Christmas is just under five weeks away and for many PC users it is high season for upgrading with new hardware. If you don’t want to pay the high prices for brand new hardware, you can get a good result for much cheaper, especially with graphics cards with used hardware.
PC components usually last longer than the warranty period, as many readers confirm to us again and again. Especially when the demands are not that high, hardware is often used for around five years. The manufacturers’ data also shows us that price-conscious users in particular wait around three generations of hardware before switching to new components.
This is where our first piece of advice for buying used graphics cards comes in: Please don’t buy high-end components that are too old just because the performance is good. Alan Wake 2 just shows that some game manufacturers no longer take older Geforce GTX graphics cards into account. This trend will continue in future games.
Manufacturers don’t support GPUs forever either
Nvidia still supports the Pascal GPUs, but its predecessor, Kepler, already has to make do without new drivers. The situation is similar at AMD, where the Radeon RX Vega and Polaris GPUs (RX-400/500) have no longer been supplied with Linux drivers for a few days, and Windows is likely to follow in the next few months.
This means that we recommend at least an AMD RDNA graphics card (Radeon RX-5000) or Nvidia Turing (RTX 20 series). If the price is very good, a Geforce GTX 1080 Ti (test) may be worth it, but the savings compared to a similarly fast Geforce RTX 3060 (test) will be paid for in the electricity bill the following year.