With the current trend in falling Cryptocurrency value, GPU prices are falling and the used market is being flooded.
So is now the perfect time to buy a used GPU?
- As with many things the the world of PC hardware, the answer is complicated. Many new and existing Cryptocurrency farmers, big and small, concentrated more on mining Ethereum as its price sky rocketed around the 2017/18 new year, but that value has plummeted, and the mining difficulty has grown too. This all means that the profit margin for mining is very low, and only the dedicated miners will keep on mining. But those that jumped on the mining train with no prior experience, are now selling off there hardware, to try and recoup there initial investment. This has led to the second hand market being flooded with medium to high end graphics cards at close to there original recommended retail price. Equally, New GPU prices have also fallen, but not as much as many hoped. I bought my RX 580 in March, when prices were still high, and it cost me close to £400 ($580 USD). Looking back on that same site where I initially bought the card, the price has now dropped to £290, a significant drop. That trend can be seen more in the RX Vega 64 GPUs, they were at £1000, and have now dropped to £599. But weather or not the price remains there, is entirely dependant now on the cryptocurrency market.
So my advice to you would be to buy now while prices are low.
What GPU Should You Buy.
- Again, its complicated. But if I had to single out 1 particular GPU, it would most definitely be the Radeon RX 580 4 or 8gb flavours.
It is a very good compromise between the high end Vegas and 1070/80's and the low end 550's and 1030's. You will get a good mix of performance and power that can play any modern game at a high graphical quality while keeping frame rates at a very playable framerate.
I would not be choosy when it comes to which brand you should buy, as they all have there good and bad points, and generally after market brands such as MSI, ASUS, Gigabyte, Sapphire, XFX and Powercolor will all be clocked slightly higher than the bone stock one straight from AMD. They will all have a little head room available for overclocking if you want to squeeze more performance out of them (Overclocking Guide in a Future Post), and will have all the modern features you would expect to see in a card of this caliber.
What's its Gaming performance like.
- Fortunately for all of you, I am a complete hardware whore, so I tend to do a lot of benchmarks with new hardware, and my 8Gb Radeon RX 580 was no exception. In this chart, I have included a mix of synthetic benchmarks and in game benchmarks, so you will have an idea of what performance you could expect from your RX 580.
In all the tests, all the graphics were set to there highest level with any add ons disabled, like hairworks, antialiasing, V-sync and such. The resolution will be at 2560 x 1440. all this is so the testing is consistent, and a good compromise between 1080p and 4k.
Here is the Test Bench used for all the benchmarks...
| CPU | AMD Ryzen 1600X OC @ 4.05Ghz |
| Motherboard | ASUS ROG Strix X370-F |
| Memory | 16Gb G-Skills Trident Z RGB |
| GPU | Powercolor Red Dragon RX 580 8Gb |
| Cooling | Deepcool Gamer Strom Captain 360 EX. 4x Akasa Vegas R7 1200mm case fans. |
| Storage | 2Tb Seagate Hybrid SSHD |
| PSU | GameMax 1050 Watt Silver 80+ |
Synthetic Benchmark Results.
| Frames Per Second | |
|---|---|
| Unigine Valley | 32.5 |
| Unigine Superposition | 25.3 |
| Geeks FurMark | 79.0 |
| Oxide Star Swarm | 36.1 |
Game Benchmark Results.
| Frames Per Second | |
|---|---|
| Hitman 2016 | 57.2 |
| Alien Isolation | 155.8 |
| Rise of the Tomb Raider | 77.2 |
| GTA V | 74.9 |
| Metal Gear Sold V | 64.5 |
| Eve Online | 132.6 |
| Battlefield 1 | 89.5 |
| Watch Dogs 2 | 46.3 |
| The Witcher 3 | 61.1 |
| Crysis | 71.4 |
| League of Legends | 126.5 |
| Fortnite | 57.5 |
- As you can probably guess, the RX 580 is definitely no slouch when it comes to gaming performance. It did not score as high on the synthetic tests, thats because they are more of a stress test that are aimed more towards high end cards like the 1080 Ti or Vega 64. but regardless of this, they still scored reasonably well, and if they were gaming results, they would be playable frame rates, but only just.
I chose a broad range of games to test in to try and appease the gamers among us who may be considering buying a new GPU or wanting to upgrade from what they currently use.
Most of the games tested here all scored very well with many over that 60FPS mark most of us aim for as an absolute minimum, with the only exception being Watch Dogs 2, but with it being an Nvidia sponsored title, and being more demanding, it is to be expected.
And ''Can it play Crysis?'' Yes! Yes it most definitely can. The only one concessions I will make to the results is League of legends. With this particular game, you have to bare in mind that the game is more CPU intensive than GPU. So if you are running an older system like a first gen i5/7 or Athlon XP, the game will struggle to reach a good frame rate, as not only is the CPU weaker than today's offerings, it will also be a major bottleneck and restrict the GPU's performance.
Conclusion.
The RX580 is an awesome little powerhouse that can roll with the best of them. While it wont deliver 120FPS or more in the most demanding games with everything turned on and turned up, it will give you a very enjoyable and immersive experience with awesome graphical capabilities that wont disappoint even the most demanding gamer.
With the Cryptocurrency market at its current level, new GPU prices falling and the used market being flooded with ex mining cards, now is most definitely the perfect time to pick up a Radeon RX 580, for not a lot of money.
So what are you waiting for?
Thanks for reading.
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