The funny thing about pennies dropping is that they do so when you least expect them to. Also that most of them are really useless. Here’s one that dropped over the weekend.
My GTX 1060 is over six years old.
It’s also no longer on my computer. None of the components that shared a case with it are. They’ve moved somewhere else to serve someone who needs them for more pragmatic purposes than just plain gaming. But if it breaks down I’m the one they’ll call to fix it, or at least conduct the autopsy. No call yet, which means that circa 2016 silicon is happily chugging away, which is great for its age and the world it finds itself in.
Yes, we’ve been living in a time loop for the past three years. And nowhere is it more obvious than in the tech space, where GPUs got really rare for over a year and scalpers taught manufacturers the upper reaches of their market elasticity. I got lucky to have gotten a replacement for the 1060 before the market exploded. And with the market like it was it also old GPUs got a new lease on life.
The silicon shortage was actually its second lease on life, after a refresh in 2018 gave it some additional performance in the form of a switch to GDDR5x memory. As the shortages raged you could find desperate people buying these cards for what a 1080ti would’ve cost when they were the greatest card in town.
Not that they had much of a choice.
Fortunately we’re mostly out of the weeds on the GPU space. The Crypto crash and increased availability means a glut of graphic cards on the market. All yours for the taking. If you don’t want to support any of the major players, Intel’s ARC is there and ready for you to help it through teething troubles. The used market is now healthy and ready to take your money and not give any of it to the manufacturers. If only we were so lucky with other PC components and money weren’t losing its value like mass media is losing trust.
Me? Well, since graphics cards are now at the point where generational upgrades are not that exciting and 4k is still something that hasn’t made its way to the computer screens on the Solis household, I think I’ll just sit here and wait for something like an RTX 4050. All the performance of last gen’s “sweet spot” card, less power consumption. That is, if I even need to upgrade at all. Haven’t complained about my graphics card yet and with a TDP of 160W or so, it’s not like i can use it like a space heater. You don’t replace a fridge unless it stops cooling or you realize you need a bigger/smaller/more efficient one, why change your graphics card just because?
At any rate, at this stage pretty much everything on the launch roster will beat a 1060.
