I am thinking about building a new PC in the next few months. My current rig I am using a GTX 970 overclocked from the manufacture. It is a great card. I am not current with all the different models. I am not looking to break the bank here. Say 400 dollars. I do not care if its an AMD or Nvidia. What would be a step up from my GTX 970?
Depending where you life the price of 1070 might be very high due to mining demand. Vega56 is also an option considering its reasonably priced, you might want to get over 1070. If Vega56 and 1070 are way more expensive their MSRP price. I'd suggest to go for 1080. Unlike 970/980, there bigger performance cap between 1070 and 1080.
I don´t understand how anyone could recommend Vega. Vega is awful, AMD failed hard. Performance consistency is awful, perf/watt ratio is awful, drivers are awful, overclocking Vega is worse than death, stock cooler is ludicrous, mining performance is not that great. Just stick with Nvidia.
So what? For some reasons, media is praising AMD products like Vega 56 and RX580. Sure, it can provide slightly more performance in some titles than 1070(RX580 vs 1060) for the same price but with a much higher power consumption, much less consistent performance (TPU even removed some games from their benchmarks because they performed poorly on AMD lol), much higher noise when comparing stock coolers, much worse overclocking and much worse availability. There are 0 reasons to buy AMD VGAs. Ryzen and Threadripper are a different story, they are awesome for certain workloads but AMD VGAs are just not worth anyone money.
Don't get me wrong, Vega 56 looks to be the real card to look out for with AMD's current lineup, but are they going to be available like V64? Sold out within an hour and then coming for an extra price? Better be fast to grab a card without the bundle or you could just as well go for a used 1080 at this point.
If like is too bias even I'm NVIDIA fanboy, but VEGA 56 is really worth to be considered. As for the processor I personally think there's no reason to buy any AMD CPUs.