PNY RTX 3080 Ti for £743 (was £804) Palit RTX 3070 for £453 (was £513) Palit RTX 3060 for £283 (was £333)
First, the RTX 3080 Ti. This high-end card, ideal for 4K or HFR 1440p gaming was dubbed ‘a big disappointment’ by Katharine in her review. What’s changed since then? Well, this £1050 graphics card has dropped precipitously in price, and now costs just £743 in the current deal. That’s less than £100 below the RRP of the vanilla RTX 3080, set before the great GPU shortage, and consequently this is a solid deal on a card that is within a couple of percentage points of the RTX 3090, and a good 10% ahead of the standard 3080 with a little more RAM. Overall, not the best value graphics card on the market, but the combination of stellar performance, best-in-class features and a massively reduced price point is hard to beat.
The RTX 3070 is much easier to recommend, offering the performance of the outgoing balls-out RTX 2080 Ti while consuming less power. This model is going for just £453, some £16 below its UK RRP and a solid choice given the level of performance on offer. This card can stretch to 4K gaming with a few settings tweaks, but also works great at 1080p and 1440p at higher frame-rates. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the good performance and much lower price, Katharine dubbed it ‘a very safe bet for the foreseeable future’ and ‘an excellent upgrade option for current GTX 1070 owners’, and I’d definitely agree with that assessment.
Finally, the RTX 3060. This is a 1080p or 1440p card that doesn’t quite offer the level of performance per pound of the RTX 3060 Ti, RTX 3070 and RTX 3080, but still performs well and should stay relevant thanks to its full feature set. You get double the performance of the GTX 1060, a card that is still among the very most popular amongst Steam gamers, and with this deal you’re only paying £283. That’s an awesome deal, and given that a next-gen RTX 4060 ought to appear towards the tail end of the Nvidia’s Ada Lovelace cards, you’re not likely to find a better choice at this price point for some time.
In any case, that’s enough GPU talk for me - I’m going to… use my GPU to play World of Tanks. Anyway, thanks for joining me once again and I’ll see you again next week for more deals - and I promise, no more non-rechargeable batteries again.
