Which GPU(s) have aged the BEST in the last 3 years?

[MrTeal]

Makes sense. Multiple PCs certainly gives you a lot of fun upgrades down the line as you can pass off the CPUs/GPUs from your primary to secondary to tertiary systems, etc. This justifies upgrades



As far as the performance leap from 7900GTX/X1950XTX, yes for sure it's justified but as far as longevity it was also considered to be one of the most legendary cards but I think I'd have to split 9700Pro/8800GTX as the best cards to come out from a performance jump point of view but longevity factor I'd give to 7970 over those ones.

We'll see what happens though as GPUs continue to increase in performance but with static PS4/XB1, games aren't getting as advanced as fast as I thought. At this pace the 980Ti might last a while but we'll see.



The thing is it was possible to buy an after-market 290 for $200-250 well before 390 dropped. Even today it's not easy to find a 390 below $280. Think about all the gaming enjoyment someone already got out of a 290 for 1.5-2 years? I doubt the 390 will outlive 290/290X due to 8GB of VRAM. Also, I think comparing 390 to 970 makes the 390 look pretty bad since the 970 came out Sept 2014 and is very similar in performance but cost $330. Imagine if someone waited 1 full year thinking there would be something much better than an after-market 290/290X/970 as of October 2014? Well that never happened in 2015.

8800GTX caught a bit of a break because Tesla wasn't a massive enough jump to make it redundant, and Fermi was so delayed and took awhile to get its 40nm issues sorted out with the 580. It took three years until the release of the 5870 for a card to be twice as fast as the 8800GTX.

For the 7970, the 980 wasn't quite twice as fast as it so it took a bit over three years until the Titan X was twice as fast as the 7970. The delay and cancellation of 20nm cards really helped keep the 7970 competitive with newer generations there.

I think a lot of the reason why the 7970 feels like it's aged so well is that it still does really well in most games at 1080P. You might have to turn down some settings here or there in some, but it's still good. For the 8800GTX, it wasn't too long before games like Crysis and FC2 came out where you really had to dial back settings and resolution to make it playable. Even if it took awhile for the cards to improve drastically because G80 was so good, it still seemed like it was limited just because the games punished the hardware so much at common resolutions.

 

[Sohaltang]

I would go with my 7970 GHZ but my 780TI classified @ 1350 MHZ would be a strong second. Sure I paid a lot for it but at 1440P no other card has shown much of a improvement. At least in the games I play. Likely keep it another year or so.

 

[poofyhairguy]

What amazes me about the 7970 isn't its longevity, it is the fact that nowadays it is SO CLOSE to the OG Titan that was almost twice as much money. I wish I was paying more attention to the GPU market then so I could understand why so many people bought Titans, there is a much smaller gap between it and the 7970 than the current Titan X and our current $500 card.

In a way the great value that is the 7970 made the OG Titan (unless you need DP) the worst GPU value of all time.

 

[Headfoot]

Legendary status: 8800 GTX, Radeon 9700 Pro, 3dfx Voodoo(1)
Best value of all time status: aftermarket 8800 GT, 1 Ghz 5850, aftermarket R9 290 in 2014-2015 ($250)
Honorable mentions: 7970/7950

 

[dragantoe]

I am not sure how you are comparing 660Ti to the 7870 when 7870 was significantly cheaper when 660Ti came out. 660Ti was as expensive as the 7950 cards. 660 was a competitor to the 7870.

660Ti was never really competitive with a 7950 in the hands of an overclocker, and neither was the 760. 7950's stock speed was 800mhz but it overclocked to 1.15-1.25Ghz, at which point it was easily as fast as the HD7970Ghz, which in turn is at least as fast as the 280X.

http://www.legionhardware.com/artic...z_edition_7950_iceq_xsup2_boost_clock,13.html

That means from the chart you linked, an overclocked 7950 would be = 280X = 63 fps.

In comparison a 760 is 43 fps. I am not aware of any 660Ti/760 that can overclock 45% on air.

A solid MSI TwinFrozr III 7950, Gigabyte Windforce 3X 7950, PowerColor PCS+ 7950, Sapphire Vapor-X/Dual-X 7950 were known to hit 1.15-1.25Ghz overclocks and we had a gigantic thread of owners showing this on this very forum. That means for all intents and purposes an after-market 7950 = 280X. 660Ti/760 would have no chance to compete with that.

