In our special, in addition to the topics of length, ray tracing and AI upscaling, we offer you current graphics card purchasing advice with a focus on what performance the individual graphics card series offer, how these performance assessments come about and what the current price-performance ratio is looks. We have created a price-performance graphic with current prices for you.
Based on this graphic, we will examine in detail which graphics card series are currently particularly attractive depending on your budget, and also offer an overview of 22 relatively inexpensive example models.
If you don't know what we mean by graphics card series: AMD and Nvidia's partner manufacturers (e.g. Asus, MSI, Sapphire, XFX, Zotac and others) provide each series, such as the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 or AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT Create your own model variants based on reference blueprints with the GPUs and components intended for the blueprint.
Instead of talking about a graphics card series, you can simply say graphics card in many places, for example “the AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT is the faster graphics card compared to the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070”.
Source: ASRock
A reference becomes a custom graphics card
The reference blueprint ensures that the performance of all model variants within a graphics card series is identical. A GeForce RTX 4060 is always the same speed, regardless of whether it is manufactured by Gigabyte or Palit – at least when using the standard reference clock speed for the GPU.
Our performance metrics, which we presented later, are based on gaming performance at this standard clock speed. However, the partners usually also offer model variants in which the GPU is slightly overclocked. However, this usually amounts to less than 5 percent difference in performance. The partner manufacturers also develop their own cooling solutions and usually offer several variants per graphics card series. This is also referred to as custom graphics cards.
The possible features that a cooling solution can offer are: particularly good cooling and/or a particularly compact design and/or comparatively quiet operation. There are also often one or more models with average standard cooling and a comparatively low price.
Model variants and prices
Thanks to the cooling solutions, a heavily overclocked graphics card, for example, can still be comparatively small and cooled quietly, but then usually costs significantly more than the variant from the same manufacturer with normal standard cooling. In some cases, there are more than 5 to 6 model variants for the same graphics card series from a single partner manufacturer in order to cover all target groups. This also includes models that are available in both black and white color versions.
When we later talk about the prices of the graphics cards, we are talking about the price of the cheapest models currently available – but your desired model may well be 10 to 20 percent more expensive. The following can also happen, especially with graphics card series that are close in terms of price-performance ratio.
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We link (as of October 4, 2024, 12 p.m.) over 80 graphics card models with offers from partner shops ranging from 191 to 1,029 euros.
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We link (as of October 1, 2024, 1 p.m.) over 80 graphics card models with offers from partner shops ranging from 195 to 1,029 euros
You have the choice between graphics card series A and series B, where A actually has the better price-performance ratio. However, the models from A at the shop where you want to buy the graphics card are relatively expensive – and suddenly B is the winner. Likewise, B can simply be on special offer and therefore win in terms of price-performance ratio. In short: Our subsequent purchase recommendations may ultimately be different for your individual choice due to a price difference of perhaps 30 to 40 euros.