In the previous articles we had seen various components of a Gaming PC. Today we are going to look at the most important part of a Gaming PC- The Graphics Processing Unit (Or the Graphics Card). Most people in India only go by quantity not by quality.
I still remember the time when I had changed from a 2Gb Nvidia GT520 to a 1Gb AMD HD7770. Every-time I said that I had replaced a 2Gb card with a 1Gb card, people used to start laughing at me and every time. I had to show them the proof that my 1Gb card was better than their 2Gb card. The GPU is basically 60-70% of your gaming PC.
Let’s answer a simple question first:
What is a graphics card and why do we need it?
Graphics cards are those peripherals responsible for rendering images. A Graphic card is dedicated to rendering graphics/textures so your processor can focus on the other things. This makes your games run extra smooth. This statement also answers why we need a GPU.
But then the problem is that there are hundreds if not thousands of graphic cards to choose from. Even though there are only 2 companies making GPUs- Nvidia and AMD, there are so many manufacturers with their custom design and factory overclocked settings that a person can easily get trapped into an infinite circle of nothingness. But that is why we have made this guide to help you get out of ‘that circle’. So let’s talk GPU.
Graphics cards can come as cheap as 3-4k ,for example Nvidia 610 GT and AMD 5450 and can even go up in few lakhs, for example Nvidia GTX Titan Z. But of-course all of us can’t buy those cards in the high up regions. Even when buying in a particular price range, we can end up with what we call less bang for the buck card. So “How do we decide which GPU to buy?”
1) Model Name and Number
The Model Name and Number is the first thing that determines the capabilities of card. In case of AMD’s previous gen GPUs the models had only numbers, but now they also have started keeping model names. Nvidia has cards with the model name starting with GT and GTX whereas AMD’s cards start with R7 or R9.
At Nvidia’s end, it is very easy to distinguish the entry level cards by their model name and the higher end cards. All the the cards having a model name GT are entry level which have DDR3 RAM type with the exception of GT 940 which has DDR5 RAM cards and all the cards having names GTX are comparatively better cards with DDR5 RAM.
In case of AMD, the R9 series is better than the R7 series but some of the R7 series cards, have both DDR3 and DDR5 type RAM for the same model. SO there you’ll have to be pretty careful while choosing since DDR5 RAM performs twice as fast as a DDR3 RAM at the same frequency. Both GTX and R9 series come exclusively in DDR5 type RAM, so you don’t have to worry if you are going for one of these.
2) Frequency, Cores and Theoretical Performance (Bandwidth)
Different GPUs models have different amount of cores (Cuda for Nvidia and Shader Cores for AMD). They also have variable frequency, even those of the same model and number. For example, a Nvidia GTX 970 comes with a base clock frequency of 1050 MHz which is pretty good. But many companies like ASUS, Gigabyte etc overclock the card and have taken the clock speeds up to 1300MHz. Then there is the Memory Interface Width and the Memory Clock. You must be wondering what is Theoretical Performance. It’ll be discussed in just a moment.
3) Types of RAM
As I’ve mentioned above, a DDR5 RAM performs twice as much as a DDR3 at the same frequency. But there are other drawbacks of having a DDR3 RAM too, like it consumes more power and does not use more than 1 Gb of the RAM on a graphics card.
So many of the cards in India saying 2 Gb DDR3 memory are actually not very useful for gaming.
The recent technology released by AMD, the HBM (High Bandwidth Memory), supposedly even surpasses DDR5 in terms of sheer raw capabilities and will make the DDR5 outdated earlier than many had initially expected.
Technical performance
Above we said that we could calculate the theoretical power of a GPU. The calculation is actually pretty easy. All you have to do is solve the following mathematical expression by putting in the respective values:
Memory Clock * Pumprate * BusWidth / 8
OR
Memory Clock * Pumprate * BusWidth / 16
All of this information is normally on the box of the graphic cards; you can also find this information on the internet. The pump rate represents DDR-RAM (Double Data Rate) whose value is 2 for our purposes. For the above GTX 970 we can calculate it as:
7*2*256/ 16= 224 Gb/s
This is known as the Memory Bandwidth.
