[slaman]

It's value deprecates over time though, as it's market efficiency drops relative to newer cards.

Your return on the opportunity cost is maximized if you can do work closest to the time the card was acquired.

If you buy a card and leave it in the box for 10 years you have not 'consumed' the card, but you have wasted a few hundred dollars.

From an electricity and financial perspective if you have valuable work to do, your costs are minimized if you do that work closest to the purchase date.

This is obvious if you have a significant workload, but maybe not as obvious if you are running CAD. Is the cost of a new card worth the time saved by the new card? Significantly more efficient if you can keep it busy.