BEST $700 Gaming PC with A750, RX 6600 XT, OR RTX 3050!

this is the Intel Arc a750 and it recently saw a price reduction from its launch MSRP of 290 down to 250 250 dollars brand new is a very attractive price point for a modern day graphics card if you're looking to build a new pc and are on a smaller budget this is the price range you want to be targeting now normally in a video like this I'd have a PC sitting right here next to me but the one being featured for this video was actually something that I built for a friend of mine's nephew and it's already been picked up as a recording this but I did think ahead and recorded footage of it so that I could pop it in right here hopefully it looks somewhat natural uh this PC cost 700 and that's using all brand new parts that's no more than a generation old and I'm very happy with the performance it's able to put out given the price this is actually going to kind of be a hybrid video I want to showcase what you can put together for 700 that can game well as well as record and stream and do things like that but also I wanted to put this a750 graphics card head to head with its kind competition at the same price point that is what AMD and Nvidia has to offer at 250 dollars that way you can see what options you have and decide for yourself what's worth your money so yeah let's check out what's in this build right after a quick word from this video sponsor hey it's me again I am this video sponsor this shirt I'm currently wearing is one of my designs from my official merch if you're interested in this or the first design I released you can check them out using the links in the description below it's a great way to support the channel while also getting a little something in return also I want to remind you that I stream every Wednesday at 5 PM Pacific Time right here on YouTube where I talk about computer stuff do you hunt help people out with their PC related questions things like that we just hang out every single Wednesday it's pretty chill Vibe I hope to see you there alright that's it for the plug let's get back to the video as always links for all the parts used in this build will be in the description in case you want to check any of them out but this is what we're working with starting off with the processor I went with the Intel I3 12100f don't let this being an I3 mislead you this is a very solid budget processor that offers great performance at around the 100 price point it's got four cores eight threads and in gaming it actually trades bowls with amd's ryzen 5 5600 which is noticeably more expensive at around forty dollars more for cooling I went with the white se214xt from ID cooling we were going for a white aesthetic and this fit the bill at only twenty dollars while offering great performance if you don't care about Aesthetics at all feel free to save 20 bucks here and use the stock cooler that works just as well i3s don't run that hot paired with the 1200f is the ASRock v660m Pro RS this is a very entry-level bc60 board often going on sale for less than a hundred dollars I picked it up for 95 and for that price it gets the job done I'd be comfortable pairing this board with up to an i5 but any further than that and you want to consider spending a bit more money on something higher end for this build though it's more than sufficient for memory we've got 16 gigabytes of Team group Delta RGB in white this is a 3200 cl16 kit that's a true latency of 10 nanoseconds which is very standard storage wise we also have Team group with the m mp33 in one terabyte no dram on this entry level SSD but it is TLC as opposed to most budget drives that are qlc and it does utilize hmb AKA host memory buffer which leverages system memory in place of dedicated dram cache for improved performance this drive is pretty much 50 bucks or less all the time which is a great price for the capacity and performance power supply pricing is still all over the place so I used one that I picked up a few months ago on sale the Deep cool dq750m v2l this power supply is a bit overkill for this system but was appropriately priced for the overall budget the power supply so long as it's a decent unit and at the appropriate wattage for the hardware won't really impact gaming performance so there's flexibility here to choose based on what's pricewater at any given time I'd recommend to grab no less than a 550 watt unit for a build like this and stick to at least the seats here or better on the PSU tier list I'll have some alternate options down in the description because power supply prices are definitely a moving Target for the case we've got the gamdius Talos E3 in white which I was able to pick up for 55 on sale this fits the overall look that we were going for and is actually my first time building in this I think it looks great aesthetically with three included argb fans two in the front one in the rear which can either be controlled by a button on the case or be plugged into a motherboard 5 volt header to be controlled via software other than that though it's pretty basic it's got Breakaway expansion slot covers no rubber grommets for the cable cutouts no cable management Raceway in the back no special mechanisms for attaching the glass in the metal side panels but that's all most expected given its low price all right I saved the best for last the graphics card or graphics cards I should say for