katana 15 and Nitro 5.

I sat down and watched Episode 5 of Secret Invasion on the Victus 16 and the image quality looked great. Secret Invasion’s overall color palette is somewhat subdued and somber, which is in keeping with the series's heavy, world-ending subject material. However, one standout during an otherwise humdrum episode was when MI6 agent Sonya Falsworth shot a Skrull posing as her superior, Director Weatherby. Her bright red dress popped on the display and was the perfect counter to the blue suits of Weatherby’s dumbfounded security detail.  

The screen looked equally as good playing Overwatch 2, with its rich, saturated colors beaming on the display, especially on the Paraiso map. The colors weren’t as vibrant as some of the higher-end IPS or OLED panels I’ve seen in high-end gaming laptops, but for a device that starts around $1,000, there’s little to complain about here.

Keyboard and Touchpad on the HP Victus 16

The keyboard on the Victus 16 is quite comfortable, with keys that are quiet and firm in their operation. It reminded me of the latest scissor switch-style keyboards on Apple’s MacBooks. However, unlike MacBook keyboards, you get a full number pad off to the right of the laptop.

I use keyhero.com to test my typing speed and accuracy, and the site pegged me at 80.77 words per minute with an accuracy of 95.92 percent. For comparison, I hit 77.93 wpm with the Katana 13 with 95.54 percent accuracy.

The Victus 16 has a smallish touchpad measuring 5.1 x 3.3 inches. The touchpad is nice and tight, with a firm click response. However, my finger seemed to subtly drag rather than glide over the surface, which was slightly annoying.

Audio on the HP Victus 16

The Victus 16 uses a pair of B&O-tuned speakers mounted at the corner of the palm rest. Like most budget laptops, the bass is lacking, but the overall audio quality was pleasing. I played “Battersea” by Hooverphonic, which is a showpiece for Geike Arnaert’s angelic vocals. The sound was distortion free up through maximum volume levels. And to put a smile on my face at the end of the day, I played “Going the Distance” by Menahan Street Band, a magnificent cover of Bill Conti’s Rocky theme song. The song is pure perfection, and while the lack of bass doesn’t do the drumline any favors, the blaring horns came through loud and clear.

The sound was good in Cyberpunk 2077, with clear vocals and ambient sounds. However, the lack of bass means that explosions landed with a thud. However, the audio shortcoming can be easily rectified by grabbing a pair of the best gaming headsets.

Upgradeability of the HP Victus 16

The Victus 16’s bottom panel is accessible via eight small Philips screws. Once removed, I nearly broke a fingernail trying to pry the panel off – I should have just gone downstairs to get my plastic spudger tool. Once the panel is removed, you’ll find immediate access to the battery, two SO-DIMM slots (both populated on our review unit) and a single M.2 slot for an NVMe SSD.

Unlike some pricier laptops, you won’t find a second M.2 slot to for an additional SSD. However, you can upgrade the Wi-Fi/Bluetooth combo card.

Battery Life on the HP Victus 16

Battery life is one area where the Victus 16 stood head and shoulders above the assembled competition. Our battery test consists of web browsing, light graphics work and video streaming, all while connected to Wi-Fi with the display set to 150 nits of brightness. Under these conditions, the Victus 16 lasted for seven hours and three minutes.

This was nearly three times as long as the Katana 15, which gave up the ghost after 2:39. The next closest competitor was the Nitro 5 (5:33), while the higher-performing Legion Pro 5i called it quits after 4:54.

Heat on the HP Victus 16

The Victus can get toasty when gaming. Like most gaming laptops, keep it on a desk or table.

When running our Metro Exodus stress test (15 consecutive runs), the Victus 16 measured 38.3 Celsius (100.9 degrees Fahrenheit) between the G and H keys. The touchpad measured a relatively cool 22.8 C (73 F), while the hottest part of the laptop was the underside near the rear at 49.3 C (120.7 F).

Webcam on the HP Victus 16

HP uses a 1080p sensor for the Victus 16’s webcam, but it wasn’t up to par with other upgraded webcams we’ve seen on newer laptops. I won’t say that image clarity was down in the 720p doldrums, but it wasn’t as clear and crisp as I would have expected from a 1080p sensor.

Details in objects that came through clearly with other 1080p webcams looked blurred. My facial details (hair, moles, wrinkles) also didn’t transition from real life to digital facsimile unscathed. The camera also had a lot of trouble with my overhead lighting, resulting in lens flare and blooming. This is fine for quick calls, but if you're streaming, you might want to consider one of the best webcams.

Software and Warranty on the HP Victus 16

Like many HP laptops, the Victus comes loaded with factory apps. I noticed HP Documentation, HP PC Hardware Diagnostics, HP Privacy Settings, HP QuickDrop, HP Smart, HP Support Assistant and HP System Event Utility.

However, the utility that most gamers will interact with will be the Omen Gaming Hub. It’s a centralized location to view system vitals, launch your games and share screenshots and wallpapers with other community members.

In addition to the HP bloat, you’ll also find numerous shortcuts for apps like Spotify, WhatsApp, ExpressVPN and Dropbox. McAfee LiveSafe is also installed by default on the system.

The Victus 16 comes with a one-year warranty.

HP Victus 16 Configurations

Our Victus 16 review unit is configured with an Intel Core i7-13700H processor, 16GB of DDR5-5600 memory, a 1TB SSD, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4050 and a 16.1-inch 144Hz 1080p display. This configuration typically costs $1,449, exclusive from HP, but is currently on sale at HP.com for $1,199.

HP also sells store-specific versions of the Victus 16. For example, Costco sells a SKU with the Core i7-13700HX, 32GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD and an RTX 4060 for $1,399. Likewise, a Best Buy exclusive SKU with a Core i7-13700H, 16GB of RAM, a 512GB SSD and an RTX 4060 lists for $1,412.

Bottom Line

The HP Victus 16 is a compelling budget gaming laptop. When I was initially briefed on the laptop, the $1,449 price tag didn’t make much sense. That price includes a Core i7-13700H, 16GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, a GeForce RTX 4050 and a 16.1-inch 144Hz 1080p display. However, that is the exact same MSRP as the Lenovo Legion Pro 5i (Gen 8) with a Core i7-13700HX, 16GB of RAM, 512GB SSD, an RTX 4060 and a 16-inch 165Hz QHD+ display.

When priced the same, the Legion Pro 5i is the obvious choice over our review unit. However, the Victus 16 makes a stronger case at its $1,199 sale price. But you’ll have to decide if the lower price is worth the drop in screen resolution. On the other hand, the Victus 16 matches the MSI Katana 15 on performance and display resolution, yet the latter costs just $999. However, choosing the latter will result in a heavy penalty for battery life.

Throwing in another wrinkle is Costco’s Victus 16 SKU, which gives you a stronger Core i7-13700HX processor, 32GB of RAM and an RTX 4060 for $1,399. That makes for a solid alternative to the Legion Pro 5i, especially with double the SSD space and RAM – if you have a Costco membership and don’t mind a 1080p display.

With that said, the Victus 16 that we reviewed is right in line regarding gaming performance relative to the competition. It has a bright display, good build quality and a business-like exterior. In addition, its battery life blows away the competition at just over seven hours. If you can find the laptop on sale, it’s worth considering for those seeking a budget 1080p gaming rig.

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