Question Thinking of buying a used card to upgrade with

[heymrdj]

Inspired by the “are you still using a Phenom II thread”, my daily driver PC is still the one I built like almost 10 years ago. Phenom II X6 1090T stock with 16GB Ram , MSI 790GX-G65 mainboard, Antec 650W PSU, and an ATI 5850 GPU. I use it for web surfing, occasional rendering, and gaming on my truck sims. Everything else seems to be keeping up fine except the GPU. The biggest issue is the legacy drivers, I have to turn off hardware rendering in Chrome because webpages with videos will be black screen for 10 seconds or so before unscrambling the picture. On top of that, scrolling with any videos on the page is a slide show. ATS and ETS2 also are starting to stutter with this years higher resolution DLCs on medium settings.

I only game at 1080. We’re saving for a house and I don’t have a dedicated computer space yet so I do t want to waste the $$$ on a full gaming system yet. So I thought about getting a newer video card that was still supported these days but not completely overkill for the old system. The board is only PCIe 2.0, obviously 3.0 cards will work but they’ll have to deal with 2.0 x16 speeds. Any recommendations I should be looking for?

 

[VirtualLarry]

Well, if you're in CONUS, and don't mind a GPU that's a little used, abused, and dog-tired (but still seems working?), I've got an RX 470 4GB card (XFX, I'm the original owner), that can be yours for the cost of shipping (say $20 Paypal). Merry Christmas!

(You'll just have to wait a day or two for the Annual Dec. Folding@Home race for the DC TeAm to wind down, as that card is participating.)

Edit: But, I don't know if the XFX RX cards work with a non-UEFI BIOS. That can sometimes be a problem. Perhaps someone can comment with more experience. My RX-series cards, are on machines here that all have a newer UEFI BIOS. (Skylake, Ryzen, etc.)

This Reddit seems to indicate, that XFX ships a dual-compatible (BIOS/UEFI) firmware on their RX 470 and newer cards? They also have a dual-BIOS switch, but for their RX 570 cards, one selects between a mining BIOS and a gaming BIOS. I'm not sure what the switch does on the RX 470 cards.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/506pl3

 

[heymrdj]

Well, if you're in CONUS, and don't mind a GPU that's a little used, abused, and dog-tired (but still seems working?), I've got an RX 470 4GB card (XFX, I'm the original owner), that can be yours for the cost of shipping (say $20 Paypal). Merry Christmas!

(You'll just have to wait a day or two for the Annual Dec. Folding@Home race for the DC TeAm to wind down, as that card is participating.)

Edit: But, I don't know if the XFX RX cards work with a non-UEFI BIOS. That can sometimes be a problem. Perhaps someone can comment with more experience. My RX-series cards, are on machines here that all have a newer UEFI BIOS. (Skylake, Ryzen, etc.)

This Reddit seems to indicate, that XFX ships a dual-compatible (BIOS/UEFI) firmware on their RX 470 and newer cards? They also have a dual-BIOS switch, but for their RX 570 cards, one selects between a mining BIOS and a gaming BIOS. I'm not sure what the switch does on the RX 470 cards.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/506pl3

How can I say no to a deal like that It looks like a 470 4GB is about the maximum I could see out of my system anyways. Just let me know what you want for it, when you're done with it.

I did look at your research. Never even knew that was a problem, but it shouldn't be surprising. It looks like only a few bad apples in the bunch, like those Sapphire ones, were UEFI only. It looks like the XFX cards are all Hybrid. I definitely don't have UEFI, I think my chipset was one year too old for that. But I see people having a lot of success with them on old systems like Dell XPS 8300s. Is it a standard XFX card? Or has it been flashed special for crunching?

 

[VirtualLarry]

How can I say no to a deal like that It looks like a 470 4GB is about the maximum I could see out of my system anyways. Just let me know what you want for it, when you're done with it.
Is it a standard XFX card? Or has it been flashed special for crunching?

