Should you buy a used gpu?
|Your graphics card is possibly the most important part of your system when it comes to gaming, so it’s understandable you want the best you can get for your money. Many people turn to the used market to get the best value for money, and it’s kind of easy to see why. If you want an RTX 2060, well that’s gonna cost you around £300 right now, but on the used market you can pick up a GTX 1080 for about the same. Lets test them out and see if it’s worth it, but first, if you haven’t already, consider subscribing for more videos every Monday, Wednesday and Friday!
So, we’ve got COD MW running here on the 2060, in a private match at 1440p ultra settings. Despite my playing skills, we are still getting what, 75,FPS, which definitely isn’t bad. It’s totally playable, and if you aren’t happy with the performance you can always tweak the settings, plus if you really want to you can enable direct x ray tracing thanks to the RTX hardware on the card. Lets swap to our used 1080 and see how it goes.
Right, so same system, same game, same settings, and, oh damn, that’s a lot more FPS. We are getting 81FPS now which is around 8% higher, for the same money. This is obviously just as playable, but a little bit better for a high refresh rate monitor like this one, although of course there is no DXR for us, although honestly that’s not something I’m that bothered by.
So it’s a no brainer right? Just buy a used GPU and get mega performance for the same money. Well, there might be some things to consider… Thanks to the GPU mining craze, there is a non-zero chance you’d be buying a card that has been run at full tilt 24/7 for months which drastically decreases the lifespan of the card. It’s not so much of a problem any more, but it is possible. You might also buy a card that just happens to fail prematurely, or runs so hot it thermal throttles.
The good news, at least for those last two, is that since the card will be out of warranty anyway, you can open it up, clean it out, and reapply good thermal paste as preventative maintenance – or a performance upgrade. It’s really easy to do, as long as you are careful, and if it means you get more performance for your money it can be a worthwhile tradeoff.
You are going to be living with some compromises, especially when it comes to new tech and features. If you went with the 1080 over the 2060, you’d be giving up the RTX suite, the newer and improved H264 encoder, and potentially driver updates that especially for new games can give much needed performance gains.
Overall, buying used seems like a great option. You can get more performance for your money, or even the same performance for less, and the possibility of cards breaking is, in the real world, relatively minimal. If you do want to buy used, generally the best deals are found through auctions, or haggling directly with sellers – although buy it now is an option if you can’t wait.