a build price at 700 spending 250 on the GPU is a pretty good balance it's a bit over one third of the total budget and gets you something that will easily handle pretty much everything at 1080P and also be able to do a lot at 1440p for Intel we have the arc a750 it is 250 dollars pretty much all the time ever since it's seen its price drop from AMD we've got some tough competition because the RX 6600 XT is often around this price as well almost every single week I see at least one deal for it down to around 260 dollars now that's a hair over 250 dollars but I decided to choose it for this comparison because it's closer than the RX 6600 non-xt is those are usually around like 220 or so so between both cards I think the XT is closer in price and for NVIDIA man I don't even know what to say about Nvidia performance wise we should be comparing the RTX 3060 to these two because that would be a much closer match but unfortunately we can't because it's still priced ridiculously high right now at around 330 dollars yes two years after its release it still hasn't seen any notable price drop from MSRP the RTX 3050 on the other hand is actually the closest price card that they have to offer but it's even a struggle to find a 3050 at its supposed 250 launch price it's often 270 dollars so it's the most expensive of these three cards but as you'll see later on in the benchmarks it's the weakest by a long shot and no I don't care if RTX 3060s can be found for a bit cheaper in the used Market this is a comparison based on how much they can be found for brand new there's not enough Intel cards floating around in the used Market at this point in time due to being so much newer so it wouldn't be fair to look at used pricing so it's a three-way battle between the arc a750 the RX 6600 XT and the RTX 3050. before that though let's take a quick look at the overall build summary and price breakdown depending on what card is chosen we're coming in right around that targeted 700 price point before tax I think everything is pretty well balanced in this build no major Corners were cut to get it down to this price some value oriented parts were definitely used but it's all within the scope of the target budget here's a quick time lapse of the build sequence followed by some Glamor Shots of the completed system [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] all right time for the benchmarks I tested all the titles at 1440p in order to force the bottleneck into the gpus since we are working with an I3 12100f here don't get me wrong I like seeing when reviewers pair these lower to mid-tier cards with like an Uber expensive I9 or ryzen 9 to eliminate any chance of a CPU bottleneck but I also think it's important and useful to see comparisons in more realistic pairings too like I think way more people will actually pair these cards with an I3 than those higher end processors if you don't like the way I do it then also check out the other channels that do it the other way you know get some variety in your sources before making an informed decision testing parameters are all going to be listed on screen with regards to like the driver versions being used the windows version and all that good stuff so yeah let's take a look at the numbers we'll go in alphabetical order so first up is Apex Legends at Max settings I test in the shooting range for a side-by-side comparison like this because it allows me to do the exact same pass each time without any outside influence in Apex the a750 takes the victory with the 6600 XT trailing behind by 11 and the 3050 behind by 39 all the percentages I show will be relative to the a750 performance as reference next up is Assassin's Creed Valhalla this was tested at the preset medium settings in the large town of London and here the 6600 XT has a very large 32 lead over the a750 while the 3050 Trails behind by nine percent this isn't too surprising as Assassin's Creed typically performs better on AMD cards from what I've seen in the past in the newest Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 using the built-in multiplayer Benchmark at preset balance settings I first tested with no upscaling at all here the rx6600 XT has a wide 41 lead over the a750 and the 35th the unsurprisingly performs the worst I also tested Modern Warfare 2 using the respective upscaling technologies that is Intel with their xcss AMD with FSR and Nvidia with dlss all set to their performance presets interestingly here we do see the 3050 closing the Gap with the a750 but AMD comes out as a clear Victor with more than a 70 lead over the other two cards csgo is an older title running on DirectX 9. at launch the Intel Arc gpus were pretty underwhelming when it came to older apis like dx9 and dx11 and this was one of the titles that saw a big performance uplift in the recent driver updates here I ran the workshop Benchmark map at Max settings and even with the newest driver update for the arc card the rxcc 600xt still takes the victory by a decently large margin of 38 percent the 3050 comes in last and do note that all three cards took a huge hit to the one percent lows performance mainly due to the Smoke portion of the test that tanks to FPS next is cyberpunk 2077 which I tested at me medium settings and I've got four different test configurations I checked out first is the Baseline with no Ray tracing and no upscaling just raw