Good you mentioned you are already late to the party, but there are still good and profitable Altcoins to mine like Zcash, Eth and ETC. The main thing is electricity if you can get free or low priced electicity it worth investing in Altcoin mining
I was thinking of using cards with a bigger hasrate but bad energy consumption, but I need some details.
Mostly people are using radeon for mining altcoin, Like rx480, rx470, r9 and others. You can try to search through the search engine about the comparison and efficiency of every graphic card. I see average people are using it for mine altcoin such as ether, monero and dash.