Life moves fast, or so the saying goes, and it feels like the Prime Day sales were ages ago. As it so happens, it's barely been a week since Big Jeff's Days even finished. Naturally, you'd expect prices for everything to bounce right back up, but for graphics cards, that actually hasn't happened.
And in two particular cases, they're not only cheaper than they were in the Prime Day sales but they're also the cheapest they've been, full stop.
Quick links
- Sparkle Arc B570: $200 @ Amazon
- MSI GeForce RTX 5070: $500 @ Best Buy
Intel's Arc B570 isn't the fastest graphics card in the entry-level sector, but it's certainly the cheapest. So if you're looking to add a new GPU to a gaming PC and you've got a very tight budget, then Sparkle's Battlemage-powered card is well worth considering.
With just 10% fewer shaders and 17% less memory bandwidth than the Arc B580, the B570 isn't what you'd call a slow card, though. The problem with Intel's GPU is that its architecture is a bit picky about what games it has to process; in some, it's really fast, but the older the game, the worse it gets.
Arc cards do have a couple of extra tricks up their sleeves, too. First of all, XeSS. This is Intel's answer to AMD's FSR and Nvidia's DLSS, and it sits firmly between the two in terms of image quality and performance when using its upscaler and frame generation algorithms.
Secondly, the B570 has terrific video encoders/decoders, so if you do a lot of streaming or need something for home media, then an Arc card is well worth considering. Finally, there's the fact that the B570 has 10 GB of VRAM. While most games get by with 8 GB when run on an entry-level GPU, there will come a time in the not-too-distant future when it won't quite be enough.
To be honest, though, the only thing that really matters here is the price. For just $200 at Amazon, you're getting a whole heap of graphics card for your pennies.
Sporting the same-sized discount as the Arc B570, this GeForce RTX 5070 from MSI is $500 at Best Buy. That's nicely under MSRP, and just like with the Arc card, it's the cheapest it's been since launch.
To be fair, this is the price that the RTX 5070 should have sported when it was released. However, with supplies being very limited, third-party models like this one typically wielded $600+ price tags, which just seems ridiculous now when you look back. At least you can now buy one for a sensible-ish amount of money.
The middle-of-the-RTX-50-series pack 5070 has been somewhat overshadowed by the excellent 16 GB RTX 5060 Ti and 5070 Ti, partly because of its launch price, but mostly because a lot of PC gamers were put off by it only having 12 GB of VRAM, when the competition—the Radeon RX 9070—sports 16 GB.
That particular graphics card is generally faster than the RTX 5070, but it's also more expensive ($550 at Newegg). With a $50 difference in price, you need to ask yourself whether it's worth spending the extra for the uplift in performance. If outright gaming is all that matters, then I'd say that it is worth spending a bit more for the RX 9070.
However, if you use your graphics card for content creation, or if upscaling and multi-frame generation are a must for you, to achieve the highest possible frame rates, then the RTX 5070 is the better option.
You'll be happy with either one, though, and the real news behind both of these days is that we're finally getting some options in the GPU market, at long last. Sure, the top-end models are still priced into the realms of ridiculousness, but if $500 is your absolute limit for a graphics card, then you won't be disappointed with the RTX 5070.
👉All the best graphics card deals right now👈
1. Best overall: AMD Radeon RX 9070
2. Best value: AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT 16 GB
3. Best budget: Intel Arc B570
4. Best mid-range: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti
5. Best high-end: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090
You must confirm your public display name before commenting
Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.
