Buying a suitable graphics card can be a difficult task for those who are not so good in technicalities of computer hardware. You will have to take care of a lot of things in order to buy a suitable graphics card for AMD Ryzen 5 3600. It is a high-end processor and even though it is not the latest processor by the company, it is surely one of the best processors for those who want to get the best bang for the buck. Here are the few things that you must take care of while buying a graphics card for AMD Ryzen 5 3600.
1) Red Or Green Team
What we are going to discuss may upset some of the users since a lot of people are “fanboys” for either “Red” or the “Green” team. If you have not guessed it yet, the Red team means AMD and the Green team means NVIDIA. Both NVIDIA and AMD offer unique graphics processing units for the masses and it is a difficult task to select either of them. So, let’s have a look at what both companies offer.
First of all, AMD has been rocking the budget GPU market for the last couple of years by offering cheap but powerful solutions like AMD Radeon RX 570, RX 580, RX 5500 XT, and RX 5600 XT. That is exactly why going with the Red team for a budget user is going to be better since these graphics cards offer better performance than their NVIDIA counterparts such as NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060, 1650 Super, 1660 Super, etc. A downside of using an AMD graphics card is that you will be suffering from driver issues and some of the games might not run optimally due to less compatibility between the hardware and software.
Meanwhile, NVIDIA is leading the high-end market and it offered the likes of GTX 980 Ti before, followed by GTX 1080, GTX 1080 Ti and the RTX-series graphics cards such as RTX 2080, RTX 2080 Ti and now RTX 3080, and RTX 3080 Ti. AMD seems to be promising this year as well, providing the likes of AMD Radeon RX 6800 and RX 6900 XT but at least you won’t be getting the exclusive features of NVIDIA such as NVIDIA Ray Tracing and DLSS. Moreover, NVIDIA graphics cards provide Tensor cores as well which are highly beneficial for compute workloads such as machine learning.
So, it will be better to consider buying AMD graphics cards if you are planning to buy a graphics card for around five hundred bucks but if you are going to spend more than that, it is going to be a safer bet to buy an NVIDIA graphics card such as NVIDIA RTX 3070 or RTX 3080.
2) Performance Target
Now, let us discuss the performance of various kinds of graphics cards. First of all, you have to check the basic factors for what kind of performance you want. If you are using a monitor with 1080P resolution and high refresh rate, it would be better to buy a mid-range graphics card which would be able to provide you with upwards of 100 FPS.
For a 1440P high refresh rate screen, you will have to buy a high-end graphics card such as the likes of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 or higher in order to obtain around 100 FPS in the latest AAA games.
For 4K resolution, a high-end graphics going like RTX 2080 is going to work as well as long as the refresh rate is 60 Hz, however, if you are working with high refresh rate 4K monitor such as ASUS PG27UQ or Acer Predator X27, you will have to buy the best of the best such as RTX 3080, etc. or RX 6900 XT if you want to obtain FPS around 100.
3) Choosing a Variant
As you might know already, a graphics card model has multiple variants that are provided by various vendors such as ASUS, MSI, EVGA, SAPPHIRE, etc. Choosing a variant is also a difficult task since they come with exclusive features and you might be missing on something if you buy a wrong variant. Some of the most famous right now are ASUS, MSI, and GIGABYTE when it comes to NVIDIA graphics card and SAPPHIRE, ASUS, and MSI in AMD graphics cards.
Even a single vendor offers various variants of a graphics card chip, providing the user with multiple options, targeting budget users, enthusiasts, and mid-range users. The high-end variants are more expensive and provide faster clock rates and are often better in looks as well since they usually come with RGB lighting, etc.
One of the biggest advantages of buying a high-end variant is that they have a better cooling solution. This is mainly due to using a larger heat-sink in combination with a higher number of heat-pipes and custom fans that provide higher airflow. Buying a graphics card with a high-end cooling solution reduces the temperatures of the graphics card during load and this not only increases the life of the graphics card but also enables it to run at higher clock rates which result in increase in performance.
Moreover, a high-end variant comes with a custom PCB that is able to withstand overclocking as well so that the user can overclock the graphics card, which increases the overall performance in games or other applications. Another advantage of high-end variants is that they are much more durable than cheaper variants because they come with durable components such as VRM. Also, all of the high-end variants come with a back-plate that is used to support the graphics card and looks better aesthetically as well since it hides the rear side of the PCB.
4) Compatibility with the processor
This is a step that is often overlooked by many people. A graphics card must not be having a mismatch with the processor. This means that you have to use a graphics card that is fully compatible with the graphics card and there is no major bottleneck in the system. Since AMD Ryzen 5 3600 is a high-end processor, there is no graphics card right now that would outmatch it. The NVIDIA RTX 3090 is a graphics card which might push it to the maximum but even then, you would be probably using a high-resolution screen which solely puts the load on the graphics card. Therefore, you can buy any graphics card with AMD Ryzen 5 3600 as long as you are running the processor at its full potential and using a high-frequency RAM kit with it.