The internet is flooded with news of the crypto crash and the impact of that on miners’ operations. The majority of them have started selling their graphics cards on the used market platform as they don’t want to wait and suffer further losses as nobody knows when the crypto market bounces back. While this does mean that GPUs can now be purchased at incredibly low prices, it also opens doors for a new plethora of problems, the most recent one being the sale of defective units.
This was very much expected after the GPU mining flood and many resale sites have listed full ranges of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 series graphics cards up for sale even below their MSRP.
We can see that the Asian and the Chinese markets are being flooded by the resale of these graphics cards and it is leading to an increase in the number of buyers and users who are facing multiple issues. But some see this as a golden opportunity to get their hands on the cards at dirt cheap prices. For instance, one user at the NGA.CN forums recently purchased a used MSI GeForce RTX 3080 SUPRIM X graphics card for 536 USD. This is a premium model and is listed for more than 1100 USD at Newegg. This is even lower than its MSRP of 699 USD.
Being able to strike such a deal does sound too good to be true and we might ask ourselves what the catch is. Well, as it appears, the graphics card has multiple issues starting from the labels being removed from all screws, meaning clearly that this card had been taken apart previously. The initial batch of the RTX 30 series did come with some major heating issues and users had to manually get the thermal pads exchanged.
Unfortunately, the problem didn’t just end at this. The user also found out that the SKU which was supposed to come with a memory of 10 GB was showing only 8 GB on the VRAM. There were only official variants of the RTX 3080 and they were 12 GB and 10 GB, models. There was no 8 GB SKU. The reason why this one in particular was showing less memory was the defected memory modules.
Getting to fix these issues is once again a costly and time consuming task. Hence provided, it is better to avoid turning to used marketplaces for buying graphics cards.
GPU flood is here.
Chinese miners and South Asian ecafes now dismantling their mining rigs and putting cards up for auction on livestreams.
3060 Ti's going for $300-$350 US … pic.twitter.com/kphmIt7vZw
— Hassan Mujtaba (@hms1193) June 21, 2022
Via WCCFTech