Just $20 for shipping a flat-rate box, and a roll of bubble wrap at the Post Office.
It hasn't been flashed, though I'm curious about the secondary BIOS on the card. You can experiment!
It may not be 100% glitch-free, it mines and folds OK, but I haven't tried it with games for a while. Maybe I can fire up Heaven 4.0 benchmark, and watch it for a half hour, and see if it artifacts.
Edit: Oh yes, since I'm giving it to you for the price of shipping, NO WARRANTY, AS-IS.
Hopefully it will last you 1-2 years, as a transition card, until you can afford a whole new rig someday.

 

[heymrdj]

Just $20 for shipping a flat-rate box, and a roll of bubble wrap at the Post Office.
It hasn't been flashed, though I'm curious about the secondary BIOS on the card. You can experiment!
It may not be 100% glitch-free, it mines and folds OK, but I haven't tried it with games for a while. Maybe I can fire up Heaven 4.0 benchmark, and watch it for a half hour, and see if it artifacts.
Edit: Oh yes, since I'm giving it to you for the price of shipping, NO WARRANTY, AS-IS.
Hopefully it will last you 1-2 years, as a transition card, until you can afford a whole new rig someday.

Thank you! I understand, AS-IS deal.

 

[Shmee]

A used r9 290 would also be a good upgrade. I have 2 of them with the sapphire Tri X cooler, but you wouldn't get a deal on them as good as Larry's. If you wanted a bigger upgrade, you could go with an r9 Fury, just be sure to check the case clearance and make sure you have dual 8 pin PCIE connectors for power.

 

[amd6502]

Have you tried firefox? I don't understand why the video rendering would behave that way.

Maybe the olde card has silicon wear?

You can risk it and get a slightly less old card like a 670, 750, or equivalent r7/r9. I've found $50 used cards with decent luck.

If getting something new, RX 560 570 or ~1050 or thereabouts maybe.

 

[BurnItDwn]

I bought a used RX470 on the FS/FT forum a few months ago when building desktop for the wife so she could play WOW and Diablo and a few other games at 1080p. Great card, not quite as fast as my radeon 290, but, faster than my Geforce 960. The Radeon 290 does eat more power, but your Antec should have no trouble with the power needs.

Stuff like ETS2 will play maxed out at 1080p with the RX470. I imagine ATS will play the same (though I haven't picked it up so I can't confirm.)

 

[mopardude87]

Your to nice giving this guy this deal on the card Larry

 

[SPBHM]

I didn't have problems on web browsers with my 5850, but I use the windows update drivers (15.7) and always have video acceleration on the browsers disabled anyway (the video acceleration on these cards is bad, it can't handle 1080P60 on youtube and... it uses more power than leaving the CPU to do the work since it can stay in 2d clocks), other than that yeah, for gaming it's not really any good any more without support.

totally the right move to upgrade the graphics card first for that system anyway.

 

[heymrdj]

Got the RX470 card in and ran for an hour today. ETS2 and ATS both run with all settings maxed at 1080. Card is running much cooler, taking several minutes to even need to run the fans, and easily maintenance 52C at 30ish percent fan speed. Also only using about 60W of power. I look forward to trying some other titles when I get the chance. I also could use hardware acceleration again. Back to full HD YouTube and streams now, and not running the X6 at 40% plus to do it.

Thank you VirtualLarry!

 

[VirtualLarry]

Got the RX470 card in and ran for an hour today. ETS2 and ATS both run with all settings maxed at 1080. Card is running much cooler, taking several minutes to even need to run the fans, and easily maintenance 52C at 30ish percent fan speed. Also only using about 60W of power. I look forward to trying some other titles when I get the chance. I also could use hardware acceleration again. Back to full HD YouTube and streams now, and not running the X6 at 40% plus to do it.

A lot of people pooh-pooh the RX 470/570, but they're actually really decent 1080P, and in limited cases, 4K UHD cards. (4K desktop display is superb with these cards.)

I've got a bunch of them, you got the one most well-used (my oldest), hopefully it keeps working for you. You're welcome.

 

[VirtualLarry]

and the fact card lacks gigapixels per second, which makes it lose it's strength @ higher resolutions.

Not quite sure what you mean here. It has plenty sufficient memory bandwidth.