Question Wisdom of buying RX 570/580 4GB cards, for mining/gaming, in Dec. 2020?

[VirtualLarry]

I pretty-much sold off my Polaris cards last year, and invested in GTX 1660ti cards.

But current GPU market circumstances are making it tough to get decent, efficient cards, at reasonable (MSRP, or below) prices.

There's a couple of places right now where I can pick up some RX 570 4GB cards, new or refurb, for $130 or less. You can't even get a GTX 1050 ti 4GB for that price. these days. Plus, the RX 570 is like 50% faster in games, and is close to the minimum 1080P non-RT 40-60FPS card that I would recommend for gaming. I was thinking of picking up a few for builds.

 

[Leeea]

You know way more about mining then most of us.

For gaming 4 GB is still enough if your willing to turn your textures to medium. The RX580 4gb did well 1080p, especially in esports games like overwatch and fortnight. >90 fps is easy in those types of games.

I owned an RX580 4GB, and it fell flat on its face when I started doing texture pack mods. Ironically, for the older games I liked to play, the game + texture pack mod + reshade mod + maybe d912pxy would result in v-ram quantity failure.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Hmm, yeah, I kind of swore off 4GB GPUs, except for minimal-spec gaming PCs, where I would throw in a $120 (refurb) to $160 (D6 "new") GTX 1650 4GB card, just for basic 1080P gaming support.

But the thing is, the GPU market supply has tightened up so much, that maybe I should consider buying some "old" Polaris 4GB cards ("new" is what I'm looking at, for ~$117 ea. in qty. + ship), instead. They're cheaper than current-gen GTX 1650 cards ("new"), and I think performance might actually be better.

 

[Mopetar]

But the thing is, the GPU market supply has tightened up so much, that maybe I should consider buying some "old" Polaris 4GB cards ("new" is what I'm looking at, for ~$117 ea. in qty. + ship), instead.

Why do they need to be new? Do you think the previous owner ran them all day and night in a terrible thermal environment such that their expected lifespan has been drastically reduced or something like that?

What kind of a person would ever do such a thing?

 

[VirtualLarry]

Why do they need to be new? Do you think the previous owner ran them all day and night in a terrible thermal environment such that their expected lifespan has been drastically reduced or something like that?

What kind of a person would ever do such a thing?

Well, these would be for rigs for sale. Usually customers don't like old beat-up, worn-out, dusty / failing-fan GPUs. Secondly, in today's market, I'm not sure used/refurb would actually be much if any cheaper.

And I did "abuse" some of my RX 570 cards that I had before. I didn't yet learn about tweaking the voltage and power limits for AMD and NV cards yet.

 

[Shmee]

4GB in general will not be enough for mining anymore, at least for ETH or ETC. I would go for a 6GB card minimum, unless you don't need to mine on it then you could get a Fury as those are pretty fast, faster than RX 590 usually.

 

[KentState]

I'm surprised that mining on a 580X is still a thing. ETH price is 1/4 of peak 2018 and probably much harder to mine.

However, I was looking at a 570/580X for a Hackintosh build and was surprised that they are still holding their prices. It's almost to the point where getting a used Mac mini sounds like a better deal.