Don’t underestimate 8 year old gaming GPUs

If you are not ready to pay the currently extremely high prices for new graphics cards or your current model gives up the ghost, then there is only one thing left for you to do: buy an older and therefore usually used graphics card.

Our look at the prices and the performance of about eight-year-old player GPUs such as AMD’s R9-200 series and Nvidia’s GTX-700 series shows that even older models can still hide good offers if you are with can live with the following restrictions.

What you have to consider when buying used GPUs

1. Used hardware is a risk: Wear is a very important factor. The older a graphics card is, the longer it has potentially been in use. Even very old graphics cards can still do their job reliably. The chances of a defect are higher with used GPUs than with new goods, especially since you can hardly reliably find out in advance how intensively the respective model has really been used.
   
2. Performance and equipment are limited: What was once a top model, years later often only delivers performance at the level of the current entry-level class. In addition to the general computing power, there are also other restrictions on the equipment, for example with a view to the video memory or the support of current technologies such as ray tracing.
   
3. Old graphics cards are sometimes noisy: This restriction applies especially to the reference models from AMD and Nvidia. While adapted custom designs from manufacturers such as Asus, MSI, Gigabyte and Co with larger axial fans have been pleasantly quiet in the past, the standard models from AMD and Nvidia with their small radial fans are not for sensitive ears.

Which graphics cards are you talking about?

We looked at the current Ebay prices of all graphics cards from the test of AMD’s Radeon RX 480. We refer to the average price of the last 30 successfully sold models.

Both old cards from 2013 and more recent and still popular models such as Nvidia’s GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 from 2016 are represented in this test. The following benchmarks in Full HD show how the old GPUs performed in our test titles at the time:

The benchmarks were all created in maximum details, and the performance-hungry quadruple MSAA for anti-aliasing was also partially active. Nowadays, on the other hand, TAA is almost exclusively used, which has a significantly less negative effect on the FPS.

A Radeon classic in focus: The Radeon R9 290X, released in 2013, is roughly on par with the GTX 970, which is roughly as fast as a current GTX 1650. This means that the 290X is still suitable for playing current titles in Full HD.

In our graphics card test system, the GTX 970 lands at the very end of the table with an average of 41.3 FPS in Full HD, but it can easily deliver sufficiently playable FPS values. Also to consider: We measured in very high details, so there is still a lot of tuning potential.

Price / performance ratio in comparison

If you combine the current Ebay prices and the values ​​from our benchmarks, the result is a clear and generally unsurprising picture: According to this, older and cheaper models and AMD cards in particular can score points in terms of price / performance ratio.

Due to the more modern architecture and, depending on the title, also due to the larger amount of VRAM, it can be assumed that the newer cards in current titles tend to have a larger FPS advantage than in old games. A rough classification is possible on the basis of this data.