Got to play around with two GTX 970s in SLI, and it got me refocused on upgrading my GTX 780. Long story short, I ended-up getting a used MSI GTX 1070 GAMING X for $260 CDN.
The new video card requires the MSI Gaming App to take full advantage of its advertised cooling, RGB, and overclocking controls; but that app hasn't worked properly since Windows 10 1809 - and MSI has no intention of updating it, according to their forum moderator. I can recreate the OC and cooling settings better in MSI Afterburner though, so we're good there.
Anyway, $260... That's ~$230 + tax here in Ontario. The 1070 is a few years old now, so anything cheaper on the used market is even older and pretty firmly in the bad-long-term-investment category. The 780 I replaced is going for $150~$200, the newer 970 performs about the same and is going for about the same, and even when either's paired in SLI neither matches the 1070 - so they're out. The 980 Ti is around the same price as the 1070 but performance looks comparable, so I'm not seeing any reason to go back another generation. The next step up in the used market is the 1070 Ti, and it's going for anywhere from $60 to $240 more than the 1070... For a ~25% performance increase it's not bad, but not a great deal; especially since the 1070 still really holds its own with today's games as well as VR, and won't be having any issues with 1080p for years to come. Don't hesitate to grab a 1070 Ti if you find one closer to $300, but it's all extra at that point.
So what about comparably-priced new video cards? GTX 1650 SUPER or Radeon RX 570... Everything there is either a budget part or already old, and all are significantly slower than the used 1070.
Comparably-performing new video cards? GTX 1660 Ti or Radeon 5600 XT for $450 after tax... Good cards, but they're not going to age well for the $190 price premium.
Marginal upgrade on new cards? RTX 2060 for $565 after tax... That's an additional $300 to add low-end RTX support and lose 2GB of VRAM!? I'm not sold, and now that we're well over twice the price of the 1070, I think I'm done.
So it looks like spending under $300 CDN for a 1070 is the way to go if you're upgrading from the low-end (or from 2013, like I was) and want to save at least a few hundred dollars.