This basically determines how good your GPU is. The higher it is the better the performance. But any card does not gain its maximum performance, because in reality, an ideal case is almost impossible to achieve and hence we don’t know how much a card will be held back.
Now that we have a basic idea of how a GPU works let’s have a look at the best graphics cards in various price points. We are purposely not segregating this into different tiers of builds because it is very difficult to choose a graphics card in any range.
Every time we think that “If I add another 3k I’ll get a bit better performance?”.
Keeping that in mind we have made this list.
Below 10K
Some of the entry level cards can be quite a bang for the buck. Not many good GPUs come under 10K, so here are the few with some of their specs:
AMD/ATI Radeon R7 250 X
This card is available for about 8K in the market and can play most games on 900p and some even on 1080p.
Specs:
RAM- 2Gb DDR5
GPU Clock Speed- 1GHz
Compute Units- 896
Power- 500W 6 pin
AMD/ATI Radeon R7 260X
This card is available just under 10K and is a consistent performer.
Specs:
RAM- 128 bit, 2Gb DDR5
GPU Clock Speed- 1150MHz
Compute Units- 896
Power- 500W 6 pin
You’ll be surprised to see that Nvidia doesnt come in this category.
Below 20K
There are only 3 options over here:
Nvidia GeForce GTX 950
GPU Clock Speed- 1024 MHz
Cuda Cores- 768
Power-500 6 pin
AMD/ ATI Radeon R9 270 X
With this card, most of the games are playable at 1080p at close to ultra settings which is very good for a card of such a low price point.
Specs:
RAM- 256 bit, 4Gb DDR5
GPU Clock Speed- 925MHz
Compute Units- 1280
Power- 600 W 6pin connector
Below 30K
AMD/ ATI Radeon R9 280 X
This card kills 1080p and even 1440p for most games. The price point may be high, but you are looking at another 4-5 years of investment.
Specs:
RAM- 384 bit, 3GB DDR5
GPU Clock Speed- 850MHz
Compute Units- 2048
Power- 600W, 6 pin and 8 pin connector
Nvidia GTX 970
Don’t go by the rumors about the “3.5+0.5 GB” crap. This card handles all games at 1080p and 1440p with aplomb.
Specs:
RAM- 256 bit, 4GB DDR5
GPU Clock Speed- 1050 MHz
Power-Power- 500W, 2X6 pin connector
Above 35K
Here we come into the extreme builds which are suitable for 1440p gaming and even 4K gaming. The GTX 980Ti and AMD R9 Fury X are some of the cards which go above the normal trends and give you the most modern gaming experience. But we do not need these cards for general gaming or for competing with the graphics of the ps4 or Xbox one. At this price point anything that you buy will be a homerun whatever the specifications. And using the formula that we provided above, you can easily calculate which card suits your needs better.
PSUs
The last thing we’re gonna talk about is the Power Supply Units(PSUs). They essentially are the heart of your PC, because they circulate the blood (Or in this case the electricity) in your computer. If you are planning to do a single monitor 1080p or even 1440p gaming, you don’t need a extremely high end GPU and hence you don’t need more than a 500W PSU, considering the fact that it is from a good renowned company. Just be sure to check out the labels namely Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum and the newly introduced Titanium. The efficiency increases in increasing value of the metals. Unless you’re going in for SLi or Crossfire configs, multi monitor gaming, water cooling systems or even more LEDs you do not need much more than the above mentioned Power Rating.
With this article, we end our ongoing series on tips to build a gaming PC. If you’d like to know how we think about other graphics cards and their ideal combinations with motherboards, processors or PSUs we would like you to post in the comments below. Need any more help, leave it in the comments.
Building a Gaming PC Series
Part 1: Motherboard And Processors || Part 2: RAM || Part 3: Storage