What's going on with the price of FAULTY GPUs right now?

[Rob_B]

I get we're in a funny market, I get that prices are crazy for most 'reasonable' cards but some of the prices are mental, who on earth is buying these things when they're described as giving no output etc, lets be real, they aren't going to be fixed and unless you want the cooler (possible) then these prices are insane...

RX 480 - £50
GTX 970 - £52
RX Vega 64 - £158
RTX 2080 - £232
1080ti - £140
980ti - £53

I'm mainly moaning as eBay won't currently let me filter out 'for parts' cards (weird) so my hunt for a cheap older card is being spoiled my the excitement of a cheap BiN price only to then discover it's faulty

[Jonj1611]

Unless its an actual processor failure a lot of these cards can be fixed, sometimes its just a resistor, cap or something like someone has damaged a track on the board. Probably a good return if you can fix them

[kalniel]

I'm sure there's a prospective mining allegory in there somewhere

[Corky34]

You think that's absurd, if you take a look on eBay UK for "rtx 3060 ti", click to see sold items, sort by price...and you'll see some people have paid anything up to £475 for cards listed as parts only. (Are we allowed to link to eBay? If not sorry and please delete this link)

Not sure if they actually paid that, like did they get carried away and withdrew their bid, maybe fake accounts making the bids...IDK but if someone did pay that for non-working cards that's a lot of money to gamble on getting them working again.

[Rob_B]

I'm reasonably confident that a 3060ti should still be in warranty too

[Corky34]

I'd not thought of that, that makes the selling of them even more curious, i wonder why someone wouldn't just RAM it.

[Rob_B]

Probably bought from a scalper so no receipt, you'd be furious!

[Jonatron]

The price of broken electronics on eBay has been too high for as long as I can remember. It's a good thing if you happen to have broken stuff lying around you want to get rid of, but buying stuff on eBay to fix is rarely a good idea.

[Spud1]

The price of broken electronics on eBay has been too high for as long as I can remember. It's a good thing if you happen to have broken stuff lying around you want to get rid of, but buying stuff on eBay to fix is rarely a good idea.

very much so, and especially in the past 12 months.

a year before lockdown I decided to learn how to repair old computers & games consoles - and it was a cheap hobby after buying a decent soldering iron etc I was set. Started with DMG game boys, and you could get a broken one for about £15-£20. Most faults were either corrosion (requiring cleaning & sometimes a replacement chip, but 99.9% of the time cleaning worked) or lines on the screen, which just require you to heat up the connector to reflow the traces and again, that fixes 99% of them. You could then sell them for £40-£50, not really a profit as such but covers the time spent on them. I ended up doing 9 of these and donating the profits to a local charity; fun for me and a bit of cash for them

Similar with 3DS consoles - could buy them broken for £20-£30, fix (most of the time with these, its the screen ribbon cable...PITA to fix but actually not too hard, and the parts are cheap) but you could resell for £60-£70.

Now, the "working" prices are very similar and have not really gone up, but the broken prices have nearly doubled. £30-£40 for a broken DMG01 and £35-45 for a 3DS..its bonkers.

I suspect many people have decided to learn a new skill during lockdown and turned to ebay for buying bits to repair - makes sense and is pretty much what I did!

Graphics cards are another level up and newer ones in particular require some good micro soldering skills, but would be satisfying to work on!

You can still get some bargains there but mostly need to import from japan (and therefore need to buy a few to make it worth the shipping) or job-lots, which are a massive gamble.

[Jonj1611]

It's the same with mobile repair, I have bought a lot of phones over the last year for repair and whilst most can be repaired the repairs/time taken and resale value hardly make it worth it. Unless you are getting something dirt dirt cheap nearly all "broken" phones are only a few pounds off retail