Gotcha. The OP has an ultra wide so she won’t see the same performance as your wife.
OP is also running a 1030, a goat tied to a treadmill would likely improve performance.
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I really, really want a 4090, but would settle for a 4080. That’d futureproof me for a loooooooong time. It’d mean the end of macOS for me since Apple prevents nVidia from making drivers for that OS anymore, but since 99% of my games are in Windows now and I can’t launch the macOS WoW client anymore, oh well.
I have a 9900k build waiting to be put together. I just need my back to cooperate so I can move my current rig (4770k that’s so badly binned it can’t even OC a mere 100 MHz higher than stock turbo!) and swap it for the 9900k setup. Cosmos II cases are heavy, but really good for compatibility with virtually any setup I intend to use.
If the OP has an ultrawide monitor the 3060 is definitely the better choice. I’d jump to the 3070 if possible in that situation, but I doubt the OP could make it that high up given how greedy nVidia has gotten with their pricing in the 3000/4000 series.
OP has a 300w power supply that they don’t seem to want to upgrade, so a 3060/3070 is flat out… out
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Very true, I just don’t want slot see someone waste their money on a card that won’t do the job. But the OP is willing to play at lower settings if needed, just seems to defeat the purpose of the monitor upgrade tho.
Well, like I said above, at 300w the cards are limited.
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If money weren’t an object 
My current build is an AMD AM5 7700X, with 32G of DDR5 ram…solid state drive…it’s pretty and it’s awesome…except the GPU. I know there’s so much more potential in this system. And…justification time…I can give my 2060 to my son who is running a 1050ti right now! He’d love it!!! Merry, April-mas!
As for the OP, a 600+Watt power supply is not that expensive (not even here in the great white north!), so an upgrade may be in order there too in the near future
Absoloutely. This is an issue that many people are going to start running into after power demands skyrocketing the past couple of years unfortunately.
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300 is just ultra low, I was putting 500-700w in systems back 10-15 years ago.
I put an 850 in the rig I built a couple years ago. Based on what I’m seeing from nvidia and and now I think if I built today I would be throwing in a 1000w minimum but most likely a 1200w for some extra buffer
nvidia is kind of a meme in the tech community with their power draws at this point lol.
The melting cables and the stupid new pin configs didn’t help.
I totally forgot about the Arc series from intel. They are getting positive reviews now after a rough launch, due to them fixing their drivers. But even the Arc series wants a 550w psi unfortunately.
They also require somewhat newer boards, don’t know how new honestly, but iirc they require a certain tech or they run like crap.
Seen a couple of reviews where they were disappointed until they went into bios and turned on whatever it was.
Ouch. Yeah, that really does limit their choices. The 1650 is a 75W TDP board, so it’s not going to perform superbly, but will still be an upgrade. However…
I would also point out that given the age of the current PSU in the OP’s computer I’d strongly recommend a 650/700W PSU. You can often find them on sale as those two wattages benefit from the “race to zero” as it were.
My original build for this rig was:
4770k (worst sample ever)
32 GB DDR3 RAM
780 OC (now a 1080 Ti)
250 GB SSD for macOS
128 GB SSD for Windows
250 GB SSD for WoW/D3 in macOS
Thermaltake ToughGrand 1200W PSU
My awaiting rig is:
9900k
64 GB DDR4 RAM
2x 2 TB 970 EVO Plus NVMe drives
2 TB 870 EVO for OS/less played games
2 TB 860 EVO for other games
10 TB HGST drive for DVD/blu-ray rips and downloads (this is in my current rig)
With how power hungry GPUs are these days I wouldn’t go less than 1200W. Remember, GPUs can really spike and if your PSU can’t handle that spike, the system shuts down entirely when it happens. For the 4080 1000W is minimum. For the 4090 1200W is minimum, and definitely ATX 3.0 PSUs are recommended for native +12VHPWR.
AMD had a GPU that hit 525W years ago while the 4090 (not in OC mode) hits 450. OC’d 4090s require an ATX 3.0 PSU so they can actually use the full 600W from the +12VHPWR cable (ATX 2.x PSUs must use the +12VHPWR adapter whose IC in the cable limits the power draw to 450W for safety reasons).
The melting cables was user error in virtually every case. I’m not blaming the users here though because the cable design was so bad that it had multiple failure points: it easily rocked back and forth, tension from pulling the cable could dislodge some pins, it requires enormous amounts of pressure to insert (far more than PCIe 6/8 pin connectors), and PCI-SIG botched the sense pin orientation by putting CARD_PWR_STABLE on pin 1 instead of having the orientation be SENSE 0, CARD_PWR_STABLE, CARD_CBL_PRES, SENSE 1, and if CARD_PWR_STABLE is physically not connected due to the cable having been rocked to one side, the GPU can’t tell the PSU to halt power to the card in situations where it is necessary to do so.
Sense pin orientation:
| S1 | CARD_PWR_STABLE | BLUE |
|---|---|---|
| S2 | CARD_CBL_PRES# | BLUE |
| S3 | SENSE0 | BLUE |
| S4 | SENSE1 | BLUE |
It should be:
| S1 | SENSE0 | BLUE |
|---|---|---|
| S2 | CARD_PWR_STABLE | BLUE |
| S3 | CARD_CBL_PRES# | BLUE |
| S4 | SENSE1 | BLUE |
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I haven’t kept up with GPU’s a ton. I know the had issues at launch, the biggest being they were struggling with dx9 games due to using an emulator. They fixed that.
The other limitation that still persists is they need resizable bar, which means a compatible cpu and mobi , if you don’t have it, it’s a 20% performance hit. And being newer tech I would imagine the OP doesn’t have that.
The Arc does seem to be a solid pick, if not the best pick for a modern budget build at this time tho.
That’s the part i was talking about yea.
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I play on a dell lattitude 7480
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My advice is to make sure the 1650 will match your cpu power. This is to prevent a bottleneck via the cpu.
From AMD the ryzen 3 2300x or the ryzen 5 2400g. From Intel the i3 8100 or the i3 8350k would be the best cpu you should buy. Anything more powerful then the above is fine.
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Always check spec before you buy. Especially power supply. Seems like power requirements are increasing…
For 1440p, I would advise at least RTX 3060 12GB (8GB is a scam product).
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A couple of years ago, I’d have agreed with you on the RTX 3060, but now it just feels underwhelming (I’m using an RTX 3060Ti)… When it came out it was pretty much on the budget end of GPU’s, and now its significantly less than that… Therefore I am considering replacing mine with the RTX 4090 for the next few years… But it’s a coin toss on whether or not to wait or go for it…