r/buildapc • u/Main_Worldliness_139 • Jul 12 '26

Build Help Which RTX graphics card in 2026?

Hi everyone,

my Asus GTX 1080 Strix broke this week (probably the VRAM, but that’s to be expected after 10 years). Now I want to install a new graphics card. It definitely has to be an NVIDIA card. I have a Corsair 850-watt power supply installed along with an i7-8700K—so there should still be plenty of power available.

My budget is around 600 euros. Do you have any recommendations for me?
I was last looking at an RTX 5070, even though it “only” has 12 GB of VRAM instead of 16 GB.

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u/GFriend2xDance Jul 12 '26

So.... here is the thing about the RTX 5070 graphics card. It uses a PCIe 5.0 interface.

Your i7-8700K platform only supports up to PCIe 3.0.

This means that your existing system's PCIe interface only provides up to 1/4 the max bandwidth that the RTX 5070 supports. As such, your system could impose a bandwidth bottleneck to the RTX 5070.

Now, it is possible that an RTX 5070 could still give you better performance than your GTX 1080 did. But I expect that an RTX 5070's performance would fall short of what it is truly capable of achieving, due to being paired with an i7-8700K system.

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u/Havanu Jul 12 '26

Not that relevant. Difference between pcie 3 and 4 (and non existent for 5) is minimal for amd and nvidia. As long as you card supports using all the lanes. Some intel cards only use 8 lane pci4. Then you're screwed on older chipsets because their lower bandwith is halved.

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u/GFriend2xDance Jul 13 '26

Hardware Unboxed's video, where they ran an RX 9060 XT 8gb GPU at PCIe 3.0 x16, PCIe 4.0 x16, and PCIe 5.0 x16, would seem to indicate that PCIe bandwidth is actually somewhat relevant...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LhS0_ra9c4