Question Should I buy GTX 1070

[Pijmzhchus]

I have enough money to buy GTX 1070 second hand. Should I wait a few months or buy it now. If I wait a few months I may be able to afford 1070 ti.

 

[Darkbreeze]

Is the card you are looking at one that is for sale on Ebay, or one that you are looking to purchase from somebody you know? Currently, I wouldn't buy ANY graphics card on Ebay unless it was brand new and was sold by a vendor that was authorized by the manufacturer for resale of their products, otherwise, you may be out of luck when it comes to warranty issues and as far as used cards go almost all of what you see for sale on Ebay these days are cards that were previously used for mining and were either abused, modified or simply ridden to death 24/7 while the mining craze was in full effect and are probably, usually, not trustworthy hardware purchases. Often, they fail to work for gaming at all due to modified BIOS on the cards for mining optimization.

You would be VERY wise to purchase a card new, even if it means having to drop a tier in performance, unless you can buy a card used from a seller you are 200% certain is trustworthy and reputable, or is somebody you would have direct access to in the real world and would not hesitate to invite to dinner at your mother's house during the holidays.

Graphics cards, power supplies and motherboards, purchased without a warranty, are like begging to be kicked in the knee with steel toe boots. It's very likely to make you cry in the long run. Better to buy through an authorized seller and get the warranty, because these components are known to have higher failure rates than other types of hardware. Even when they are high quality components.

 

[THEearthISFLAT]

I have to wholeheartedly disagree with you on the eBay thing but you do have some valid points. for peace of mind buy new, end of story.

 

[Darkbreeze]

You can disagree all you like. I know at least fifteen people, personally, who've bought graphics cards off Ebay in the last six months and had some kind of issue with their cards. Three of them had mining BIOS installed, the others were simply done had it. Aside from that, I have personally participated in maybe 40 threads, just myself, here on the forum over that time period where somebody purchased an Ebay card and discovered that it had either been used for mining and had issues, wasn't even the card it was supposed to be or just had problems in general from hard usage. Certainly that's not the case, in every case, but considering the downfall of Bitcoin you can be sure there are hundreds and thousands of cards that were used in mining farms that are being offloaded to sellers on Ebay in an attempt to either recover investments or make money off somebody else's misfortune knowingly.

There are plenty of others here who've encountered similar situations and probably in higher numbers than I have.

It's not a question of IF this is happening, it's only a matter of whether you get one of those cards or not. Personally, I'm not willing to roll those dice nor am I willing to recommend somebody else do it either. You could lucky, but you could just as easily get screwed.