Question It's that time again. Im lost.

[Chadders101]

I find myself in a bewilderment.

I have been an AMD fanboy ever since I bought my first PC. My tried and true R9 380 has served me well, but now I am in search of a new graphics card.

My mind immediately looks towards the RX lineup, the RX 580 8GB looks promising, giving roughly 39% more FPS than my R9 380 on userbenchmark.com, so I ordered the cheapest one I could find on Amazon. It was dead on arrival, so I returned it and bought another. It had an unbearable coil whine, so I returned it.

I knew I had to spend a little more for quality, so I find Sapphire's RX 580 8GB, which has glowing reviews. I then noticed an odd little thing in Amazon's recommend list. The Zotac 1070 mini.

I checked it out, and it gives roughly 77% more FPS on average than my current R9 380, (again, using userbenchmark.com) and it's only £11 more than Sapphire's RX 580. It blows everything out of the water.

It seems absolutely too good to be true. But I have little to no experience with Nvidia cards.

Is the 1070 mini as good as it says it is?

Would a smaller card like this get unbearably hot?

Why is the 1070 mini the same price as a card which is half as effective?

Should I buy it?

My current rig:
CPU: 5 2600
GPU: R9 380
Motherboard: B450 Tomahawk
RAM: 16G 2866hz Corsair
PSU: 550W bronze 80+

I'm going to be buying a 1080p144hz monitor soon as well. I'd like to be able to play games on medium settings at 144hz with whatever graphics card I'm going to buy.

I found the Sapphire RX 580 8GB on Amazon for £218 and the Zotac 1070 Mini on Amazon for £229.

 

[rolli59]

Yes it is! Good deal.

 

[NightHawkRMX]

I have heard of RX cards with similar issues.
The 1070 and 1070ti offer great value right now. Since your upgrading from a graphics card I'd consider midrange now, i wouldn't consider an rx card.
Rx 570/580 beat Nvidia at the lower end, but I would consider Nvidia for the higher end cards. The cheapest 4gb 570 is priced at 124 pounds and the cheapest 4gb 1650 is priced at 137 pounds. The 570 beats a GTX 1650 by a big margin nearly every time even though it costs less.
However, for higher end cards, Nvidia Pascal cards offer better value than RX or Turing GPUs.
I would buy the GTX 1070. That is a good deal.

 

[clutchc]

I have a Gigabyte GTX 1070 Mini ITX OC in one of my pre-builts (Optiplex 9020 MT). It had to be that card because of the length limitation in the Dell case. Even running with an aging i7-3770, it is a bear of a card. Nearly as fast as my Evga GTX 1070 SC Gaming is in the PC I'm on now. You might want to check it out as the clocks are a bit faster out-of-the-box than the Zotac. Of course OC'ing can narrow the margin. Either way, the GTX 1070 is the way to go more so than the RX 580 since you have the CPU to easily support it.

Btw, I also have a RX 580 and RX 590. No comparison to the 1070.

 

[cryoburner]

Prices for RX 580s appear to start around £170 in the UK, so you could probably find better pricing on one...

https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/products/video-card/overall-list/#c=391&sort=price&page=1

And most 1070s are priced significantly higher, but that model appears to be on a good sale at the moment, so it might be a decent option, assuming it doesn't also suffer from coil whine or something. The 1660 Ti is Nvidia's current-generation card that offers performance similar to a 1070, but prices for it start around £250.

There's also the 1660 (non-Ti) worth considering, which offers performance roughly in between a GTX 1070 and an RX 580, which can be found priced a bit lower...

https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/products/video-card/overall-list/#sort=price&c=439

I wouldn't pay £220 for an RX 580 when you can get a faster 1660 for less. Only consider RX 580s in the sub-£200 range.

AMD's current cards around this price range are about 2 years old at this point, and they are expected to be releasing some much-improved 7nm cards before long, but it will likely be a few months before those are out.

 

[clutchc]

+1^
I sure hope AMD/ATI/Radeon gets competitive with Nvidia again for gaming.