- XFX Speedster SWFT210 RX 7600 |
$269.99$239.99 - MSI RTX 4060 |
$299.99$289.99 - Sparkle A750 ORC OC Edition |
$225$179.99
Black Friday sales are an excellent chance for you to snag an awesome gaming PC or a new monitor, all with a healthy discount on the usual price. Unfortunately, it's also an opportunity for retailers to try and shift old stock, especially junk that's been sitting around in their warehouses for years.
So while hunting for a good deal on the latest graphics cards, I spotted this jaw-dropping 'deal' at B&H Photo: Asus TUF GeForce GTX 1660 Super OC for $260, bar a cent, with 'Instant Savings' of $60. This is a graphics card that was released by Nvidia in October 2019, so it's over four years old.
But it gets better. The launch MSRP for the 1660 Super was $229, so not only is the listed price nuts in today's market, it would have been too expensive back in 2019. Of course, it could well just be a mistake by B&H Photo, just something that has been shoved on to its website without being checked properly.
Anyway, despite the GTX 1660 Super being pretty good for its time, there are far better choices to spend $250 to $300 on in the Black Friday sales.
Let's start by looking at something $20 cheaper than that 'Super bargain', namely AMD's cheapest model in its RNDA 3 desktop portfolio. The Radeon RX 7600 is a nice little GPU, with decent (rather than amazing) 1080p performance. Compared to the GTX 1660 Super, though, it will be roughly twice as fast in the latest games.
It also fully supports all of AMD's FSR 3 technology, so you'll able to use the best shader-based upscaling and frame generation systems around. The only thing that's really disappointing about the RX 7600 is that AMD missed a great opportunity to furnish this model with more VRAM.
While 8GB of speedy GDDR6, backed up with 32MB of Infinity Cache, is good enough for almost every game at the moment, there's no guarantee that it will be in the near future.
You can always turn down the graphics settings in a game, if the amount of VRAM proves to be an issue, but when the rest of the GPU is pretty capable, it's a shame that it's not the entry-level killer it could have been.
Now let's go the other way and check out something that's a little more expensive ($30 more in this case) and is also part of the latest generation of GPUs. This is Nvidia's equivalent to the Radeon RX 7600, the baby of the Ada Lovelace clan. The GeForce RTX 4060 performs roughly the same as the AMD model, though it can vary quite a bit across different games.
It also suffers from the RX 7600's same lack of design foresight and given that its predecessor, the GeForce RTX 3060, sported 12GB of VRAM, it definitely feels like a step backward by giving the RTX 4060 just 8GB. Nvidia defending this decision by talking up the performance benefit of the GPU's 24MB of L2 cache, but it would have been nicer still if it had a 192 bit memory bus and more VRAM.
Its saving grace, as with all of the RTX 40-series cards, is the DLSS 3.5 feature set. In games that use it, the AI-powered upscaling and frame generation systems work incredibly well, boosting frame rates while maintaining (and sometimes improving) the quality of the graphics.
As good as DLSS is, though, I would go for the RX 7600, as it's a good $50 cheaper than the RTX 4060. If the latter dropped by a further $20, though, I'd probably go with the Nvidia card, just to have the full gamut of upscaling tech.
And to round things off, how about something that's a bit different. Intel's Arc A750 is super cheap at the moment, though there are good reasons for this. At launch, its gaming performance was all over the place, despite packing some serious amount of hardware.
In the latest DirectX 12 games, the A750 fares well against the Radeon RX 6600 and GeForce RTX 3060, but in some older DX11 and DX9 games, it can be abysmal. Intel has worked hard on improving its drivers to eradicate these issues, but some games are still very twitchy when being run on an Arc graphics card.
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Your PC absolutely has to have Resizeable BAR enabled in the BIOS for it work properly too, so if you're using an old gaming PC and it doesn't support this feature, then avoid the A750 at all costs.
But with the right setup and specific game collection, this $180 GPU can blitz through 1080p rendering, and you can use AMD's FSR or Intel's own XeSS upscaling systems to boost performance.
You don't even need a latest generation graphics card to trounce the GTX 1660 Super, either. Nvidia's GeForce GTX 3060 can be found for under $270 and the Radeon RX 6650 XT is even cheaper at less than $220; both of these will make mincemeat out of that old Turing card.
Fortunately, I've not seen that many really bad GPU deals in the Black Friday sales so far and our whole team daily curates the best Black Friday graphics card offers for you, removing that problem entirely.
Just stick with us and we'll see you safely through the Black Friday PC gaming sales!
