The daily decline in the price of graphics cards has made many gamers breathe a sigh of relief, and the market price of new cards has gradually returned to stability, including the NVIDIA RTX 30 series, AMD RX6000 series have returned to the original starting price, and even some brand models have fallen below the initial price. However, what really makes low- and middle-level players not get rid of the shackles is that the existing new card prices are still much higher than expected. Taking the RX6400 released by AMD at the end of April as an example, the card is positioned as an entry-level, but the price is more than 1300 yuan, and the performance is only equivalent to GTX1650, even lower than the RX580 of the same door, and the second-hand price of the latter is currently only six or seven hundred yuan, and the final advantage is probably only low power consumption.
In fact, in the past two years, the pace of new cards of graphics card manufacturers has not weakened significantly, but the price of both new cards and old cards has risen, the most obvious is that CPU products including Intel Pentium, AMD Athlon, etc., because of chip production capacity problems, manufacturers in order to maintain profit margins, give priority to ensuring the supply of high-end products, so that hundreds of yuan of low-end graphics cards and CPUs seem to have become a thing of the past, so that only low-end players can pick and choose in the second-hand hardware that has formed a stock market, for this reason, The second-hand consumer electronics market has also entered a period of spatial prosperity and disorder.
So as a "garbage guy" who has recognized the reality, how to find his favorite hardware equipment? The key starting point is still in their own needs.
General office group
The choice of hardware for the office community is much simpler, and at the same time, ordinary home computers with the same usage needs are also in this column. For daily Internet access, document processing, H.264 hard-unplay and other usage scenarios, the platform released after 2010 can easily cope with it.
The reason why it is limited to 2010 is because this year is the watershed of PC energy efficiency, and the technologies that determine future trends such as converging concepts, AVX instruction sets, and process process leaps and bounds have since emerged, including Intel's second-generation Core SNB architecture, AMD's first-generation APU LIano architecture, and later processor platforms.
The advantage of these platforms is that the price is low enough, often the motherboard CPU set dozens of yuan to three or four hundred range, the host assembly price is less than 300 yuan can be achieved, and most of them come with core graphics cards, do not assemble a unique and daily low-load use of the average power consumption of the whole machine is only about 100 watts, and even some low-end products can reach 70W or less, the key is that the use of SSDs is still very smooth.
This part of the hardware combination is obviously the first choice for the increasingly trending home office, online classes and other daily offices and homes, which greatly get rid of the premium paid by the mismatch between demand and performance, and even some platforms can meet the smooth experience of general low-demand online games in their leisure time because of the relatively strong nuclear display.
Entry-level gamer
Gamers are more segmented than we normally assume. The largest group comes from online games, but online games also have more complex hardware-level requirements, such as lower LOL, high-order nuclear display can cope, and higher chicken eating games, etc., need the previous dessert-level unique display to meet. At the same time, for players of single-player games, it is also divided into fps classes, role-playing classes, etc., and according to the time node of game release, the hardware requirements are also very different.
In terms of CPU selection, it is recommended to consider Intel's third-generation IVB architecture Core i5 processor and above, while AMD's sex price selection range is narrower, and should be searched for Athlon X4 760K/860K and above.
The main reason for the narrowing of the choice range for gamers comes from the game's CPU requirements, some of which have added mandatory requirements for new instruction sets, while more and more games have begun to rely more on THE CPU than just the graphics card, and eating more CPU has become an inevitable trend in the development of games. It should be noted that although the DOZER family of the AM3 interface has decent performance and three-level cache, the excessive energy consumption and heat generation have lost their optional significance.
Although the choice of graphics cards is not the same, the watershed is already emerging. In the AMD platform, the first generation of GCN architecture HD7750/7770 is often the first choice for entry-level online games, while high-demand chicken games still prefer Maxwell architecture GTX750Ti and above models. Although the Kepler architecture GTX660/660Ti, and the HD7850/7870 and its vest R7 270/370 are still available in the surrounding area, they are not the preferred chicken graphics card due to power consumption and energy efficiency.
In terms of stand-alone games, the above graphics cards of the current AAA masterpieces can hardly guarantee smooth operation, so the choice of older second-hand graphics cards is more to relive the smooth experience under the high score and high special effects of some of the earlier stand-alone games.
Enthusiast-level gamers and productivity users are mostly not in the second-hand consumer group, moreover, the current GTX1060 above the grade of graphics cards do not have a good cost performance, and even some of the semi-new graphics cards launched in the past two years and the new cards have no price difference, has lost the meaning of taking over, for this reason we are no longer targeted recommendations.
brief summary:
At present, the price of second-hand graphics cards has obvious lag, most graphics card models are still limited, taking RX560 4GB as an example, the average second-hand price of the card in the first half of 2020 is only about 240 yuan, the high point in 2021 rushed to more than 600 yuan, and the current price fell back to near 400 yuan. What is more critical is that the choice of models is only a necessary foundation in the second-hand gold panning, and more or less to polish the eyes, find products with both quality and quality at the right price, especially in the deep-water second-hand market after the mine is sad.
After the price fluctuations of memory, hard disks and other accessories stabilize, the return of graphics cards to their original appearance will also be the trend of the times, we are not encouraging everyone to choose second-hand goods, but in the gap period of the industry can effectively avoid the premium, I believe that one day, after the recovery of chip production capacity, such as new cards below a thousand yuan, Pentium Athlon and other cost-effective accessories will return to the public vision.