HD 7870 to GTX 970 for $250

A computer store I was at was selling an RMA'd Asus Strix GTX 970 for $250 CDN, on clearance (25% off). I bought my 7870 a couple of years ago under a similar situation (RMA'd) with a heavy discount. The clearance items were also on sale (30% off). The card is brand new more or less, I'm guessing it had fan problems which was the case for my 7870 back when I got it. It came with no discs or components etc as well.

I haven't payed a ton of attention to GPUs in a while so I am wondering if it was a solid pick up, and can I expect a sizeable performance improvement? 1080p gaming.

Let's see... By American standards, that's a little under $200 for the card, so that seems like good value for the money. The 970 is an excellent card (I own one) and will serve you well for all 1080p gaming. It will be night and day when coming from a 7870.

I'm lucky enough to have a few Micro Centers near me and have bought many open box cards for use in resale builds. My best haul was a Gigabyte R9 290X for $115 (which is otherworldly). I grabbed it and -- realizing the following result was likely -- it was a brick. That said, I RMA'd it, waited my month and got back the same card repaired & good as new.

Had an RMA not been possible, I would have returned it the same day and not thought about it again.

If the card works when you get it home, great! If it doesn't, RMA it while your 7870 holds down the fort or return it with only your time and effort being a loss.

A 7870 in crossfire is about what you would get with a 970. Plus more if the 970 is OC'ed. So yes I would take that deal. Speaking on a personal note, I had and well.. still have x2 7870's. I was using a Crossfire set up, before bumping to the 970 I own.

It's a nice jump and very nice when you consider it being a single card. If nothing is wrong with when you buy it, I'd say you got a really good deal.

Not a good time to buy GTX 970 even at $250 especially since you already have a decent enough card to hang on to for a month. Wait for GTX 1070 reviews before making a decision.

I would not recommend buying a 3.5GB card at this point especially since you seem like someone who doesn't upgrade every 2 years. An R9 390 should serve you much better in the long term with 8GB ram and superior DX12 performance. You can buy one brand new for $300 so you are not really getting as great a deal on the 970 as you might think. But like I said it is essential to see how much better the 1070 will be compared to the 390 before making a decision.

@Gambler_3:

I can't find an R9 390 for $300 in Canada. Cheapest I've seen on either newegg or memoryexpress is about $400+. I can get R9 380s for $300ish.

So in USD my card is closer to $190.