Tested: PNY has made a budget GPU with real creative potential

Graphics cards have become essential tools for creatives as much as they are for gamers, and while the integrated graphics cores in the latest generations of CPUs are making marked improvements, there's still nothing to beat having a dedicated graphics processor in your rig. This one from PNY uses the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 chip, one level up from the bottom of the 5-series hierarchy, paired with 8GB of dedicated RAM, making it a popular choice among low-end gamers.

What this means for creatives is a huge boost to a PC’s 3D rendering and video effects processing capabilities, as well as to AI tools. It may not be on the same level as the mighty RTX 5090, but it costs about a quarter as much and, in this compact two-fan configuration, is a good choice for small-form-factor PCs, external GPU docks, and even enormous towers.

Key specifications

Design, build and display

• Two-fan design
• Easy to install

If you’ve seen the size of the 5080 and 5090 cards, especially some of the third-party efforts, then the compact nature of PNY’s 5060 may come as a surprise. It’s not even the smallest one in the range - the company makes a single-fan 5060 with the same power consumption but a lower boost clock speed. There's a triple-fan RGB-festooned card as well, with an even higher boost speed, but the one we’ve got here is the dual-fan OC model that sits nicely in the middle.

As such, it will take up two PCIe slots in your PC case, but only extends 28cm inside. The 5-series cards tend to be a bit smaller than the 4-series overall, and this is a good size for fitting into a small PC. It’s very simple to install, requiring only an eight-pin PCIe power connection to your PSU rather than the 16-pin 12VHPWR connector we see on higher-end cards, and its relatively modest power draw means you can get away with a 550W PSU if you’re considering it for a budget build. More is always better, however.

Inside its electrostatic protection bag, the card is coated with a layer of sticky plastic that’s more difficult to remove completely than you think it’s going to be. Once that’s off, however, it slips into the PCIe slot and screws into the case: being such a short card, there's no worry about GPU sag or need for extra support.

You get four video outputs, three DisplayPorts and an HDMI, all of which hit the latest standards and can be active at once. It’s capable of pushing an 8K monitor in HDR at 60Hz, but probably wouldn’t do too well playing a game at that resolution - you’ll be much better off at 1080p. For creative work, it easily drives a 4K monitor and won’t have any trouble playing back multiple video streams.

Design score: 4/5

Features

• Latest generation
• Low down the range

The Blackwell architecture comes with the very latest Nvidia tech, and includes many gamer-centric features such as multi-frame generation and path-tracing that are aimed at making games run as smoothly and beautifully as possible.

For creatives, there have been improvements in render speeds, video processing and AI, as well as a new generation of video encoders to export your files more quickly, especially in the AV1 and HEVC codecs. The faster memory and the improved bandwidth that comes with it means your data flows more efficiently through the card, and the 5060 acts both as a drop-in upgrade over earlier cards and as an excellent addition to a system that’s been held back by integrated graphics until now.

There's Windows and Linux compatibility, and Nvidia’s Studio drivers still offer stability over the Game Ready driver’s bleeding-edge speed, but there's no Mac compatibility here. This is less of a problem for the M5 chips, as they’re already offering hardware ray-tracing and a form of upscaling through the Metal API.

So while the RTX 5090 boasts 21,760 CUDA cores for general graphics and rendering tasks, and the RTX 5080 has 10,752, the 5060 only features 3,840 of the little processors. This is a big drop that explains the card’s small size and power draw, but doesn’t mean it’s not an effective GPU for video and AI tasks.

Feature score: 3/5

Performance

• Good performance for the price
• Excellent boost for video editing

We took a PC that usually packs an RTX 5080 into the Creative Bloq Testing Lab and Feline Grooming Parlour, ran the usual battery of tests on it, then replaced the GPU board with an RTX 5060 to see what difference it made.

Obviously, there was a drop in performance, with the 16GB 5080 being two steps on the Nvidia ladder above the 8GB 5060, and it can be quite significant. In 3D Mark’s Steel Nomad gaming test, the 5060 produced a frame rate of 31fps compared to the 5080’s 82. Then, in the 2026 edition of Maxon’s demanding Cinebench benchmark, based on the Cinema 4D renderer, the difference between the two is 82%. The card we have on test here goes for about £300, while PNY’s RTX 5080 costs as much as £1,229, so the price difference is 121.5%. By splashing out on the more powerful card, you’re not getting the same increase in performance as you are in price.

In creative software, the differences can be less pronounced than they are in gaming or synthetic benchmarks. The Pugetbench for Photoshop test gives an overall score of 13,055 for the 5080 and 11,668 for the 5060, only an 11.2% difference, while in Premiere Pro (which works the GPU a lot harder) the 5060 scored lower than the 5080 in almost every metric, though its scores for Long GOP compression and GPU effects weren’t as low as you might expect. For reference, laptops using integrated graphics, even the MacBook Pro’s M5, generally score pretty poorly here, meaning the 5060 still represents a huge upgrade.

Performance score: 4/5

Price

The cost of graphics cards has gone through the roof over the past few years, so cards like the 5060 have become more popular among PC builders working to a budget. Spending a lot more cash on the 5080 or even the 5090 (if you’ve won the lottery recently or just come into some venture capital funding) does give you an increase in performance, but for creative work, spending £300 on a 5060 like this board from PNY can give a big boost without emptying the bank account.

Value score: 3/5

Who is it for?

• Graphics and video pros

Even a lower-end GPU like this is a heck of an upgrade over using a processor’s integrated graphics cores.

Buy it if...

• You need a GPU upgrade for a desktop PC
• You’re experimenting with an external GPU dock
• You’re building from scratch

Don't buy it if...

• You use a Mac
• Even this is too expensive
• Your laptop GPU is good enough