Anyway, since you had other uses such as streaming Shield games, that's a different story.

Look at modern titles - today a 760 cannot even beat an R7 270X which is a barely higher clocked 7870, not even a 7950.

Let's not get ahead of ourselves, there is no way to get stock 280x performance out of a 7950, that would require almost a 50% increase in performance, which is way too big of an overclock for that card. My 760 is currently overclocked to 1350 core 7200 memory, a 22% core increase and 17% memory increase respectively, both of which are out of the ordinary for this card, and it has 4gb of usable vram, in battlefront specifically, I was using around 3.3 gb of vram during gameplay, I don't know if the game really needs that much, there aren't a lot of vram benchmarks for the game, but it could also put the 7950 at a disadvantage

 

[MrTeal]

Let's not get ahead of ourselves, there is no way to get stock 280x performance out of a 7950, that would require almost a 50% increase in performance, which is way too big of an overclock for that card. My 760 is currently overclocked to 1350 core 7200 memory, a 22% core increase and 17% memory increase respectively, both of which are out of the ordinary for this card, and it has 4gb of usable vram, in battlefront specifically, I was using around 3.3 gb of vram during gameplay, I don't know if the game really needs that much, there aren't a lot of vram benchmarks for the game, but it could also put the 7950 at a disadvantage

How would a 7950 need a 50% increase in performance to hit a 280X? The 280X only has 14% more shaders than the 7950, and the same number of ROPS. You don't need to run the 7950 much faster than a stock 280X to get similar performance. Most 7950s will easily hit 1100.

 

[dragantoe]

How would a 7950 need a 50% increase in performance to hit a 280X? The 280X only has 14% more shaders than the 7950, and the same number of ROPS. You don't need to run the 7950 much faster than a stock 280X to get similar performance. Most 7950s will easily hit 1100.

my mental math sucks, but it's a 25% increase, still a beefy overclock, but I can see how it would happen.. still the 7950 and 760 are very close when compared to the higher end cards

 

[MrTeal]

Look at the benchmark, the 280x gets almost 50% higher framerates than the 7950.

Not quite, that a bit less than 30% different. The 280X is clocked at 1GHz vs the 800MHz of the 7950, but they're the same die. The 800MHz clock speed of the 7950 was just a differentiation thing by AMD, it can easily go above 1GHz without even touching the voltage. The 7950 was massively overclockable, with a lot of people getting 50% overclocks.

 

[Silverforce11]

Clock for clock, the 7950 was around 5% behind a 7970, which became the 280X. AMD launched it with very low clocks, 800mhz, which didn't give an incentive for buying the 7970.

@RS
A 7950 only needs to run at 1050mhz to match 280X (7970 @ 1Ghz). The 7950 was considered the OC champ in recent history, doing 40-50% OCs was common. So a 7950 @ 1.2ghz is basically 280X + 10% more.

I recently still use a 7950 @ 1.2ghz and it was beastly even in Witcher 3, near maxed settings @ 1080p fluid smooth gameplay (>45 fps).

For its price, I bought it at release time for ~$330 AUD, I think it held up extremely well over the years when compared to the more expensive 670.

The other contender would have to be the R290 4GB, for its price (~$499 AUD on release in 2013), it still is a very strong performer, especially the non-reference models, when compared to its competitor: 780 (~$599 AUD at the time).

The reason I don't think much of the R290X, was it was priced at ~$700 AUD (780Ti was ~$850 AUD), which is ridiculous when considering custom R290 TriX was 5% slower for $200 less.

 

[Gikaseixas]

HD 7900 series are legendary already, mine keeps on going, what a card

 

[thesmokingman]

1340 on a 7970? That must have been on water and over 1.3V?

1340 on my slowest card, and yea on water and over 1.3. There's no way to maintain your sanity running quad anything w/o blocks.

 

[njdevilsfan87]

For single GPU, the 7950 and 290 get my vote. NV isn't even close there. For multi-GPU, the 780 Ti paired with G-Sync, as expensive as that is, gets my vote. That just worked out of the box and has made a big difference. AMD's multi-GPU side has been too broken over the past 3 years (FCAT, and then not working with FS for many months too) for me to say that aged well at all.

