Gadgetory

welcome back to our run box for another video now this one features many many benchmark runs though most of them you won't actually see but I'll get to what that's all about in a moment back in January I made a series of videos discussing why right now is a bad time to build a gaming PC and all I really did in that series was deliver bad news so sorry about that more positively though I have recently been revisiting a few older graphics cards to see how they hold up in today's games and I found that GPUs such as the GTX 680 r9 280x and even the GTX 760 still perform very well in the latest games using medium quality type settings at 1080p the GTX 680 and r9 280x were comparable to the GTX 1050 Ti in terms of performance but at today's prices can be had for around the price of a gtx 1050 or rx 560 meanwhile the GTX 760 cost about as much as a GT 1030 but offers way more performance of course there's always been bargains to be had when shopping for use graphics cards so none of this is terribly surprising however we're a secondhand shopping is usually reserved for bargain hunters today with the way prices are many more gamers are considering buying a used graphics card with so many options available it's really hard to work out where to even begin do you work at which GPU you want or do you work out what your price range is but then how do you know how much you should be spending on a particular model it's all a bit complicated really so to try and make the process a lot easier I've spent a huge amount of time working at the average selling price for each model and then the average performance to work out the average selling price I've turned ebay calm so all the figures are in US dollars it really wasn't an option to do some more currencies if I ever wanted to see my kids again still for the most part this information should translate quite well into other markets of course pricing is just part of the puzzle and it was the quicker and easier part of this puzzle to work here far more time-consuming and difficult was benchmarking all 44 graphics card in three different games by providing all of this data though it means that you guys can quickly and easily work out how each of these graphics cards compares in real-world games which I feel is significantly more useful than a quick and easy to run synthetic benchmark so for this I really wanted to test games that are fairly neutral and by that I mean don't favor one particular brand of GPUs therefore I looked back at one of our recent 35 game benchmark comparisons which featured a gtx 1016 and rx 580 along with the gtx 1070 and vega 56 and I chose the games where these graphics cards delivered similar performance to one another this led me to choose battlefield 1 f1 2017 and rise of the Tomb Raider all of which we tested using the DirectX 11 API with the medium quality settings at 1080p frame rates for all the graphics cards were higher in battlefield 1 and F 1 2017 while they were about 35% lower in rise of the Tomb Raider so this caused some issues for the lower end models but I still feel like this is a good example of what you can expect to find from modern games using mild quality settings before we get to the french ii results though let's talk about the average selling price of each model okay so what you're looking at here is the average sale price for the GeForce graphics cards so far during the march period and I've included all the GeForce 500 600 700 and 900 series GPUs there are 20 different models here so a wide and varying range of options and please note pricing has been rounded to the nearest five dollars for a bit of context on just how bad graphics card prices have gotten as if you needed it here is the average selling price information for the September 2017 period as you can see graphics cards such as the GTX 970 have increased by almost 70 percent of course it's the newer more capable models that have suffered the highest price inflation but even so we're seeing about a 15% increase for the older mid-range models as well and pricing had already started to increase by September moving over to the radio and GPUs we have 24 models but please note I haven't included factory overclocked options like the 79 78 gigahertz edition or the 7950 boost those versions have just been included with these standard models again here's a look back at pricing in September of 2017 as you can see AMD graphics cards have increased in demand significantly with most having increased by 60% or more in price over the past six months it's shocking to see the ultra entry-level models such as the r7 360 increasing by almost 90 percent in value that's pretty insane really but even with all this pricing information sorted out you might now have a good idea of what each of these models is roughly worth but you probably still have little idea about which one you should actually buy so there let's talk performance here's how the GeForce GPU stack up when benchmarked in three modern games using medium quality settings Tandy P also please don't I've included the GT 1030 GTX 1050 and GTX 1066 gigabyte so you can see how the older second-hand graphics cards stack up to these modern entry-level and mid-range offerings as you can see the GTX 980 is comparable to the GTX 1066 gigabyte the gtx 960 and 760 are comparable to the gtx 1050 while the GTX 650 Ti is comparable to the GT 1030 for those wondering I am using the 384 CUDA core version of the GTX 560 Ti and for whatever reason it just stinks it's way worse than the GTX 570 and I have tried two different models and I've got the same results so yeah it just hasn't held up well over time so I'd scrub the base model gtx 560 TI and 560 of your list most of these graphics cards though did provide playable performance though be aware models with less than 2 gigabytes of vram can and will deliver mixed results in modern titles here's a quick look at the price versus performance for the GeForce GPUs I won't focus on this graph for too long as I do have a proper cost per frame analysis coming up in a moment at a glance though the GTX 670 and 760 look very good moving on to the Radeon GPUs we see fairly respectable performance across the board with the exception of the Radeon HD 7770 and 77 90 the r7 360 was also a bit of a battler and the r7 to see DX will struggle in some titles requiring lower quality settings and perhaps even a lower resolution here we can see that the RX 580 sits between the r9 390x and r9 nano while the RX 560 is comparable to the HD 7870 and r9 270x then the rx 550 can be found sitting between the HD 77 90 and r7 360 then finally before moving on here is a quick look at the price versus performance the r9 290 looks good along with the 285 and HD 7970 okay so here is the cost per frame analysis for the GeForce GPUs and as you can see the gtx 570 offers the most bang for your buck at the current prices the GTX 670 760 and 