Tell your friend to save his money until November. Black friday sales will probably yield some pretty good deals so unless your friend absolutely needs a GPU right this instant, I would wait. Plus this gives him time to save more. Possibly even for a 1080 which would future proof him a bit.
Great point!
I was not clear with my earlier point, but I wanted to emphasize that (usually) the used cards on eBay are overpriced...hard to find a legit bargain...and that is even more true now, with the latest AMD and Nvidia entry level cards, where $200 gets you something that comes very close to the previous top of the line.
After one of the awesome demos that have us screaming for 3.0, the dev's responded (in answer to a question) that the demo computer was running a single Nvidia 1080 card. My 1060 gets me 60 frames per sec in my hanger, and I'm usually in the upper 20's in the PU, where it has more to do with the net code and my connection.
In any event, waiting will never hurt...