LuxXeon posted at 12:48AM Wed, 04 September 2019 - #4361159

A factory refurbished GPU should be just fine. It may not last as long as new, of course, but I'd trust it a whole lot more than any shady firmware hacked card at a ridiculously low price. EVGA has some refurbished cards, and that's a good reseller name. Always go directly to the manufacture website or authorized reseller if possible. As Lobo mentioned, Newegg and Amazon are reputable sources. Be sure it specifies that they are "certified" refurbished. You will notice that prices on these are typically within $100 of the retail price for any particular card, which suggests the card is legit as well.

Are you creating comics from the renders? If so, you might try using the Eevee engine instead of Cycles. It will render fast even on older hardware provided your GPU driver supports OpenGL 3.3 at minimum. The results can be almost as good as Cycles in some cases but in a fraction of the time.

I've bought a couple of SSD's from Newegg, seems like a good outfit. I should join Amazon Prime one of these days...

Yes, I'm trying to get a graphic novel going. Since it's a solo project I've been looking for ways to make production more efficient and still keep the look I'm after- there are trade-offs any way I go, it seems.

I'm just beginning to figure out the Blender renderers, there seems to be a lot of good material on doing NPR on Eevee. Since I'm not doing photorealistic rendering I don't think I'll be dealing with Cycles much.

I made a list of seven things I need to get on top of in Blender to be able to get a basic workflow going if I'm using it just as a reference. That's not too bad, although I've got some persistent health problems that are making it really hard to focus on learning these things. Hopefully by the time the pen display arrives I'll have the basics down and be able to step through the whole workflow and see if it's really practical.