GeForce GTX 970 & Radeon R9 390: Are They Still Game?

The GTX 1060 vanilla version runs about $200 everywhere, save for a special deal here and there where you can get $20 off if you're lucky. The MSI Gaming version you use here is a 3GB card that runs $230 on Newegg and Amazon right now.

I just don't agree with your assessment on what the 970 and R390 are worth. Considering they both still slaughter newer games and can outperform the 1060 in some respects, $120 would be a rip-off to sell one at. Even at $150 I'd feel bad getting rid of one. I'd rather keep it.

I picked up a gigabyte OC 1060 for $180 in Sept - 16. The price increase could be due to lack of inventory.
 
Rocking a 980 here. friend has a 970 and I don't considerably beat him in framerate in games. firestrike tests etc are a different story. the thing that upsets me about owning a 980 though is a 1070 smokes it. quite annoying since it costs 200 less than I paid for a 980
 
In my country, and in much of Europe it seems, Nvidia cards are just cheaper and retailers have more in stock. It did not make much sense to buy 390 for me then. Also, it came 8 months later, and back then it was 290 vs 970.

I've actually read the opposite. Allot of users were posting on the AMD and Nvidia subreddits their pricing. AMD was the cheapest in Europe, Nvidia in Asia, Africa was a mixed bag.
 
To be honest I would love to see how an (nvidia) 580 '3GB' and a GTX 680 '4GB' would perform in modern titles with the memory amount not an issue at 1080p (original 580 was only 1.5GB!).

I know these cards are/were super rare but would be very curious if they would be able to push 30+ fps in modern titles (maybe with a little overclocking!!)
 
Sorry I did miss read your post. It's been a long day ;)

Well people have their reasons I guess. Plenty of them have been selling at those prices, so gamers on a budget might as well snap them up.

No worries friend.

Anyway, those are people with more money than sense IMO. They just wanna sell off what they have to get quick cash to go towards the latest tech and don't really care about getting what the cards are actually worth.

Definitely a good deal, especially if you get one of the quality 970's (there are A LOT with crappy third-party coolers on them). But I myself prefer to buy most hardware new. You never know what someone did with a GPU. They may have OC'ed it to hell and back and let it run hot. It may be full of dust. If someone is selling one so cheap they probably didn't give it much love. Just saying. But I totally agree that they are worth that and more. Brand new I'd say they are definitely worth almost $200 or so. The 970 overclocks so well. Most people can get it up really high.
 
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To be honest I would love to see how an (nvidia) 580 '3GB' and a GTX 680 '4GB' would perform in modern titles with the memory amount not an issue at 1080p (original 580 was only 1.5GB!).

I know these cards are/were super rare but would be very curious if they would be able to push 30+ fps in modern titles (maybe with a little overclocking!!)

Honestly I'd love to see stuff like this. Not everyone wants to shell out insane amounts of cash every year for new gen cards and they like to try and get by for a few generations.

I still have a 670 running in my secondary rig. I used to run two in SLI before I upgraded to two Nvidia made GTX 970's and a whole new system (except for my case). I had 580 SLI too at one point. I found the 670 to be about 12-15% faster than the 580. The jump to Maxwell was amazing and then comes Pascal and really blew me away. I bought the 970's about six months before Pascal launched. Early leaks kept saying we'd only see marginal performance increases. Otherwise, I would have waited and I'd have two 1070's in SLI instead. Typically I buy my hardware at the right time but this was one of those times I regretted it.

I gotta say though. Running two GTX 970's in SLI with an OC'ed 4970K doesn't "suck" lol. I just bought a new LG IPS 27" 4K monitor. I tend to buy the professional grade monitors as I do a lot more than gaming on my system. I have a Dell Ultrasharp U2410 I'm still using along with it in a dual monitor config (I used to have a couple more of the Dell's but I sold them). I can't use TN panels. They just don't satisfy me. I'm happy to see great IPS panels out that are easily fast enough for gaming. This LG even supports Freesync, which was something I really didn't look at when I bought it. It's too bad Nvidia blocks it, as it is royalty free and free for anyone to use (including Nvidia). But of course, Nvidia always has to push their proprietary tech.

