Hardware & Technical Suggestions for a half-decent cheapie GFX card?

Stealthie · Jun 1, 2018

I'm looking for the best possible GFX card for around £80-£100.

A friend decided to buy himself a new GFX card off eBay, from China, for £150-odd, which turned out to be dodgy.

Now he's a bit "gun-shy" so he doesn't want to spend as much and he wants to buy from the UK.
I'm okay(ish) with buying off eBay, and used, but it'd have to be from the UK so it can be returned if necessary and so he'll be covered by Brit' consumer laws.

Any suggestions?

*EDIT*

FWIW, his original card was an old Radeon R7 so it won't take much to improve on that but I'd still like to get the best possible card.
He thought he was buying an NVidia 1060Ti so he was obviously looking for a fairly decent card and I'd like to find him something that won't be too disappointing.

Asp Explorer · Jun 1, 2018

At this moment in time - I'd suggest staying well clear of 2nd hand graphics cards or "import" specials

Having said that, there are now loads of dumped R290 / HD7950 3Gb cards to be had, some pretty cheap - and that's not too shabby.

Caramel Clown · Jun 1, 2018

1060ti? Wasn't that a dead giveaway that it's some fluke? 1060ti isn't a thing.

Stealthie · Jun 1, 2018

Caramel Clown said:
1060ti? Wasn't that a dead giveaway that it's some fluke? 1060ti isn't a thing.

It's funny you should say that.

When he asked me for help alarm bells started ringing 'cos I didn't think there was a 1060ti but a bit of googling revealed that there are cards which people are now referring to as a "1060ti".
As far as I can see, it's not NVidia who's doing this but people are calling the 6gb version of the 1060 a "ti" model.
Without a real 6gb 1060 to look at, of course, I have know way of knowing if that's how the real card's BIOS describes itself.
I'm still doubtful, though, cos I would have thought NVidia would refer to the 6gb 1060 as a "ti" model if that's the description they wrote into the BIOS.

I guess this is the sort of confusion that these chinese outfits take advantage of though.

Shadowdancer · Jun 1, 2018

Asp Explorer said:
At this moment in time - I'd suggest staying well clear of 2nd hand graphics cards or "import" specials

Having said that, there are now loads of dumped R290 / HD7950 3Gb cards to be had, some pretty cheap - and that's not too shabby.

Those cards will be EoL after having been run at temperature limits for too long. Don't touch any used graphics cards from sources you don't know personally, unless you get them for free including shipping they won't be worth it.

ZeroAi · Jun 1, 2018

I have one PC with the 1050ti 4gb which runs VR fine and often can be found for under $150 (when cryto miners aren't spiking prices)

Pville_Piper · Jun 1, 2018

Greylock said:
I have one PC with the 1050ti 4gb which runs VR fine and often can be found for under $150 (when cryto miners aren't spiking prices)

It runs ED: Horizons?

the100thmonkey · Jun 1, 2018

Pville_Piper said:
It runs ED: Horizons?

I guess it might run Horizons at very low settings in VR.

Paired with the right CPU, it should run Horizons 1080p/60Hz/Ultra without issue.

The Ti series of cards are low power units that only draw a maximum of 75W - enough to be powered by the PCI bus.

A GT 1030 card should run the game at 720p smoothly at maybe high settings. A GTX 1050 2GB will run the game at 1080p/60Hz/high with some settings turned down to medium (I have this card in my laptop), although it will almost certainly cost a little over £100 - probably £120 - and if you're going to do that, you might as well get the 4GB 1050 Ti which will do 1080p/60Hz/ultra (paired with a non-potato CPU, naturally.)

Patrick_68000 · Jun 1, 2018

It is true that the 1050 Ti is attractive for the small budgets and even the biggest

MickyG1982 · Jun 2, 2018

CEX sells them pretty cheap

They have an online store, guarantee it for two years from date of purchase too.

2gb GTX 960 around £90 (4gb £115)

Gtx 680 or 780 for less than that.

TorTorden_VR · Jun 2, 2018

No doubt the 1050ti is the value king.
But going beyond 1080p and VR I doubt It could, for obvious reasons, keep up with my 1080ti.

That said I could get nearly five 1050ti's for the price of one 1080ti.
And for 1080p gaming the 1050ti can easily run elite at ultra with a few tweaks at 60fps.
If you for instance can find a cheaper 960 4gb I can also recommend it. I myself had the 2GB version but it ran out VRAM when horizons came out, and I happened to get a 3440×1440 screen.
It couldn't quite keep up with that.
But for 1080p it would be a solid card.

Stealthie · Jun 8, 2018

Bit of an update....

After some back & forth with the chinese seller, I managed to secure a refund for my friend.
I can't say I'm especially keen on the way that works because, after getting the refund, the purchase vanishes out of his ebay history, which means there's no opportunity to leave negative feed back or report the fraud to ebay.
Course, I did make the effort to find another, similar, item offered by the same seller and report that instead.

