Last week I finally chose to upgrade my AMD RX 580 to a RX 6750 XT. I often consider my computer to be somewhat on the good side of mid-tier, and I think that's hard to judge, but its the baseline I go for.

When looking into a new GPU, my main goal was to find a card that is probably going to run better than what my current CPU and RAM may allow, so my GPU will be bottlenecked by my other hardware, however, I didn't feel the need to get top of the line, nor could I afford it, so I set a budget for around $700.

Decided to not use Amazon for my seller and went to Newegg. I narrowed down to my 6750 XT 12GB for $470 - with a $70 off coupon code at checkout to make it $400 - or, 6800 16GB for $600.

I was really stuck between the two because after a lot of comparing and benchmark videos, of course the 6800 was the better performer, but not by a large margin. it was really the debate between the 12 and 16 Gigs of VRAM that I questioned. I did glace through Nivida cards, and saw even the high end GPUs were 12Gigs so I was confused, because 16GB should be a no brainer. I posted on r/PcBuild for advice, which I appreciate the helpful responses, and was starting to lean towards the 6750 when I found a JayzTwoCentz video, specifically about GPU VRAM. It was very insightful and I'm glad I went with the cheaper option.

I'm proud to say I've built this PC and did my best to chose the best parts for my budget, but damn are specs complicated and not overly intuitive for me. Choosing an affordable GPU for what you really need without overspending is probably the most challenging with 5 slightly different models for the same gen card and...ugh, it still makes my head hurt. Luckily my next upgrade will just to get a couple more RAM cards for 32Gigs. When I ran an ingame stress test of Hogwarts Legacy by flying around the map and through the Forbidden Forest, the new GPU handled fairly well and the VRAM was sitting between 7-10gigs while my actual RAM was maxing around 15 of my 16gigs consistantly. I'm not even sure what that fully tells me, but I know games are starting to become more demanding anyway, and RAM for the most part is cheap, so I am fine upgrading to 32, even if I really do not need it.