Prime Day is on and there are also graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia on sale. But you should definitely keep your distance from a few offers, because these will hardly be worthwhile in 2023.
On Prime Day you will also find some graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia. While some GPUs are indeed worthwhile upgrades, such as the RTX 3060 Ti, there are a few products that we would advise against purchasing.
2 models in particular are hardly worthwhile today and have long been outdated. There are simply better alternatives on offer.
You can also find all sensible offers in our Prime Day ticker:
more on the subject
Amazon Prime Day: Live ticker with the best offers and deals on day 2
by Benedict Schlotmann
Radeon RX 550
What is the problem? The RX 550 is now a very outdated entry-level graphics card. In 2023, integrated graphics chips from AMD CPUs (so-called APUs) will already have more graphics performance than these graphics cards.
100 euros sounds tempting at first, but for 50 euros more you already get an RX 6500 XT, which not only offers the significantly better GPU architecture, but also significantly more performance in Full HD. The RX 6500 XT isn’t a perfect graphics card either, but for the extra price it’s significantly better than the old Polaris model.
For a pure office system, we would in most cases recommend an AMD CPU with a graphics chip, such as the Ryzen 5 5600G, which also manages many games with low details. And you can now get the Ryzen 5 5600G in stores for around 100 euros, which is just as expensive as the RX 550.
The YouTuber “High FPS” made a helpful comparison video. Here you can see that the Ryzen 5 5600G’s iGPU is almost always slightly faster than the Radeon RX 550:
iGPU Vega 11 vs Radeon RX 550.
GeForce GT 1030
The GeForce GT 1030 has a similar problem as the RX 550, because it’s quite a few years old. The card was officially released in March 2018 and experienced its new heyday during the mining boom in the Corona phase. The GT 1030 was sometimes sold for just under 200 euros.
We would currently advise against buying a GT 1030. On Prime Day you pay an average of 100 euros for this card. For 50 euros more you get the GTX 1650, which is also reduced and offers you significantly more performance. Especially with modern games you have absolutely no chance with the GT 1030.
It is just about sufficient for a small office or streaming system in the living room, but you cannot use 4K streaming. Nvidia names the GTX 1050 (Ti) as the minimum requirement for 4K. For a pure office system, we would also recommend a Ryzen 5 5600G or comparable processor. Thanks to low consumption and waste heat, this can also be used in a very small system.
You can find recommended graphics cards from Nvidia in our purchase advice on MeinMMO:
Buying an Nvidia graphics card in 2023 – which one is worth it for me?
Beware of graphics cards that are too cheap
Fraudsters are also on the move on Amazon and take the opportunity to cheat innocent buyers on Prime Day. That’s why it’s better to double-check the offers and think carefully about whether someone is really offering hardware for little money, or whether a user is making a bad joke.
Also pay attention to things like ratings of the dealer or the location. If it is a completely new account or if the seller would prefer to make the purchase via Whatsapp or otherwise, cancel the purchase immediately and contact Amazon!
User buys top GPU for 300 euros – community explains to him why he will never see the graphics card