We're refreshing our picks
Prices for products in this category have moved above £250 since our last review. We track the market daily and will restore the under-£250 recommendations the moment products come back into bracket.
We're rebuilding our recommendations across this category. Browse all buyer's guides while we restock.
Frequently Asked Questions
Here's the honest truth: the title is a bit misleading. None of these cards actually cost under £250, with prices ranging from £289 to £578. However, the RTX 5060 comes closest and can handle 1440p gaming in less demanding titles with settings adjustments. For proper 1440p performance across modern AAA games, you're looking at the £400-£520 range with cards like the RX 9060 XT or RTX 5070.
You'll want at least 8GB for 1440p, but 12GB or 16GB is ideal for future-proofing. Modern games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Hogwarts Legacy can push past 8GB at high settings. The RX 9060 XT's 16GB gives you plenty of headroom, while the RTX 5060's 8GB means you'll need to watch texture quality settings in VRAM-hungry titles.
The RTX 3050 and 3060 in this roundup are overpriced at £440-£445 for their age and performance. You're better off spending a bit more on the RTX 5060, which offers newer architecture, GDDR7 memory, and better efficiency. The older cards only make sense if you find them on sale for under £200.
GDDR7 is the latest memory standard, offering significantly higher bandwidth (28Gbps vs 16-18Gbps for GDDR6). This means faster data transfer between the GPU and memory, which helps with high-resolution textures and ray tracing. The RTX 5060 and 5070 cards feature GDDR7, giving them a performance edge over older GDDR6 cards in memory-intensive scenarios.
No, you don't. While the newer cards support PCIe 5.0, they'll work perfectly fine in PCIe 4.0 or even 3.0 slots. The performance difference is negligible for gaming. The RTX 5060 actually uses PCIe 5.0 x8, which is equivalent to PCIe 4.0 x16 bandwidth, so even older motherboards won't bottleneck these cards.
