AMD

AMD makes better processors, hands down........ Nvidia is the graphics king

My current PC is a Ryzen 9 5950x with a RTX 3060 12gb

The only correct answer.. is Sapphire. if you are going to go AMD... you go Sapphire... Im on my third Sapphire card.. and each one has been excellent.. (RX590 - sold, RX-5700 - back up gaming rig and RX-6800 - primary gaming rig) Never have a problem with any of them.

Now you may pay a few extra bucks.. but its well worth it. Not saying that any of the other brands are bad.. (might stay away from Asus though). But when i started out getting my first GPU everyone was unanimous with Sapphire.

I would not recommend Asus for an AMD GPU. My top three would be Sapphire, XFX, and very surprisingly ASRock, all pretty much tied. They all perform similar at similar temps, the Sapphire will have better quality control and will run quieter than XFX, and I honestly just find the ASRock cards ugly most of the time. Replacing the fans would improve that a lot though lol.

Close following is Power Color, but this generation they perform slightly below the 3 I listed and haven't been great at QC.

I have an XFX Merc310 because their price was stellar and their performance is on par with the best. Just a bit louder, but I use closed back headphones.

As far as Nvidia, I generally went Asus or MSI.

For AMD I'd go Sapphire or PowerColor.

There are definitely brands I avoided though. Back when I had an Nvidia card, I shied away from EVGA mainly due to how many people seemed to know how amazing their customer service was and recommend them based mostly on that, gave me the impression their cards had reliability issues.

For AMD I'd personally stay away from anything not reference (Sapphire I think), Sapphire, Powercolor or possibly XFX.

ASRock has been doing AMD cards for a while now and have been good.

They only do AMD and Intel, no nVidia.

Usually the non-exclusive brands like ASUS just slap whatever cooler they use for nVidia with some minor tweaks on their AMD GPUs, sometimes it works well, sometimes not, you gotta look for reviews on the specific model you're looking at.

Meanwhile AMD exclusive brands like Sapphire, PowerColor and XFX have coolers built with the AMD GPUs in mind and offer more predictable quality.

From personal experience all I can tell you is all my XFX cards were pretty great and the Asus Strix RX 480 I had a few years ago was pretty good too and still going strong in a friend's machine so you're probably fine going with the TUF if those 50 CAD are important to you.

It's not so much brands themself, but every brand can have a dud line up (also on nvidia)

Sapphire is roughly amd equivalent to what used to be evga.

Xfx lately has done very well on amd cards.