But even without being able to use the Freesync now I get wonderful results with 970 SLI and 4K gaming for the most part. One 970 definitely wouldn't cut it though. Games that don't support SLI well can be a problem for me. But in that case, I just set them to high settings and run them on the 1200p Dell. In game mode it only has around 9ms of input lag and the response time is 10ms I believe. Not bad at all for a 2010 IPS monitor geared at content creation.

Rocking a 980 here. friend has a 970 and I don't considerably beat him in framerate in games. firestrike tests etc are a different story. the thing that upsets me about owning a 980 though is a 1070 smokes it. quite annoying since it costs 200 less than I paid for a 980

Totally feel your pain here bro. I paid a bit extra for my 970's since I got the rare Nvidia branded ones that have the same exact vapor chamber cooler as the 980 and the Maxwell Titan. That means these look really nice and run very cool. Then a little over six months after I bought my second 970, the 1070 comes out and offers a massive performance increase. I did not see Pascal getting so much of a jump. It's sad how fast GPU's lose their value. That is why I quit buying the flagship cards. I just buy in the $400 range now, which is still expensive. I bought one 970 months earlier and the 2nd one when I came into a little extra money and figured I'd see how they did in SLI.
 
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Not sure how you come to that conclusion. We saw here that out of the box the R9 390 is just 7% slower than either the 8GB RX 480 or 6GB GTX 1060 and your saying getting one for $150 (25% less) is a bad deal? $120 would make the R9 390 40% cheaper for a 7% reduction in performance, seems like a good pickup to me.

Not to mention the R9 390 was slightly faster than the GTX 1060 3GB overall, so why would you pay 53% more for the GTX 1060?


No I'm not saying getting a 970 or R9 390 at $120-$150 would be a bad deal. That would be a killer deal. I'm saying a person selling one for that price would be getting a raw deal. They'd be better off keeping it at that price. But if you can find them at that price, have at it.

In other words he did not understand what you wrote because you used the inverse.
 
Honestly I'd love to see stuff like this. Not everyone wants to shell out insane amounts of cash every year for new gen cards and they like to try and get by for a few generations.

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Totally feel your pain here bro. I paid a bit extra for my 970's since I got the rare Nvidia branded ones that have the same exact vapor chamber cooler as the 980 and the Maxwell Titan. That means these look really nice and run very cool. Then a little over six months after I bought my second 970, the 1070 comes out and offers a massive performance increase. I did not see Pascal getting so much of a jump. It's sad how fast GPU's lose their value. That is why I quit buying the flagship cards. I just buy in the $400 range now, which is still expensive. I bought one 970 months earlier and the 2nd one when I came into a little extra money and figured I'd see how they did in SLI.
Keeping up with any tech seems a PITA these days. I had a Yamaha RX-V1030 which did not have HDCP 2.2 or HDMI 2.0 then a few years later, the V1050 comes out. Now, there's a 1070. Seems most tech just keeps rapidly evolving and it is impossible to keep up with it. In a few years, I may scour the used market for a 1070 or better.

As such, I am considering that at least some of my future tech may be used instead of new.

Back on topic - all I will say is Volta is coming to town...so not too long from now, used Pascal will hit the market, too!

I'm running a 1.5G 580 in a PC that I use for BOINC. It has gone obsolete for my main cruncher project - GPUGrid. That is my main reason I am considering a used 970 at this point because it is just one revision behind Pascal for CUDA and may be a value buy.
 
I have MSI gaming x R9 390x which is great card not having any problem with it and I hope to get another few year out of it unless it dies I think 2 more years would be great and looking at amd video card roadmap that could be a great time to upgrade but if your looking for a budget card now from amd go with new amd rx 580 which is $249 same price as rx 480 but if want a better card amd rx vega is coming out later this summer and it's expected to take on the 1080 ti for much cheaper price.
 