rasterization performance none of these cards were able to hit that company 60fps average with the rx6600 XT getting the closest beating the a750 by 17 and the 3050 Trails a750 by 21 taking a look at the cards with upscaling enabled with the a750 and 6600 XT using FSR since dlss is not available to them and the 3050 making use of the LSS we do see favorable performance uplifts across the board all three cards now manage to get over 60fps with the 3050 leading the pack surprisingly and the a750 actually coming in last but not by much a rare victory for the 3050 we're not going to see too much of that now let's take a look at Ray tracing turned on before any upscaling right off the bat we can see that all three cards have horrible performance with no upscaling as expected remember we're talking about a triple a title that's already demanding with regular rasterization adding the fact that it's 1440 feet and you have Ray chasing turn on yeah of course it's not going to do well the a750 takes the lead here and the rx6600 XT actually comes in dead last placed and last we have the results with both Ray tracing and upscaling enabled here Intel barely squeezes by with the Victory and I think it's that Ray tracing performance that's carrying it here because earlier we saw it come in last place with only upscaling but it led in the ray tracing only so mixing the two together the ray tracing was good enough to help it get the W next is Far Cry 6 which I used a built-in Benchmark to test at high settings the rx6600 XT takes the lead followed by the a750 and in last again is the 3050e I do want to note though and you can see it on the screen right here that the a750 was having some graphical issues with this title this was the only title I experienced this in nothing else had anything like this I mean it still ran smoothly you know average and one percent low frame rates were fine it was just artifacting pretty badly this also happened in story mode gameplay it was actually worse there to the point where it was unplayable and nothing I did was able to fix it I removed the drivers using ddu and I did a fresh reinstall I verified the game files I reinstalled the game and nothing worked I'm not sure how widespread of a problem this is because I've seen other benchmarks out there with the Intel art cards and Far Cry 6 performing just fine but I've also come across some Reddit posts showing Far Cry 6 having artifacting problems in general even with AMD and Nvidia cards so I wouldn't blame Intel art cards on this one in fortnite at the max preset High settings with the 3D resolution increase to 100 the RX 6600 XT gets the W averaging 10 higher FPS than the a750 while the 3050 comes in 26 slower than it for Halo infinite at preset High settings we get a victory for the a750e it barely edges out the RX 6600 XT and both cards have a sizeable lead over the 3050 Hogwarts Legacy is one of the newer titles in my benchmarking suite at the moment and it's a pretty tough game to run so I turned it down to the preset low settings for these cards here the rx6600 XT leads the a750 by 16 and the 3050 Trails it by 25 note that the 6600 XT is the only card able to achieve triple digit FPS now let's take a look at what happens when we turn on their respective upscale settings all three cards get an uplift in performance they all now average over 100 FPS however the RX 6600 XT still holds on to first place but it's very notable that the RTX 3050 really closes the gap between itself and the a750 here and both average and one percent lows League Legends is kind of an interesting game because it's not really Graphics intensive and it doesn't fully utilize all the chords and threads of modern day processors thus you have lower utilization in both the CPU and GPU compared to most other more demanding titles here despite the art card getting the latest driver updates for improved performance it still comes in last place that's not to say that it performed badly though the numbers were still very good overall the other two cards were just a bit over 10 better than it surprisingly the RTX 3050 performs almost identical to the RX 6600 XT in Rainbow Six Siege with dx11 at ultra settings and 100 render scale the rx6600 XT takes first place it should be noted though that before the new driver updates Arc cards performed horribly in dx11 in this title we're talking less than triple digit FPS which for a game like Rainbow Six Siege is really bad that has been improved but I don't see much reason for anyone to run it in dx11 if Vulcan is available and gets you better numbers as you can see here where the arc card gets a huge bumper performance closing the gap between it and the 6600 XT the 3050 actually takes a minor hit in performance on Vulcan compared to the X11 and comes in last place sorry about the weird Riva tuner on-screen display scaling it decided to break specifically on Rainbow Six Siege and couldn't be scaled smaller when I got to the art card sons of the forest is the last title I tested and it's in Early Access as of the release of this video but it's a highly anticipated title one that I'm personally super excited about so I wanted to check it out in this comparison this game looks great graphics wise but it's pretty hard to run I had to use the preset low settings and even then the performance wasn't the best the RX 6600 XT leads by a large margin here the