NVIDIA isn't worth considering when these older AMD GPUs are still such a great deal

Published Sep 27, 2026, 11:30 AM EDT Ismar is a Senior Author at How-To Geek. He previously worked as a writer, editor, and general manager at a content agency before joining the team in 2023. He began his writing career in 2021 after completing a BA in English Language and Literature. Beyond How-To Geek, Ismar has contributed to Red Stag Fulfillment and Authority Hacker. He has also worked on various SEO projects to help clients improve their search visibility. Ismar has been around Windows PCs since the age of three, so friends and family naturally chose him as the resident tech support. His projects often involve tinkering, such as disassembling mechanical keyboards and gaming mice to mod his beloved gear. He also enjoys pushing hardware to the max through overclocking while staying on a reasonable budget. An avid gamer, Ismar has logged thousands of hours across various genres, including first-person shooters, RPGs, racing games, and roguelites. When he is not at his desk, he is probably exploring other people’s phones to discover their quirks and features or experimenting with the latest AI tools. In his free time, Ismar enjoys spending time with his wife, working out at the gym, playing guitar and bass, cooking gourmet meals, and traveling. Above all else, he’s a proud cat owner. For most PC gamers, the first instinct when building or upgrading a gaming PC is to look at the latest and most popular GPUs. But with graphics card prices shooting up, you’re unlikely to get great value for your money when buying new, especially from NVIDIA. Maybe it’s time to start looking at older, used graphics cards that are still powerful enough to run modern games at a solid frame rate. If you do some research, you’ll likely come to the same conclusion I have: AMD’s RX 6000 and RX 7000 Series graphics cards are usually the best value cards money can buy. Older Radeon cards are dominating the used market These cards refuse to die Although AMD has never been as popular as NVIDIA, and we're in the middle of a shortage, there's a very healthy supply of used AMD RX 6000 and RX 7000 Series cards on the market. In fact, you can readily find new RX 7000 Series cards, as they're only a few years old, and stock hasn't fully dried up. But since they are being sold at "new" prices, the used market is really where it's at. RX 6000 Series cards in particular are very easy to find good deals on. Whether it's a cheaper variant for 1080p gaming like the RX 6500 XT or RX 6600, or a higher-end model that can handle 1440p and 4K like the RX 6800 XT, there's no shortage of these cards on sites like Facebook Marketplace, Jawa, and eBay. Despite being relatively affordable compared to newer cards, they remain pretty capable. Just because the latest NVIDIA RTX 50 Series and AMD RX 9000 Series cards offer better performance, it doesn't automatically mean that the previous couple of generations should be written off, especially given the abundance of games that you can run on these older cards. And if you're wondering why I haven't included the RX 5000 Series in my recommendations, that's because they don't have hardware-level ray tracing and won't be getting official FSR 4 support, so they really only make sense if you play lighter games. Nvidia card prices are surging, while older Radeons are holding their value Long-term value is where things get interesting Credit: Monica J. White / How-To Geek While used AMD cards are going for reasonable prices on the used market, brand-new NVIDIA cards are a completely different story. Graphics card prices have gone up throughout the year, and some NVIDIA cards are now selling for drastically more than at launch. Just to give you a couple of examples, the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB launched with a $429 MSRP, and it now costs around $800, while the RTX 5070 Ti launched at $749 but now costs around $1,200. That's about an 86% increase for the 5060 Ti and 60% for the 5070 Ti, which is a massive premium for cards that were already expensive at launch. But since these used RX 6000 and RX 7000 Series cards have already taken the bulk of their depreciation by virtue of being used, their prices can be considerably more stable. These AMD cards also tend to offer more VRAM than their NVIDIA counterparts, which can help them stay relevant for longer and retain their value. And on top of only costing a few hundred bucks to buy, you could use the card for a year or two and, depending on the market, potentially sell it for the same price that you paid. As an anecdotal example, I bought a used RX 6800 XT for $380 in January 2025 to upgrade from my old RX 6600 XT, used it daily, and sold it for the exact same price in late December 2025 to put toward my RX 9070 XT purchase. So, I essentially got to own a capable 1440p gaming card for free. Your mileage will vary drastically depending on ever-changing market conditions, but I still think you're likely to take a considerably smaller hit than you would with a brand-new NVIDIA card. Using the same RX 6800 XT example, you should be able to find one for around $400 to $450, which is around half the current price of the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB. And yet, it has the same amount of VRAM and, according to TechPowerUp's relative performance chart, outperforms it by a few percent. RX 6000 cards can build the PC equivalent of a PS5 without breaking the bank Build a better PS5 I always recommend that gamers on tight budgets aim for the performance of outgoing console models. This way, you can rest assured knowing that every new game that launches should also run on your PC reasonably well, at least with upscaling enabled. The good news for us is that the PlayStation 5 has been around for quite a while and uses custom AMD hardware. This gives you an easy target to aim for — the RX 6700 — which is a close match, as it uses the same RDNA 2 architecture with 36 CUs. Of course, you could aim for even better performance by opting for any number of the higher-numbered RX 6000 and RX 7000 cards, like the RX 6700 XT, RX 6800, RX 7700 XT, RX 6950 XT, and so on. The point is, you can absolutely build a machine with hardware that's several years old but still feels modern and runs all the latest games that the PlayStation 5 can. The real challenge is finding a good secondhand card Whether you're a first-time PC builder or looking for a reasonably priced graphics card upgrade, used AMD RX 6000 and RX 7000 cards can offer excellent value. The real challenge is finding one at a reasonable price and making sure it works before you buy it. But if you can get past that, you can enjoy modern games on hardware that's still pretty capable in 2026.