No sympathy for con-artists.

Anyway, part of the refund was that he gets to keep the card (which he doesn't want) so I decided to take it to bits.
Turns out the processor is out of an old (really, really old) NVidia GTS 450.

The memory is slightly more confusing (to me, at least).

There are 4 ram chips on the board, all made by Elpida.
3x EDW2032BBBG-6A-F
1x EDW2032BBBG-60-F

Data Sheets here:-
http://pdf1.alldatasheet.com/datasheet-pdf/view/555097/ELPIDA/EDW2032BBBG-6A-F.html
http://pdf.datasheet.live/datasheets-1/elpida_memory/EDW2032BBBG-60-F.pdf

If somebody can tell me how much RAM this equates to, in layman's terms, and why there's 3 of the 6A-F's and one of the 60-F's I'd be interested to hear it.

Also, FWIW, I found somebody selling an Msi GTX770 locally for £50 and ended-up buying that for him.
I know it's EoL but it's a decent(ish) card and it's in superb condition.
He's happy with it.

*EDIT*

And the GTX 770 absolutely crushed his "GTX 1060ti" in all the benchmarks I did.

MickyG1982 · Jun 8, 2018

Stealthie said:
Bit of an update....

After some back & forth with the chinese seller, I managed to secure a refund for my friend.
I can't say I'm especially keen on the way that works because, after getting the refund, the purchase vanishes out of his ebay history, which means there's no opportunity to leave negative feed back or report the fraud to ebay.
Course, I did make the effort to find another, similar, item offered by the same seller and report that instead.
No sympathy for con-artists.

Anyway, part of the refund was that he gets to keep the card (which he doesn't want) so I decided to take it to bits.
Turns out the processor is out of an old (really, really old) NVidia GTS 450.

The memory is slightly more confusing (to me, at least).

There are 4 ram chips on the board, all made by Elpida.
3x EDW2032BBBG-6A-F
1x EDW2032BBBG-60-F

Data Sheets here:-
http://pdf1.alldatasheet.com/datasheet-pdf/view/555097/ELPIDA/EDW2032BBBG-6A-F.html
http://pdf.datasheet.live/datasheets-1/elpida_memory/EDW2032BBBG-60-F.pdf

If somebody can tell me how much RAM this equates to, in layman's terms, and why there's 3 of the 6A-F's and one of the 60-F's I'd be interested to hear it.

Also, FWIW, I found somebody selling an Msi GTX770 locally for £50 and ended-up buying that for him.
I know it's EoL but it's a decent(ish) card and it's in superb condition.
He's happy with it.

*EDIT*

And the GTX 770 absolutely crushed his "GTX 1060ti" in all the benchmarks I did.

The 770 is probably about level with(if not slightly exceeding) the GTX 960 / 1050ti in terms of raw gaming performance. It's also still new enough to be kept updated by Nvidia (probably for at least a year or two) so at the price your mate got it for, it's a steal.

CMDR MAIN SEQUENCE · Jun 8, 2018

Each of those chips is 2 gig.

I'd be very interested to hear what kind of frame rates your friend gets with the 770. I have been considering a used 770 (for ED and other games) to replace the HD5770 in my son's PC. This will be at 1920x1080.

Stealthie · Jun 8, 2018

MAIN SEQUENCE said:
Each of those chips is 2 gig.

I'd be very interested to hear what kind of frame rates your friend gets with the 770. I have been considering a used 770 (for ED and other games) to replace the HD5770 in my son's PC. This will be at 1920x1080.

Gah!

I did a bunch of benchmarks a couple of days ago but I stuck the card in his PC last night.

One of the reasons he wanted a new GFX card was to start playing ED so I'll pester him to hurry up and buy it over the weekend.

*EDIT*

Regarding the RAM chips, I'm a bit confused.

Am I to assume that each chip is 2gb but the quantity of chips on the board relates to the bandwidth somehow?

For example, here's a review of a Radeon R9 270 which has 2GB RAM: http://www.bit-tech.net/reviews/tech/graphics/amd-radeon-r9-270-review/1/
This card uses the same RAM chips (the 6A-F version) and has eight of them.

To me, that suggests that this chinese "1060ti" either has half that amount of RAM or, possibly, half the bandwidth. [where is it]

I'm also still wondering why it has 1x 60-F RAM chip and 3x 6A-F RAM chips.

I wonder if that was a mistake and if the board had 4 of the 6A-F chips it might have worked "properly" and my mate would never have realised anything was wrong?

MickyG1982 · Jun 8, 2018

Stealthie said:
Gah!

I did a bunch of benchmarks a couple of days ago but I stuck the card in his PC last night.

One of the reasons he wanted a new GFX card was to start playing ED so I'll pester him to hurry up and buy it over the weekend.

