Pick up an AMD RX 6700 XT graphics card for just £420
Ideal for 1440p gaming and right at its original UK RRP - a miracle.
The Radeon RX 6700 XT is one of the best value options from AMD's Big Navi family of Radeon 6000 graphics cards, and now you can pick up a PowerColor Fighter 12GB model at its UK RRP - just £420. We've seen price drops on the higher-end models recently, as next-gen GPU rumours have begun to build steam, but this is the first time I've seen a great mid-range option receive the same treatment so I thought it was worth writing about!
So what makes the RX 6700 XT a good GPU to pick up? Well, as RPS called it last year, this is a powerful 1440p graphics card, sitting between Nvidia's RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3070 - at least as far as UK RRPs are concerned. It boasts more VRAM than its Nvidia rivals too, 12GB to 8GB, and generally offers quite good performance in rasterised games. Frame-rates can be boosted in a handful of titles with AMD's new FSR 2.0 image upscaling tech, which now uses temporal data for better results, although RT performance remains a problem compared to Team Green's second-gen implementation. Overall, it's quite a competitive card, and unless you're a big of RT there's a good argument to go with the 6700 XT - especially at this reduced price.
By point of comparison, let's look at RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3070 cards at the same retailer to give you a bit more context for what you're getting. The cheapest 3060 Ti price is £480, some £60 more than the more powerful 6700 XT, while the RTX 3070 starts at a massive £560. So the AMD alternative is considerably cheaper, while existing in the same high-refresh-rate-1080p-or-1440p-60fps performance envelope - not bad!
Of course, there's an argument too for waiting until the end of the year, and if you already have a good GPU then it's not a bad one. However, I'd say that the next-gen cards, while undoubtedly faster, will probably be no easier to get hold of than the current generation was at launch - and in that case, you may as well get a known fast card now rather than potentially not being able to find a new card at a fair price towards the end of the year.
Anyway, those are my thoughts. What do you think? Let me know in the comments below, and thanks for joining me once again!
