If you are a budget gamer looking to set up a relatively cheap gaming PC for under $350-400, your options maybe very limited especially if you do not want to go the used route. In that case, the Radeon RX 6500 XT, the PowerColor Fighter variant, is currently on sale for just ~$111, making it a solid deal (purchase link down below).
This card though is far from flawless as it is limited to just four lanes of PCIe bandwidth and being a 4 Gig VRAM card, you can only get its full potential if you run it on PCI Express version 4.0 or newer or else modern AAA title textures can easily overwhelm the available memory buffer leading to stutters, jitters, and in general, recessed performance. However, these should not be an issue on PCIe Gen4 and newer, and most modern systems these days are based on PCIe 4.0.
You can also use the card on PCIe 3.0 PCs but only if you are going to be playing older (pre-DX12) titles.
The 6500 XT is not a ray tracing card by any means shape or form, but it is still an excellent gaming GPU at the budget. The card is actually faster than Nvidia"s more expensive 3050 6GB in rasterization. As an HTPC GPU, the 6500 XT is not such a great option though, as it lacks AV1 decoding and has no media encoding block, so do keep these in mind.
Get the RX 6500 XT at the link below:
- PowerColor Fighter AMD RX 6500 XT (AXRX 6500XT 4GBD6-DH/OC): $110.49 (Sold and Shipped by Amazon US)
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