The cryptography market continues to fall, which has led to a lot of miners leaving the market or reducing their operations, thus finding themselves in possession of valuable computer components that they no longer need. Some of these miners, many from China and South Asia (where electricity is cheaper), now take this hardware and dump it on e-commerce websites. As a result, GPUs that typically cost between $ 500 ($ 694) and $ 600 ($ 833) sell for about half that price on the second-hand market.
As PC Gamer pointed out, GPUs are suddenly flooding the market, a trend probably driven by several factors. Most importantly, cryptocurrency prices have plummeted since this winter. Now that it looks like the market won’t turn around soon, miners are jumping on the boat. And these aren’t GeForce RTX 3060s pristine and out of the box they’re selling. These graphics cards have been used to extract cryptography, which uses tons of electricity. Buyers have found that these RTX 3060s were cheap for a reason: many of them are defective after prolonged use. So it seems that the common wisdom is that you shouldn’t be too eager to point out some used GPUs from an unknown buyer.
However, there has been some controversy in the tech community about how degraded these graphics cards really are. PC World claims that buying a used graphics card from an experienced miner outweighs buying one from a gamer (who tends to “overclock” their GPUs). Technology youtuber Linus Sebastian tested some mining GPUs on the camera and found that the graphics cards used may still work well, if their previous owner carefully maintained them. So if you have to buy a GPU from a miner who wasted a ton of electricity in speculative currency, you should at least find a reputable seller. Good luck with that, by the way.
If you ask me, I think it’s more fun to let the miners languish with a bunch of expensive graphics cards that they can’t even get rid of. However, it is annoying that Nvidia benefited greatly from the cryptographic boom, so much so, in fact, that the company received a federal fine for trying to hide how cryptography increased its profits. Hey, at least this cryptographic nightmare is over * cake in the wood * and we’ll all no doubt see much more reasonable graphics card prices very, very soon.
While you’re here, why not check out our article on Choosing the Right CPU and GPU for You?