AMD Radeon RX 470
AMD’s appealing all-rounder.
At the time we went to print, AMD’s Radeon RX 470 was pretty much untouchable at this $300 price point and, in the US, AMD has just dropped the price slightly — likely in the hopes that it’ll tempt some potential GTX 1050 Ti buyers up — so it should be even more competitive by the time you’re reading this guide.
This is basically a slightly cut-down version of the RX 480, making it a comfortable 1080p/ Ultra card — it’s able to clear most modern games at 70fps with those settings, and it can even stretch to 1440p in many titles at Medium details. Most 470s require a 6- or 8-pin power connector. On a frames-perdollar metric, the RX 470 is second from the top on our list, making this one topvalue offering.
That said, it’d be remiss of us if we didn’t point out that prices on the 3GB variant of the GTX 1060 are coming pretty close to the $300 mark. The cost of the latter has continued to slip since its launch in August, and you can find super-budget options from vendors like Sapphire and XFX starting at $320 online. Measured on our frames-per-dollar metric across 16 games, the 3GB 1060 is actually the best-value card currently on the market — provided you don’t pay over $320.
Cards from the major-three (MSI, Gigabyte and ASUS) are all generally over $350, though, so if you’re going to spend that much, you might as well jump up to our recommendation in the $400 category...
After all, this is Corsair, a company that, for the last few years, has been the king of cool when it comes to aesthetic design.