Given an infinite budget…
and you go for a thin client setup from out of left field!
Truly didn’t expect anyone to play an UNO reverse card like that!
Then I’ll… use my infinite budget to create some neutrino-based hybrid classical/quantum network infrastructure, so nobody’s ping is bad!
An Intel ARC 7 with 24GB of VRAM would be the dream!
But with a 6700K… there’s no official PCIe Resizable Base Address Register (ReBAR) support, or PCIe 4.0 support. (There are some UEFI patching workarounds that might be worth looking into.)
That would certainly be one of many caveats worth looking into if going Intel ARC… currently just the last gen ARC A770 16GB.
Intel oneAPI performance is good, but not CUDA good (see YouTuber “Hardware Canucks” testing the ARC B580 12GB). There is the ZLUDA project, but that shouldn’t get anyone’s hopes up based on its history.
And the Intel Quick Sync Video (QSV) encoder is amazing, it’s a legitimate contender with NVENC in some workloads, and it is sometimes the best in others. Would recommend looking for reviews and testing of QSV vs. NVENC/NVDEC.
AMD has the Radeon RX 7900XT 20GB and the 7900XTX 24GB. There’s ROCm and HIP support, but Hardware Canucks’s testing show AI is usually CUDA or bust. (ROCm support in many AI workloads can be lacking…) There’s also the AV1 encoding 1920x1082 AMD ReLive defect…
And the new Radeon RX 9070 16GB and 9070 XT 16GB with improved encoders, even for H.264 (AVC). But there isn’t any ROCm support yet…
Nvidia is so expensive, they took the G out of GTX…
and put it into the price.
The RTX 50-series has dropped 32-bit CUDA support, which breaks the old PhysX games completely. So the 4090 24GB (beware 12VHPW), 3090 Ti 24GB (beware 12VHPW), or 3090 24GB… definitely will need to look into a new PSU for handling the transient power draw spikes.
Good sources are:
Gamer’s Nexus
Hardware Unboxed
Hardware Canucks
Level1Techs/Level1Linux
Der8auer
JayzTwoCents (good start for newbies)
PC Builder (even better for noobs)
Just make a decision tree of all possibilities:
Some things to think about:
AM4 is technically a “dead” platform. So unless AMD finally decides to release the Ryzen 9 5900X3D, upgrades will cap out at either a 5800X3D for gaming, or a 5950X for productivity.
The GeForce GTX 1060 only has 6GB of VRAM, so it’ll be in 1080p “Low” graphics settings territory soon.
There are some gaming performance differences with 16GB of system RAM vs 32GB of system RAM. But it will matter much more for multitasking and productivity workloads. A dual-rank dual-channel DDR4-3600 CL16 memory config is optimal for non-APU Ryzen.
My personal choice is to upgrade to a GPU with a modern amount of VRAM, at least 12GB (but preferably 16GB).
An Intel ARC “Battlemage” B580 12GB or the ARC “Alchemist” A770 16GB may be the cheapest (note that ARC GPUs currently have 30W-45W idle power draw).
But an AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT, 7700 XT, 7800 XT, 7900 GRE/XT/XTX would also work well (but there is a hardware bug in the AV1 media encoder: AMD ReLive VCN4 1082p bug).
Nvidia is too greedy to offer many reasonable VRAM configurations, there are also tons of gimped versions of most of their popular cards to be wary of. There’s the RTX 3060 12GB (NOT THE 8GB version), RTX 3080 12GB (NOT 10GB version)/RTX 3080 Ti, RTX 3090, RTX 4060 Ti 16GB (NOT 8GB version), RTX 4070 Super, RTX 4070 Ti Super, RTX 4080 Super, and RTX 4090.
Useful resources:
TechSpot
Hardware Unboxed (YouTube)
Hardware Canucks (YouTube)
Level1Techs (also on YouTube)
Gamer’s Nexus (also on YouTube)