Seems like 390 aged a little better. But I'm always surprised at how much more overclock headroom Nvidia cards have, and why Nvidia does not put more aggressive clock speeds out of the box.

This is almost always the case with AMD cards. I must say I'm still pleased with my R9 390, as I only game on a 1080p display.
 
From personal experience. 970 is superb for almost every game at 1440p/144Hz (PG279) (although I didn't played any of the games above). Its a great card. However...

Its a question how much eye-candy user requires and here you have to think long and hard. Take ME Andromeda. On high (ultra is unplayable) with couple trivialities disabled single player is very pleasant experience... except Remnant vaults. Same goes for MP Remnant maps. Recently added 'Deeper into the ruins' mission map contains so many objects that my poor 970 chokes itself to death.

I have spare X99 board+cpu combo + 1080Ti lying on the shelf, but still waiting for AMD Threadripper as Intel X299 looks really pathetic considering that 6&8 core models on X99 support 40 lanes. I can't wait to see how good 1080Ti is, but for now running my 'venerable' 970. (no amount of OC can supplement lack of VRAM, but MEA is the only one)
 
Hi Steve,

Good read, nice job with the benchmarks! I have the same GTX 970 card and wanted to see the OC clock speeds but I didn't find it in the article. Can you pleas share it?

I'm planning on getting a 4K IPS monitor. Hopefully the 970 will handle it well. I have no problem with lowering graphic details to Medium or even Low in games in order to get a stable 60fps in 4K. Do you think the 970 is up to this task? I play games like CSGO, SC2, BF3&4, HOMM6, AoW3, Mass effect series, Doom, etc...

Keep up the good work,
Peter
 
To be honest I would love to see how an (nvidia) 580 '3GB' and a GTX 680 '4GB' would perform in modern titles with the memory amount not an issue at 1080p (original 580 was only 1.5GB!).

I know these cards are/were super rare but would be very curious if they would be able to push 30+ fps in modern titles (maybe with a little overclocking!!)

Actually the article you're asking for already exist.

https://www.techspot.com/article/1191-nvidia-geforce-six-generations-tested/

I'm also very curious to know what the overclock was on that 970 used in the testing done here. I'm running my Strix at just shy of 1500 Mhz core and 8Ghz memory and have been doing so comfortably since I bought it over 2 years ago and it handles everything I throw at it, some games in 4K, most at 1440p and the odd game at 1080p.
 
Honestly I think what's shown here is that both the 970 and the R9 390 are in fact "still game" in 2017.

it's 2018 now and F1 2018 used 4.6 GB of video memory on ultra @ 1080p (390)
4GB vid ram really isn't enough for latest games unfortunately
 
Update: Still running a '4'GB 970 and a mildly oc'd i5-2500k. I've not bought Tom Raider yet but Far Cry 5 at 1080 on Ultra, though without Motion Blur and HD textures, and it plays very well. Only in VR (Oculus) do I seem to suffer a bit (EDIT: I seem to recall that RFactor2 does
start to inflict pain on it). I'm considering the possibility of overclocking the 970 but I still haven't heard what they used in this article.
 
it's 2018 now and F1 2018 used 4.6 GB of video memory on ultra @ 1080p (390)
4GB vid ram really isn't enough for latest games unfortunately

To be fair it was 2017 when I commented. But just because a game uses available VRAM doesn't mean it won't run on less. I would bet that F1 would run good on a GTX 970 at 1080p while using less than 4GB of VRAM. Games today are really good at streaming textures in and out as needed. They will use that VRAM if you have it, but if not they will make due as long as you are not seriously limited.

That said, I'm very glad I ditched my 970 SLI setup for a 1080Ti. 11GB will serve me well for a long while.
 
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