*EDIT*

Regarding the RAM chips, I'm a bit confused.

Am I to assume that each chip is 2gb but the quantity of chips on the board relates to the bandwidth somehow?

For example, here's a review of a Radeon R9 270 which has 2GB RAM: http://www.bit-tech.net/reviews/tech/graphics/amd-radeon-r9-270-review/1/
This card uses the same RAM chips (the 6A-F version) and has eight of them.

To me, that suggests that this chinese "1060ti" either has half that amount of RAM or, possibly, half the bandwidth. [where is it]

I'm also still wondering why it has 1x 60-F RAM chip and 3x 6A-F RAM chips.

I wonder if that was a mistake and if the board had 4 of the 6A-F chips it might have worked "properly" and my mate would never have realised anything was wrong?

It would have worked properly right up to the point where it hits the 1gb VRAM limit, then binned out with a memory overrun.

If you are feeling confident you *might* be able to reflash the BIOS back to a Gts 450 and it'll probably work again. The thing is the scammers have actually hacked the bios so the card thinks and represents itself as a gtx 1060 to both you and your pc. This means that legacy support drivers for it will not work and current drivers may also simply crash at the first available opportunity...

CMDR MAIN SEQUENCE · Jun 8, 2018

If those datasheets are correct then they mention the 2gig capacity in at least 4 places. The difference with the 60-F is that it requires a slightly higher voltage to operate at the same data rate (1.6 vs 1.5 at 6.0gbps), but it's all very odd I agree.

Stealthie · Jun 8, 2018

MAIN SEQUENCE said:
If those datasheets are correct then they mention the 2gig capacity in at least 4 places. The difference with the 60-F is that it requires a slightly higher voltage to operate at the same data rate (1.6 vs 1.5 at 6.0gbps), but it's all very odd I agree.

Okay, I think I'm starting to wrap my head around how this stuff works...

That R9 270 (which I posted a link to earlier) has the same EDW2032BBBG-6A-F RAM chips that this card has.
It has EIGHT of them but still only has 2gb of RAM.

I also had a look at a 1gb GTS 450 card, here: https://www.hardwaresecrets.com/geforce-gts-450-video-card-review/
This has 4 RAM chips, the same as "my" mystery-card, but they're Samsung K4G10325FE-HC05 chips.
A bit of googling unearthed a generic Samsung data-sheet: https://datasheet.ciiva.com/26785/k4g20325fc-hc04-26785647.pdf
According to Samsung's naming conventions (from page 2) it would seem those are all 1gb RAM chips.

I guess I've learned that GPU RAM works in "parallel" and the chip denotes the memory size while the number of chips relates to the bus width; 4x chips = 128bit, 8 chips = 256 bit etc?. [where is it]

Course, having said that, I suspect that cards which have RAM chips on both sides of the PCB probably have more RAM too ("banks" of parallel chips working in series?) but I think I've gone as far down this rabbit hole as I need to.

It would seem that this chinese card is actually a 2gb card with a 128bit bus rather than being a 3gb card with a 192bit bus, as claimed.

In summary, even if I could re-flash the BIOS so it acted like a GTS 450, it'd still suck balls.

Morbad · Jun 9, 2018

Stealthie said:
Turns out the processor is out of an old (really, really old) NVidia GTS 450.

The memory is slightly more confusing (to me, at least).

There are 4 ram chips on the board, all made by Elpida.
3x EDW2032BBBG-6A-F
1x EDW2032BBBG-60-F

Data Sheets here:-
http://pdf1.alldatasheet.com/datasheet-pdf/view/555097/ELPIDA/EDW2032BBBG-6A-F.html
http://pdf.datasheet.live/datasheets-1/elpida_memory/EDW2032BBBG-60-F.pdf

If somebody can tell me how much RAM this equates to, in layman's terms, and why there's 3 of the 6A-F's and one of the 60-F's I'd be interested to hear it.

Also, FWIW, I found somebody selling an Msi GTX770 locally for £50 and ended-up buying that for him.
I know it's EoL but it's a decent(ish) card and it's in superb condition.
He's happy with it.

*EDIT*

And the GTX 770 absolutely crushed his "GTX 1060ti" in all the benchmarks I did.

The GF116 was used in several parts from later revisions of the GTS 450 through some of the low-end 600 series parts. My best guess is that your sample there is a GeForce GT 545 GDDR5...Fermi small die in the 144:24:16 (shaders:TMUs:ROPs) config with 1GiB of 5Gbps GDDR5 on a 128-bit bus.

So yeah, it's four architectural revisions old and the second lowest end die flavor of the Fermi generation. A GTX 770 should be about 3-8x as fast, depending on app.

The "6A" vs "60" on the memory isn't significant. Same speed grade, same size...difference is likely a down to revision or a relabeled part from a second source.