660ti also offer exceptional value for me a standard here though was the gtx 770 as it was very capable and all of the aims tested but it also comes in at a cost of just a dollar 53 per frame as expected the AMD cards are a little more pricey in today's market and getting anything good for less than a dollar fifty per frame isn't really possible realistically for a good gaming card you'll be paying over a dollar eighty per frame for anything from AMD still when compared to buying new these older graphics cards such as the 290 X and 290 for example are much better value ok so throughout this video I've had a really really tough time showing you all the data for all 44 GPUs on a single screen at once it's not really possible without scrolling which gets even more confusing so here all the graphics cards that can be regularly had for a cost of less than $2 50 per frame based on our testing this leaves us with 33 GPUs but we can scrub off an additional three as the seventy seven seventy seventy seven ninety and 652 are all too slow to be useful in my opinion okay so this then is what we've been working towards a list of the best bang for your buck AMD Nvidia graphics cards available on the second-hand market again the GTX 570 and 670 are standouts here and well the r7 260x looks decent it's actually very slow most of the GPUs in this list though are quite capable but what if you want something that maintained over 60fps in our three-game average well here you go these are the best value performance graphics cards capable of delivering respectable performance in all the latest titles at 1080p the GTX 770 stands out as the best value choice while the GTX 680 offers a decent bang for your buck as well the GTX 780 does surprisingly well also the r9 285 looks to be a great choice from AMD but be aware these results are somewhat skewed by availability for example in the last six months there have been just 2409 285 graphics cards solid option while in the same period 600 gtx 770 cards were sold over 200 GTX 680 and 200 HD 7970 models were also sold so realistically you have a much better chance of getting a 79 70 at a reasonable price compared to the 79 78 the r9 280x actually appears to be better value and with over 400 of them selling in the last six months you have an even better chance of getting your hands on one of those the GTX 780 Ti looks to be a good option as well I feel like drivers support has improved for the capital architecture in recent time but I could be wrong about that I haven't really looked into it properly either way it did very well in the three games selected for this test and as such it came in at a cost of just a dollar ninety-nine per frame which isn't that bad really that said though with just a hundred and fifty of them sold in the last six months getting one might be a little more difficult it might cost two hundred and forty dollars us on average but the GTX 970 should be a pretty easy graphics card to get your hands on as almost 2000 of them have sold at auction in the last six months as one of envy is best selling GPUs of all time it's really not that surprising to find so many of them for sale on the second-hand market it's well worth noting though that in terms of value the GTX 1050 is very similar to the GTX 970 and 980 both of the 900 series GPUs are of course quite a good bit faster so they will enable higher quality visuals for those of you wondering here's a quick look at the average option price in March for each model as you can see the cheapest options include the GTX 770 and GTX 680 while the uh 9 to 85 r9 280x and 7970 worked much more expensive coming in at around the same price as a gtx 1050 that said though the gtx 1050 technically shouldn't be included here as it fell short of the 60 FPS minimum with an average 1% lower result of 54 frames per second here we see that the gtx 770 and 680 offer considerably better performance as does the 79 72 ATX and 285 so there you have it a full breakdown of the used graphics card market it should be noted that this guide is accurate based on auction prices in March of 2018 or at least the options we've seen so far and as always pricing will likely change over the coming weeks and months whether that is for better or for worse is yet to be seen but for those of you buying right now this video should give you a very good idea of what you should be looking out for for those of you in different regions with a different pricing structure the benchmark results including this video will still prove invaluable for working out which graphics cards are worth investing in and how much you should spend as I found in my recent gtx 680 and r9 280x revisit videos you will really need to do better than the average selling price to really justify buying a used graphics card for example at the average selling price the GTX 980 is just 20% cheaper in terms of cost per frame than a brand new gtx 1060 and while that means you stand to save about $70 u.s. that's really not enough to justify the gamble with older used Hardware of course you can get lucky the cheapest gtx 980 sold an option this month went for just 225 dollars and that's a massive saving from the 360 dollars you expect to pay for a GTX 1060 and almost 40% discount in fact personally I always shoot for at least a 40% saving on second-hand hardware when compared to a brand new equivalent second-hand shopping for a Radeon graphics card does look to be a bit less cost-effective the r9 390x for example is just 16 percent cheaper than the rx 580 when comparing the cost per frame so although the 390x is on average $100 cheaper ideally it really needs to be $200 cheaper to make sense in my opinion at $270 that would give you an almost 40% saving over a new graphics card given the auction prices that I've seen though over the last few months getting one for that price really won't be easy I only found a single example of a working cart that went for as low as $270 most cheap models have gone for a little over three hundred dollars which admittedly is still quite good overall though the star of this roundup was the gtx 770 along with the recently revisited gtx 680 the gtx 780 also put in a surprisingly good showing so that's an option worth considering as well based purely on the average option sale prices there really isn't much to see from AMD it seems their cards are just too good at mining but with the cryptocurrency industry seemingly falling apart at the moment the future could be bright once again for gamers fingers crossed anyway and that's where I'm going to end this video I really hope you found it useful I poured a huge amount of time and effort into this one so if you did enjoy the video be sure to hit the like button for us subscribe for more content and if you appreciate the testing we do here at harbor box then consider supporting us on patreon thanks for watching I'm your host Steve see you next time