only card to run over 60fps and the a750 falls in last place which isn't too surprising this game despite being new is running on dx11 and it's not fully released yet so we may need to be patient and give Intel some time to release specific driver updates cater to it in the future and to wrap up all the testing I took a look at simultaneous recording and streaming performance now my focus wasn't on image quality here like I wasn't nitpicking pixels or anything like that that's beyond the scope of this video and it's a deep Rabbit Hole in itself what I was mainly focusing on is given that we're running with a more entry-level i3 can these cards handle taking the load off of the CPU with their respective Hardware encoders on the GPU so long as the image quality wasn't complete hot garbage they get a pass and all three of these cards did well in my opinion I tested in Halo infinite because it's a fast-paced game that already has pretty high Baseline load on both the CPU and GPU and adding in recording and streaming on top of it we do see a small drop in performance across the board represented by the red numbers with the gray Baseline performance numbers there for reference and comparison I would consider all these results still very playable and the image quality as a result of the streaming and recording was good the a750 still takes the victory here followed by the 6600 XT and last is the 3050. I'm just going to show you all the results summed up in one chart here feel free to pause the screen if you want there's a lot of bars and numbers but it's pretty easy to see that the rxcc 600 XT is the overall winner now I would like to add that it was nice to see the arc a750 take some victories like in Apex Legend and Halo infinite and the cyberpunk ray tracing tests the RTX 3050 really only saw one Victory with cyberpunk using the LSS though it did almost tie for first in the League of Legends test with the rx6600 XT now if I want to be honest all three of these cards gave very playable experiences for how much the build total was remember this build came in at 700 I gave it a harder time by testing in 1440p these will all blow 1080p gaming out of the water and I don't think many people would complain if you drop this build with any of these cards in front of them and let them have at it and start gaming now for the people who are chasing the most performance per dollar though that's a different story those people would not and should not consider the RTX 3050 at all unless they have some special use case I've actually met people in that exact scenario preference towards AMD or Nvidia generally Nvidia but uh that's also kind of work related stuff I do a lot of data science in the tensor course on there I use a lot for work okay but aside from that the 3050 should mostly be ignored if you are a gamer in my opinion it's just horrible value before you could kind of lean on the dlss as a reason to get it but with the other upscaling Tech out there now I don't think that's as valid of a talking point anymore and between AMD and Intel I think the choice is pretty clear get the RX 6600 XT if you want the best performance across most of the games and grab the a750 and maybe you're specifically playing the games that it got first place in or if you want to you know support the third horse in this GPU race also if you are particularly interested in av1 Hardware encoding which I didn't cover in this video because that's a whole nother animal but it's kind of like the Nvidia tensor core thing if you have a special use case for av1 whether it be for streaming with less data usage or for archiving smaller size videos it's hard to put a dollar value on that to compare with it's very case dependent and um I will say though while I personally find more value in the AMD card at this point in time I'm very pleased with what Intel has achieved so far and I am very hopeful for what they have planned for the future I have no doubt in my mind that they're definitely going to put pressure on both amb and Nvidia and that is a very good thing all right I'm pretty sure this video is getting long enough as it is by this point so let's get to the closing question of the day hypothetically for the next year if you had to use one of these three cards exclusively for everything you do that's gaming that's streaming video editing whatever else you do with a graphics card which one are you choosing for your own personal system is it going to be the rx6600 XT the RTX 3050 or the arc a750 which card are you going with let me know down in the comments below let's see what everyone picks other than that though I hope you all enjoyed and found this either useful or entertaining in one way or another I want to thank you all as always for watching and for continued support the channel and thanks to channel members for their above and beyond support be safe out there and I'll see you all down in the comments as well as in the next stream and or video bye

Channel: Nerd on a Budget

Views: 17,357

Keywords: nerd, on, budget, noab, geeky, gamer, gaming, games, video, nerdy, computer, pc, build, console, technology, windows, killer, nvidia, amd, radeon, intel, extreme, value, super, cheap, parts, reddit, hardwareswap, deal, hunter's, showcase, hardware, deals, best

Id: HrclhOw2dSY

Length: 20min 34sec (1234 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 10 2023