Best budget graphics card

Gigabyte Aorus Radeon RX 570

 

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$159.99

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The Gigabyte Aorus is a gorgeous, well-performing graphics card. The Radeon RX 570 is the best sub-$200 gaming option around—but it isn't much of a step up over the RX 470.

The best low-cost graphics card you can buy right now didn’t start off as one. The AMD Radeon RX 570 started off as a $180 refresh of the already-great Radeon RX 470, but now that 2018’s cryptocurrency crunch is over and Nvidia’s new wave of mainstream GPUs is starting to crest, this family of graphics cards is starting to get cheap. Like, really cheap. “You can always find a Radeon RX 570 for $130 with three months of Xbox Game Pass for PC thrown in” cheap.

That’s an incredibly enticing price for a superb 1080p graphics card that can hit the hallowed 60 frames per second mark at High or Ultra settings in most modern games. You may need to tinker with some visual settings to achieve that goal, though. Both 4GB and 8GB versions are available. Always take more memory if you can afford it in a graphics card, but the cheaper 4GB models should hold up fine at 1080p resolution in most games.

The insane value proposition of these discounted Radeon RX 570 graphics cards have rendered true budget GPUs like the GeForce GTX 1650, the older GeForce GTX 1050 Ti, and the Radeon RX 560 obsolete unless you need a graphics card that doesn’t require any extra power connections. Just get one of these—and enjoy those free games while you’re at it.