 

[crisium]

7970 released 3 years and 10 months ago as the fastest GPU money could buy. Although the 280X has been officially discontinued I believe, they are still on the market and effectively occupy the 5th performance tier of late 2015 (AMD currently only has 390, 390X, Fury, Fury X as faster).

No card in history has ever been good enough to basically be in the fifth or even sixth (if you add Titan X to the top) tier four years later. 7950 is about a month younger technically but also cheaper and with a max OC should be within 5% or so, so that's another winner.

The other GCN 1.0 cards might have been up there if it weren't for 2GB of VRAM, and they are also a bit light on the Shader count (1792vs1280 on Radeon 7950vs7870). If there was a 4GB 7870XT (1536 cores) it would probably be a winner too but that card was almost like a phantom and was 2GB only.

 

[MagickMan]

How many 7950s and 7970s, that have been used heavily for gaming (like 4-6 hrs /day), are still fully functional today? I'm on board that theoretically AMD GPUs have more longevity, but mine seem to die (or degrade to the point I need to underclock them) not long after 2 years. My 7970 from Sapphire started getting flakey after 26 months and died altogether at 28, and with a 2 yr warranty I simply had to throw it in the recycle bin. That's an all-too-common thing, too. My CF 5850s died, 7970 died, one of my CF 290s died (and the other is running in my dad's PC where it flakes out after 2 hours of gaming). So now I've gone to team Green and am running SLI 980TIs, started w/ one and then bought another, and we'll see how that works out.

 

[thesmokingman]

How many 7950s and 7970s, that have been used heavily for gaming (like 4-6 hrs /day), are still fully functional today? I'm on board that theoretically AMD GPUs have more longevity, but mine seem to die (or degrade to the point I need to underclock them) not long after 2 years. My 7970 from Sapphire started getting flakey after 26 months and died altogether at 28, and with a 2 yr warranty I simply had to throw it in the recycle bin. That's an all-too-common thing, too. My CF 5850s died, 7970 died, one of my CF 290s died (and the other is running in my dad's PC where it flakes out after 2 hours of gaming). So now I've gone to team Green and am running SLI 980TIs, started w/ one and then bought another, and we'll see how that works out.

Mine work pretty well still. Your post reads like it's got an agenda anyways lol.

One of my quad 7970s:

Order detailsOrdered on March 2, 2012 (1 item)
XFX FX797ATNBC HD 7970 Black Edition 3GB 1000MHZ GDDR5 Dual Mini Display Port HDMI DVI PCI-E Graphics Card
XFX
Sold by: Amazon.com LLC

I know longer use it now, it's been retired along with the rest of the cards. They are now living life in my kids rigs.

Btw at roughly 30 months or so I sent it to a friend in Norway and he did this with it.

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/4282003

Then after getting said card back, it still did this:

http://www.3dmark.com/fs/3005500

After years of pushing 1.4v and benching like mad my cards still work and clock well. Maybe the problem is on your end?

 

[tential]

Mine work pretty well still. Your post reads like it's got an agenda anyways lol.

One of my quad 7970s:



I know longer use it now, it's been retired along with the rest of the cards. They are now living life in my kids rigs.

Btw at roughly 30 months or so I sent it to a friend in Norway and he did this with it.

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/4282003

Then after getting said card back, it still did this:

http://www.3dmark.com/fs/3005500

After years of pushing 1.4v and benching like mad my cards still work and clock well. Maybe the problem is on your end?

Could be a psu malfunction. I'd be inclined to think that when a person has a higher failure rate than everyone else.

 

[thesmokingman]

Could be a psu malfunction. I'd be inclined to think that when a person has a higher failure rate than everyone else.

It could just be user induced degradation. For ex. I stuck one of my 7970s in my nephews rig on air. He said he had problems a year later. It turns out he never cleaned his pc and the rig was huffing on it's own air for a year. The card was full of dust, the filters had never been cleaned lol. The card degraded from living high temps for a year. It was sad though, this was a 7970 OC (original ref pcb layout with extra phase) that clocked to 1330/1850 on air. Moving I pulled that card out and stuck in a cheapo 7950 off a miner as a replacement. I then put that 7970 into my htpc, it's living a retirement now puttering along in my htpc server.

