The Ultimate 44 Used Graphics Card Pricing & Benchmark Guide

[Julio Franco]

Along with our recent editorials on why it's a bad time to build a gaming PC, we've been revisiting some older GPUs to see how they hold up in today's games. But how do you know how much you should be paying for a secondhand graphics card?

Read the full article here.

https://www.techspot.com/article/1596-ultimate-used-gpu-benchmarking/

 

[dickdon71]

"Personally, I always shoot for at least a 40% savings on secondhand hardware compared to the new equivalent."

Best advice I got from this. Top tier article as always Mr Benchmark King!

 

[madboyv1]

A proverbial wall of graphics cards (and graphs), very interesting to see everything lined up.

Honestly I'm really surprised my ageing (and sitting in a box) GTX 570 is even on the list, guess that goes to show how hard hit the market is price wise, or maybe while the card has aged greatly, it still puts out SOMETHING for all the heat it generated lol.

 

[ET3D]

Thanks for the interesting article. Damn these prices.

 

[Jon Tseng]

Good piece. You should plot cost vs. FPS as a scatter chart then we can see both what is good value at various performance brackets with one glance.

 

[Potato Judge]

Great article! Though the performance graph for Geforce GPUs on the first page that says "lower is better" got me confused.

 

[enemys]

Nice summary. I'm a bit pissed to see R9 390 only a bit cheaper than I bought it years ago. Good thing I managed to replace it just before the prices went totally mad.

One minor complaint, though: your average FPS charts have a "lower is better" note, it should obviously say the contrary.

 

[Colonel Blimp]

Excellent article, thank you so much for this.

The 680 and the 280x revisits were really interesting but this places everything else in context with them and with current offerings.

Once again, still convinces me to hang on to my 280x for a while longer.

 

[regiq]

Great work, will come in handy!

I'd also like to see performace per watt chart, but that probably doesn't matter much for a gamer.

If you're on a very tight budget the 7850 overclocks like a beast and with the TDP set to 150W (max for pcie+6pin plug) it can achieve performance similar to RX560.

Here, where I live, nvidias are pricier - guess we have more gamers than miners

 

[p51d007]

Considering not knowing about where used cards come from, I'm more likely to wait for a new model to be released, then buy last years model when it goes on sale. I'm not a gamer any more, but I do use a ton of photoshop, lightroom etc.

 

[UncleSharkey]

Are you cherry picking the prices? I have been on Ebay several times looking at used cards and the prices are way inflated on all of them. They are at least 10-20 dollars higher than what you have listed.

 

[HIC99]

Great job on the graphs, I really appreciate the work you do here. However I would like to see a crossfire and sli comparisons with some of the best value cards as I have a gtx 770 and I am building a new computer after the ryzen 2 release and I would to reach higher frame rates than I am now.

 

[pookie]

Article was a nice reminder of how great the 980ti is.
I bought it like new used just when the Pascal was announced and people said not to.
Glad I didn't listen it was a great buy.

 

[User12345]

Great article and very relevant in today's overpriced GPU market.

 

[Evernessince]

Are you cherry picking the prices? I have been on Ebay several times looking at used cards and the prices are way inflated on all of them. They are at least 10-20 dollars higher than what you have listed.

You are likely only look at buy it now prices. You can get cards cheaper on Auction.

 

[ZackL04]

Great job on the graphs, I really appreciate the work you do here. However I would like to see a crossfire and sli comparisons with some of the best value cards as I have a gtx 770 and I am building a new computer after the ryzen 2 release and I would to reach higher frame rates than I am now.

Those techs are as good as dead bro

 

[ZackL04]

Article was a nice reminder of how great the 980ti is.
I bought it like new used just when the Pascal was announced and people said not to.
Glad I didn't listen it was a great buy.

I scored a reference card for $265 this fall....but I flipped it...

 

[Raytrace3D]

Glad to see my aging 980 still holds out... if only new GPU prices weren't so high, I'd upgrade... maybe in another 3 years I guess.

 

[treetops]

I bought my 970 used a few years ago but with this rise in mining I would not buy a used video card. Or a new one with the crazy price hike, I would not be surprised if we are seeing the end of the gaming pc age.

 

[Fobus]

Very nice article. But one thing missing is power consumption, last time I did some research, power hungry nature of old gen AMD cards wiped out any potential savings you got buying them cheaper over Nvidia. I wonder if the same could be true with buying used, especially really older stuff.

 

[Fimbulvetr]

Got 2 GTX 770s for $25 each 10 months ago. Boy, am I glad I did, running both of them in separate systems now. When I bought them, I had no idea the market would go the way it has, but it worked out well. Hope it comes down soon!

 

[regiq]

Got 2 GTX 770s for $25 each 10 months ago. Boy, am I glad I did, running both of them in separate systems now. When I bought them, I had no idea the market would go the way it has, but it worked out well. Hope it comes down soon!

Now could be the time to sell

 

[GreenNova343]

Very nice article. But one thing missing is power consumption, last time I did some research, power hungry nature of old gen AMD cards wiped out any potential savings you got buying them cheaper over Nvidia. I wonder if the same could be true with buying used, especially really older stuff.

That's going to depend heavily on how much your local electrical company charges you, how much the power draw difference is, & how long you actually game with the card.

Take the R9 280X (apparently $340 USD) & the GTX 980 (apparently $547). Not counting the other charges on my monthly bill (both fixed & variable), I pay $0.0739 USD per kWh. The difference between those 2 cards is $207 USD, so I would have to use just over 2,801 extra kWh of energy before the R9 280X catches up in price to the GTX 980. TDP is 165W for the GTX, 250W for the R9, for a difference of 85W. 2,801kWh = 2,801,000Wh; 2,801,000Wh / 85W = 32,953 hours of gaming before the "extra" price of electricity makes the R9 280X as expensive as the GTX 980. Note that this would be nearly 4 years of gaming, assuming the PC was gaming 24/7. Even at most, I've only maybe gamed 5 or 6 hours at a time (and that's far from an everyday occurrence, but for the sake of argument I'll use that), so it would take me 15 years before the extra electricity reaches that threshold. My actual average per-day gameplay is maybe 1 hour tops, so that bumps it up to 90 years...at which point if I'm not dead I'm doing a great impression of a Lich.

And yes, I know I mentioned "variable" costs on the bill. The bill itemizes the charges, & there are some charges that seem to fluctuate from month to month. They're probably based on the actual electricity used (my own, all customers, or maybe a combo)...but the differences are so slight, & in total maybe reach only 10% of the actual electrical charges, that they aren't going to affect these numbers that much.

So, maybe if someone has super-expensive electricity -- on the order of $1.00 USD per kWh or higher -- they might have to worry about AMD cards being more power-hungry than nVidia cards. But that's not going to be that common.

 

[HyPeroxya]

Power = Heat . and if you live in a small space or already high temps , the last thing you need is an older (less efficient) gfx card pumping out heat... Just for the lols they should inject a 2200g into equation IF you could separate the cost of the gfx card/portion (50% of the price?). It would probably come out tops ...

 

[regiq]

Very nice article. But one thing missing is power consumption, last time I did some research, power hungry nature of old gen AMD cards wiped out any potential savings you got buying them cheaper over Nvidia. I wonder if the same could be true with buying used, especially really older stuff.

I'm not sure miners would agree with your findings...

But yeah, the power consumption could be a part of this review.