Long story short, coworker was talking about how he upgraded from a 3080 to a 4080 last week. He asked if I was interested in buying his old 3080 for 400 USD. I told him yes of course (my gaming pc still running a 970 and I’m getting back into PC gaming after a long break).
Well today he comes in, says he was mistaken, it’s actually a 3060 and because of that he’s willing to sell it for 300 USD. I thanked him but after seeing new 3060s for sale on Amazon for the same price I’m thinking that I need to haggle or look for another card. Thoughts?
TLDR: Used 3060 for 200-250 USD, new 3060 for 300 USD or another option preferably vram min 10gb. Very top end of my budget (stretching it) is $450-500. I want to game at 4k (I know “good luck” but I wouldn’t mind settling for 1440) and have a respectable bump up in graphics performance from the Xbox series X or else the purchase isn’t really worth it to me, as the Xbox is already doing 4k @120 hz on my TV. Yes I know the Xbox 4k is probably upscaled.
300 for a used 3060 is terrible. Frankly, it’s terrible even for a new 3060. I wouldn’t offer that price to a stranger, let alone an acquaintance.
Regardless, given your performance target of 1440p/4K, the 3060 won’t get you there. If I were you, I would try to turn the offer down. If you want to upgrade, you might want to consider if you even want an Nvidia card, since they are generally more expensive at the same performance than an AMD card. I would really only recommend Nvidia if you care about ray tracing. Otherwise, for 500-ish dollars, you can get a very good AMD card. I would recommend looking at an RX 6800XT or 7800XT, whichever is cheaper where you are. (Performance is about the same)
I would also recommend waiting a couple months. Nvidia’s recently-announced 4000 SUPER cards have a pretty meh price (as compared to Nvidia’s usual terrible price). The lower-than-usual pricing might cause AMD to respond by lowering their own prices, so it’s a good time to hold out and wait