Oh, I do love a good thrift. Thanks to judicious use of second hand apps, a good chunk of my wardrobe is now Lucy and Yak—yes, I know, with prints this loud you saw that coming a mile off. Still, in all my years of bargain hunting, I’ve not yet found a deeply discounted GPU I can trust.
Well, Reddit user BlackTo0thGrin hit the jackpot when they plunged their hand into a bargain bin earlier this week, and unearthed what appears to be a AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX in among miscellaneous stock. Realising what they had, they took it to the till—and paid the far from princely sum of “$4 plus tax.”
Though a couple years old now, this particular graphics card remains our top pick for the best AMD GPU for good reason. With a MSRP of $999 at launch, this Reddit user has potentially made a saving of mythological proportions—so long as the card proves to be genuine and functional.
Reddit user BlackTo0thGrin has been sharing updates, including a picture apparently showing the GPU in question installed and powered on. However, they’ve yet to share anything in-depth on the card’s performance—in part because this is their very first PC build. At present, their desktop doesn’t even have a case yet.
In their original post, the user explained how, after enjoying their time with the ROG Ally handheld gaming PC given to them as a gift by their eldest son, they decided to build their first desktop. On the hunt for some case fans, they ventured to their “local Amazon returns/overstock store called ‘Gimme a Five’,” and got more than they bargained for.
The progress they’ve shared so far sounds tentatively promising, as they write their motherboard is detecting the GPU correctly. They also share they’ve “got everything updated, all the drivers and the AMD software, everything seems fine, and temps are good.”
Though I am obviously intensely jealous of this Reddit user’s good luck, I am also keeping my fingers crossed that their very first PC build proves magical the whole way through (and doesn’t turn into a Grimms’ fairytale with a twisted moral at the end). Second-hand GPUs can be a troublesome game, with cards used for cryptocurrency mining once flooding the used market. With big cryptos no longer relying on at-home GPU mining all that much, that’s less of an issue these days.
Of all the places for pretty decent hardware to turn up, an “Amazon returns/overstock store” is perhaps one of the more expected I’ve seen in recent months. Serious thrifters will advise you to wear gloves if you’re planning to go elbow deep in any bargain bin, but it certainly beats digging hardware out of the trash.
With our surplus of e-waste, there may soon come a day when stories like that one—to badly paraphrase Shania Twain—cease to impress me much. Still, with how limited supplies of the imminent Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 are likely to be, maybe it is worth giving your local bargain bin another look.
Best CPU for gaming: Top chips from Intel and AMD.
Best gaming motherboard: The right boards.
Best graphics card: Your perfect pixel-pusher awaits.
Best SSD for gaming: Get into the game first.
