Yeah.. that setup + the cooler master cooler I got. I think I got lucky finding my setup for as cheap as I did.

If I just got the 950 I'm sure I could just sell it and make most of my money back down the road if I decided to sell and upgrade though, right? $100 seems like a great deal for what it is.
Also I couldn't even get a 480 or something without also buying a new monitor. At least with the 950 I can get a dvi to vga adapter

I'm not sure what the story on the gtx 950 is, but for whatever reason there doesn't seem to be a lot of them on the market, new or used. Which I would think is not a good thing when it comes to preserving resale value. Conversely, if you buy a card that was/is largely popular, you have a larger customer pool down the road. (i think?)

A $100 card should keep you gaming for at least a few years which makes it cost very little over the course of 3 years. But in 3 years, those cards will be approaching the end of the usefulness and wont have much resale value. So it kind of ends up being a throw away / dust collector.

Now consider if you buy a good new $250 card (and save all the box, packaging, and accessories), you can probably sell it in 2-3 years on fleabay for $100, making its eventual price being about $150 - pretty close to what you would have paid for the old card. But this time you will have been using a much better card with better graphics.

There are other ways to access value. You have to decide what is best for you.





This is what happens when you try to make the 950 look bad. They run settings high enough to cripple a 950, but low enough that the 970 can perform well. The difference is namely the textures, shadow quality, and anti-aliasing. If you just turn those things down you would see much better fps for the 950. That chart says 30fps for GTA V? lol please. You can easily get a steady 60fps in that game using "high" textures and x2 anti-aliasing (on an i5 / gtx760 2gb rig). GTA has settings scaled so high it can max out a gtx Titan and leave it hungry for more if you crank up every setting.

This post was edited by NatureNames on Jul 4 2016 01:34pm

Used 970 or r9 390 whenever they hit about 200 bucks.

If not then go with the RX 480 when the custom boards are out.

A used 970 is already about $200 shipped on r/hardwareswap. I got mine 3 weeks ago for $190 shipped. EVGA GTX 970 SSC.

Well, however you set the benchmark to run...the 970 is still nearly twice as fast as the 950. ^^

I missed the deal on the 950 already anyways, it just went up to like 170 :/

I will probably wait a bit til I see a good deal pop up on something else or get a 480

Or buy a used r9 390 or 970.

The 950 is pretty much worthless dude