GTX-1070 and FX-6300 bottleneck

[FMod]

True. But also keep in mind that a 1060 3GB will be difficult to sell once you're done with it and will lose more value. So if you think of it as leasing GPU rather than buying, the price difference is quite small.

 

And I prefer to think of it as leasing - anything that gets obsolete quickly and never appreciates isn't really an investment. You pay $$/month to have a PC with 20% of reference performance (1060/FX-6300), or $$$/month to have 80% of reference performance (anything over 80% is extreme overclocking land). Every so many months you need to sell and upgrade pieces, otherwise your reference-% decays and newer stuff doesn't run as smooth.

 

If you plan to keep it forever, a 6 GB makes sense, because future games might get VRAM-hungry. Really that card would've been right at home with an in-between amount, say 4 GB, but oh well.

 

At $200 vs $260, though, the 6 GB makes no sense. It's $60 for something you'll hardly ever use, and probably have a new card by the time you need it. If you like top quality at low fps, you might use over 3 GB. If you like 60 fps at the expense of settings, no way.

[iXenite]

If you plan to keep it forever, a 6 GB makes sense, because future games might get VRAM-hungry. Really that card would've been right at home with an in-between amount, say 4 GB, but oh well.

 

At $200 vs $260, though, the 6 GB makes no sense. It's $60 for something you'll hardly ever use, and probably have a new card by the time you need it. If you like top quality at low fps, you might use over 3 GB. If you like 60 fps at the expense of settings, no way.

 

I think that by the time games require more than 4GB's of VRAM that the GTX 1060 is going to be too weak anyway. If newer games come out that need to use up it's 6GB's it just wont have the compute power to actually handle that game. I totally agree that 4GB's would have been nice for the cut down 1060 though, but I guess that's just how it is. I also agree with you on the current prices. Right now the difference between the 3GB GTX 1060 and the 6GB version is too great to justify buying the 6GB version. Especially when you consider that the difference at 1080p isn't really worth it anyway. People who really want more VRAM should look into the GTX 1070, or the GTX 1080. The 1080 probably is the better deal right now though due to the inflated prices of the other GPU's. Those GPU's will last a good few years, and even longer if you take your time buying games.

[FMod]

For any 1060. It's likely to need more than 3 GB, highly unlikely to need more than 4 GB, and it will never need the full 6.

 

Low fps tolerance and screen size matter, though. The larger your screen, the more fps you need for comfortable motion resolution. 30 fps is very tolerable on a laptop or a mid-sized TV far away, but 60 fps feels torn on a big screen. There's also significant individual variation within any given resolution.

 

There's a particular breed of "renderphile" gamers that seem obsessed with setting everything to ultra, while not giving a damn about viewing it through a small dim yellowish TN screen that's barely adequate for a paper salesman's office. To them, the 6GB would represent good value.

 

To the rest, IDK. All of the Radeons are currently highly priced due to being scooped up by miners. The 1080 is in a whole other price range, it's not a real competitor. The 1060/3 still represents good value, but you'll have to sell it soon.