New graphics cards are expensive - so consider the steadfast RTX 2060 at £212
With DLSS and RTX, this EVGA GPU offers all the essentials for modern PC gaming.
The RTX 4090 sure is expensive, huh? Wouldn't it be a shame if there was a graphics card that cost one eighth as much and offered the same basic technologies? Well, good news chums, EVGA's RTX 2060 SC Gaming model is available for £212 - and despite costing 12.5% the price of the RTX 4090, it delivers at least 25% of the performance - nice. That's like, double the value!
All hyperbole aside, the RTX 2060 remains a surprisingly good option in 2022, with DLSS offering a handy frame-rate boost in titles where you might want to enable visual effects like RT, and RT performance in general being better than AMD's offerings on equivalently priced cards. The overall level of rasterised performance (ie non-RT games) is quite reasonable as well, making the RTX 2060 a good choice for 1080p gaming - or 1440p if you're willing to accept a few sensible settings tweaks. After all, we didn't call the 2060 'your new best graphics card for 1440p gaming' back in 2019 for nothin'.
Looking at the ol' Amazon price graph, this EVGA RTX 2060 normally retails for £250, and previously spent a fair amount of time at £330 - presumably, when graphics cards in general were in extremely short supply.
Looking online, there really aren't any better options for this amount of money - with £220, your best shout at places like Ebuyer, Scan or OCUK is a GTX 1660 Ti or GTX 1660 Super, which gets you worse rasterised performance and no RTX or DLSS to speak of. On the AMD side, you can pick up an RX 6500 XT, which is newer - but significantly slower in traditional rasterised games and horrendously worse than that in RT titles. The RX 6600 is a slightly better option at £260, but retains the poor RT performance, supports the less common FSR 2.0 and costs a good £40 more.
So then: I reckon this EVGA RTX 2060 is the best GPU you can buy for £200-ish pounds, and I'll keep sayin' that until one of y'all shows me different. So - keep that in mind if you're building a PC, and if you have any questions or better alternatives please share them in the comments. Cheers!