As price rises hit everything thanks to the RAMpocalypse, with SSDs, memory, graphics cards, PCs, handhelds, consoles, and literally everything getting more expensive, let’s celebrate when someone beats the system.
Sure, it’s only one person, but at this point, I’m so utterly depressed with the state of things that I’m ready to buy this person a beer and shake their hand.
You see the doom and gloom everywhere, so when I was browsing Reddit this morning and came across a post where someone had secured an NVIDIA RTX 3050 graphics card for just FIVE DOLLARS, I have to shout it out.
Is it the greatest deal of all time? Honestly, even before the price rises, I’d have grabbed this, thrown down a $5 bill, and run out of the store before anyone realized what they’d done putting that price tag on it.
Is the RTX 3050 a particularly good graphics card? I mean, it depends what you want to do with it. It’d be pretty good as a budget video encoding card for streaming; it’ll play games at 1080p fairly well, too. Hell, I’d have absolutely put it into a machine and given it to my son.
For five bucks I would have found something to use it for. Maybe slap it inside the home server I’ve been wanting to build again for years to handle video transcoding. I don’t care; I’d have found something to do with it.
That’s assuming it works properly, of course. The post does show a Windows boot screen, so it would appear it at least gives video output, so that’s a start. With a used, mystery GPU like this, you’d have to test it properly, and most definitely you’d want to strip it down, clean it up, and give it some new thermal paste.
But for $5, who cares? Worth a go, right? It’s just nice to see someone have a win right now. If you were to buy a brand new RTX 3050 right now, you’re looking at paying at least $250 if you went to somewhere like Best Buy. Nobody should pay $250 for a two-generation-old budget graphics card.
It also gets me thinking: What’s the absolute craziest deal you’ve ever found on a piece of hardware? I think I’ve only ever been so lucky once, managing to get a Surface Go 2 LTE with a price mistake once and securing it for essentially free with an inexpensive data SIM contract.
It should have been a couple of hundred British pounds, and I got it for £8. And even though it was a mistake, it was still honored, and I got my Surface Go 2.
So jump into the comments below and let me know your personal craziest deal. Meanwhile, I’m definitely raising a glass to this person. Hopefully it all works well, and if so, you’ve definitely beaten the system right now.
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