So I'm planning to build my first ever gaming PC and I was speaking to some of my family about it when my uncle says he has a $400 graphics card his department got by mistake where he works and has been sitting in his office for almost a year.
He said he'll bring me it tomorrow to see if I'd want it. Keep in mind I was aiming to build a $500 PC with a $170 card, is there any way this $400 card would be bad for my gaming PC?
No.
yes its very harmful to your pc
send it to me instead
How much will it raise the cost of my build with me needing more expensive parts potentially?
Like mobile games, GPUs get more powerful the more you pay for them.
For example, if you pay $900 for a GTX 550, it'll outperform a 1080 Ti at $700
Interesting. Can you explain why?
If you were aming at that price range, the cpu ill just bottleneck the cpu
i.e the cpu will not be powerful enough to use all the power of the gpu
It will NOT raise the rest of your budget. You're getting a better GPU and saving $170 off what you were going to spend. You now have $170 extra to shift to other components.
Even if the free $400 GPU now slightly outclasses your other components, it's not a problem. Yes, that will result in a bottleneck on the CPU, but that only means you're getting less performance than this GPU can deliver. You're still getting better performance than your build with a $170 GPU could do.
A bottleneck only means your build is somewhat unbalanced, and usually this means you wasted money on an over-specced part only to have it held back by other under-sepcced parts. This typically means you would have done better to spend that extra money on other components. But in your case, the GPU is free so the point is moot. A bottleneck does not lower your performance apart from capping it at the performance of the best part in your system.
So yes, obviously take the free GPU.
NVidia's telemetric driver components unlock performance features based on price paid, as determined by mining browser history, cookies, cache, etc.
Makes sense. Do you happen to know where can I buy a $900 GTX 550?
>is there any way this $400 card would be bad for my gaming PC?
yes, pic related
Most sellers on eBay are willing to sell you something at a higher price than they've listed it at if you message them and ask. They might act a bit confused at first but they'll usually take your money if you insist.
Okay, that is significantly less performance than the 1050ti you'd probably end up with at your $170 budget. However, I'd still take his free GPU. If it's something nicer than a 1050ti, use it. If it's a W5100, sell it on eBay and add the money you make off it to your budget to build a nicer PC. -- Remember, while it's not a good card for gaming, it's useful for CAD and someone will be happy to buy it.
That one will actually run modern games at low settings.
This one won't, at all.
Workstation cards are waaaaay overpriced and often stick around for generations, so that $400 card could be a workstation version of a three generation old $120 gaming card.
Video cards and processors also don't really reduce in price when new ones come out, they just sit at their old price until somebody is dumb enough to buy them, so even if it's a gaming card it could have been a generation old at the time. So it could be like a GTX 770, and that gets outperformed at the $170 level now.
Thanks for the advice and taking the time to write the reply. I'll definitely take it then and see how I can use the budget saved to get the most out of it
I can find things listed for way more than they're worth too. For PC parts it especially happens with discontinued, outdated items where only 3rd party marketplace sellers are available.
That Matrox card is not outdated/discontinued.
Caveat: make sure your PSU can handle it. An unplanned $400 card could very well push the build over the edge if you were planning on getting a really low-power one.
That said a good 750W PSU costs like $150, and a decent one $100, and that can be used to power multiple flagship cards in SLI/crossfire. For a single $400-tier card 500W is probably overkill, and you can get a top-tier memeium-efficiency modular one for probably $100 easily - meaning you still save $70 on your build and get a very nice GPU.
Yes it is you retard
First what card is it?
>he needs to consult Sup Forums to see if he should take a free $400 gpu
are you retarded by chance OP?
He doesn't know, he isn't great with hardware tech but he knows it's a $400 card so I guess I'll find out tomorrow
Potentially.
It was more I was always going to take it but wasn't sure if it would mean I'd have to spend way more on everything else. Reading here though and I'll still try to keep the same budget and accept the bottleneck
this guy is right do what he says
If the card was $400 a year ago it's worth half of that today. Also as others mentioned it could be a shitty Quadro or Firepro card that'll get outperformed by a PS4.
The only caveat to this is it could be some kind of weird workstation card that is not at all good for gaming.
In fact it very likely could be as a business would be more likely to order something like that than some xxx1337DDR gamer card.
It may make sense for OP to sell the card on ebay and use that money for a gaming card. It is very possible a $400 more than one year old workstation card is out classed by a 200dollarish card today
>Makes sense. Do you happen to know where can I buy a $900 GTX 550?
how does that make sense, how are you getting trolled this hard
for you
The only way that this could be potentially harmful is if its a quarto card and most likely it wont be as bad as a 150$ budget card the only thing that may hurt you is the fact that you may need to get a bigger power supply to run it dont listen to anyone about this bs on here
Ignore the LARPers
Is this bait?
That depends on how many years the card has been sitting inside your uncle's ass.
Haven't though of this. A $400 USD business card will probably be pretty shitty, OP.
He said it's been almost a year since they bought it
Kek
Troll level master
Prolly fine then.
Also I was aiming to get a motherboard that can support max DDR3, so is my biggest priority with a potentially free powerful card to get DDR4 and a motherboard that can support it or should I get a larger SSD?
You run the risk of the GPU overpowering the other, lesser components. Eventually you might lose all control over the system and the GPU will just do whatever it wants to.
Be very careful with this offer.
That's nothing that a hammer won't solve.
>Is there any way a $400 Graphics card would be bad for gaming?
Interesting question.
Yes and it's whats wrong with the industry today. If it's an Nvidia graphics card and they have a high market share because people spent that much on a mid-tier GPU it will encourage them to keep doing it, also Nvidia constantly slow down and break games in an effort to hurt the competition and their own customers so that an upgrade is required even if the hardware is technically capable to running fast and smooth.
Their practices are bad for gaming for you and other people who have not purchased their cards. Stop it.