Conversely the two 7970s still in my sons rig in crossfire with blocks, still can do max overclocking.

http://www.3dmark.com/fs/4065785

 

[MagickMan]

Mine work pretty well still. Your post reads like it's got an agenda anyways lol.

One of my quad 7970s:

I know longer use it now, it's been retired along with the rest of the cards. They are now living life in my kids rigs.

Btw at roughly 30 months or so I sent it to a friend in Norway and he did this with it.

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/4282003

Then after getting said card back, it still did this:

http://www.3dmark.com/fs/3005500

After years of pushing 1.4v and benching like mad my cards still work and clock well. Maybe the problem is on your end?

"I don't agree, so you must have an agenda."

Or, you know, it could be that I OC my cards and push them very hard, which I do. We'll just have to see how long the 980TIs hold up. The last nvidia card I had, a 9800GT, died after a little over 3 years, and I beat it like a rented mule.

Could be a psu malfunction. I'd be inclined to think that when a person has a higher failure rate than everyone else.

Mmm... nope, I upgrade my PSU with every platform change. So, unless I got a string of bad PSUs (that all test out perfectly). . .

 

[thesmokingman]

"I don't agree, so you must have an agenda."

Or, you know, it could be that I OC my cards and push them very hard, which I do. We'll just have to see how long the 980TIs hold up. The last nvidia card I had, a 9800GT, died after a little over 3 years, and I beat it like a rented mule.



Mmm... nope, I upgrade my PSU with every platform change. So, unless I got a string of bad PSUs (that all test out perfectly). . .

Yea, their deaths probably have something to do with you. The agenda is when you imply it had something to do with AMD.

 

[MagickMan]

Yea, their deaths probably have something to do with you. The agenda is when you imply it had something to do with AMD.

I'm not implying anything, I personally think AMD GPUs don't last as long as nvidia's.

 

[littleg]

Well that makes one of you then. Total gibberish.

 

[flexy]

I think Kepler, like a 660 Ti or 670 are still surprisingly viable if you don't want to play the latest of the latest at max settings. Wife plays stuff like WoW and SWTOR...so I got her a 670 after the old 660 TI died. I don't see a reason why she would need a 970 or better with those games. Ironically, she could even play GTA V and probably other stuff fine if I upgraded the rest of the PC (I gave GTA V a test run on this PC which is about 900 years old and it looked good..EXCEPT that it was obvious it needed more memory)

 

[mysticjbyrd]

7950 boost No question imo

I'm not implying anything, I personally think AMD GPUs don't last as long as nvidia's.

If they last over the warranty when you OC the shit out of them, then what more can you expect? This is hardly an objective test...

 

[poofyhairguy]

The other GCN 1.0 cards might have been up there if it weren't for 2GB of VRAM

Does that really matter though? I mean the GTX 960 is still sold with 2GB of RAM and you pretty much have to cherry pick to find games that give significant FPS improvements on the 4GB version. Heck I was just reading a GTX 750 1GB review the other day that showed that many games can't use more than 1GB of RAM at 1080p at settings that are actually playable on that card. I know I have experienced similar with my 1GB 7850.

I think if I was buying a $100+ today I wouldn't get 2GB of VRAM just because future console ports might go past that, but I am pretty shocked at how well most of my library runs on that old card.

 

[sxr7171]

What amazes me about the 7970 isn't its longevity, it is the fact that nowadays it is SO CLOSE to the OG Titan that was almost twice as much money. I wish I was paying more attention to the GPU market then so I could understand why so many people bought Titans, there is a much smaller gap between it and the 7970 than the current Titan X and our current $500 card.

In a way the great value that is the 7970 made the OG Titan (unless you need DP) the worst GPU value of all time.

The OG Titan was a compute card packaged for gamers. I don't know why gamers bought it. The Titan X on the hand is a gaming card to the core.

Having been on the nVidia train these past years has been terrible in terms of longevity. They are the worst. They make you buy a new card almost every 6 months. The current Titan X is the only possible exception in that if you bought it at launch you will get a full year out of it. In that sense it is far better value than if you bought a 680 and replaced it with a 780 and that with a 780ti and that with a 980.

The 7970 is the winner for a 3 year card.