You could just buy older-gen AMD cards? They still work. Like Apple with their hardware, AMD sees no reason to produce new "value" SKUs, when you can just buy their 1–3-gen-old flagship cards for "value" prices.

Even old designs on new semiconductor processes would be an improvement - a 3 generation old flagship card will be a bit cheaper to buy but will still have significant power consumption (ergo noise and heat) relative to the current generation.

They still work, until they don't because the vendor stops supporting them.

I've yet to see a graphics card which stopped being supported in reasonable terms. Except if you count 3dfx or other really old stuff, at which point it gets silly. Or awesome, guess it's kinda retro by now.

Opencl is not supported on IVY BRIDGES anymore for example, although there is no technical obstacles to provide such support.

Businesses would NEVER buy used cards. The are inefficient in terms of energy consumption, you never know if they were abused for mining and such, no warranty etc.

Parent didn't say "used" at all.

PCI Express cards based on NVIDIA GeForce GT 710 are available new for <40 EUR. Presumably there's a large clearance and used market with much lower prices. None of that is an option?

But that was kind of my point - Ryzen 5 3600 I can currently find for £180, while an i5 9400 is £198. If I now have to get a £30-40 dedicated GPU for the first one, Ryzen ends up being more expensive(not to mention that a super basic GPU like the GT710 does actually struggle driving a 4K screen, while the Intel 630 does not, but that's a minor point)

Not everyone is willing to buy old underpowered yet power hungry cards. You'd waste your time searching, you card would'not support 4k and VP9, no warranty. It gets especially expensive if you purchasing machines for some software developing shops - you want to have similar configuration on each machine, to save on IT support.

You're not wrong, the GT 710 only does 4k at <=30 Hz, which makes it a terrible choice for general purpose computing at this point. It also doesn't do VP9 acceleration. The GT 1030 does these things, but it's also twice as expensive.

What is "general purpose" computing at 30+Hhz?

710 plays 1080p YouTube and non-graphics intensive games fine.

I looked at this exact thing yesterday and those are currently the best option. They're also passively cooled which is nice. Having to use NVIDIA is annoying because of the story around Linux support. I mostly worry about these being old new stock and having poor reliability because of that but maybe it's fine.

New old stock is probably not a big deal for GPUs ... There's not a lot that's going to go bad on one that's just been stored for a couple years. From arcade collecting experience, big things that go bad in storage are batteries, and capacitors, and maybe dust accumulation. But a GPU doesn't have batteries, and capacitors usually take 10+ years to degrade in absence of heat from usage or bad chemicals (and heat makes that worse, so you'ld already know there was another bad cap scourge).

You can also avoid all that by getting a new design GT 710 https://www.anandtech.com/show/15713/asus-launches-an-old-gp...

Except for a couple of very new cards, most GT 710 cards don't have a DispayPort output, only HDMI. I also wonder if they support HDCP 2.2.