Replacement gaming card

[Tea]

A customer has two Nvidia GTX 690s in SLI. One of them just failed. For now, he is operating with just the remaining one, but it occurs to me that things have probably moved on since the time he bought them, and that he could perhaps get similar performance with a single card these days at a reasonable cost - say around the $US 500 mark. I don't try to keep up with gaming cards these days, what can you suggest?

 

[mangyDOG]

I have one of these 2nd hand (only six months of use, still a year or so of warranty remaining) for $220.00 http://www.asus.com/Graphics_Cards/R9280XDC2T3GD5V2/
Should be faster I think than a pair of GTX690s.

In new cards, I would look at one of these:
Galax GF GTX 970 Black Edition V2. PCI-E3.0. 4GB 256-bit GDDR5. 1177/7010 MHz. 2 x DVI. HDMI. DP. Fan

should be well within budget and I have been very happy with the quality of the Galax cards.

Cheers,
mangyDOG.

 

[Mercutio]

A 970 would be a modest upgrade from a single 690, but the 690s were incredibly expensive cards and they're still quite credible for overall gaming performance. If your customer is looking to blow $500 on a new card, the right answer is probably to look at another 690; even an SLI pair of 960s would probably have comparable performance to a single 690 for most games and a single GTX980 would blow his budget.
I have seen R9 290Xs on sale for $260, but that's probably still not enough of a performance upgrade to justify the expense.

 

[ddrueding]

I probably have a moderately used (gamed but not folded or mined) 690 sitting around if he wants to go back to SLI.

 

[Tea]

Thankyou gentlemen! That's very useful advice. I've passed it on to my customer. Not sure what he plans to do yet.