Is it just me or is Tom’s Hardware getting really shit lately? This is the third article I’ve seen where one person has been ripped off and their story is ‘The state of the industry! Scams everywhere! 😱’
One of the others was someone who bought memory that had been swapped for metal weights, and Tom’s Hardware tried to claim that it was a new industry scam because of the price increases, and not a one off
They’re heavy into ai crap nowadays.
In one case, the graphics card in question was the Gigabyte GeForce RTX 4080 16GB Aero OC, a custom variant of the GeForce RTX 4080 that retailed for around $1,199 at launch. The seller claimed the graphics card was not functional and wanted to offload it for just $143.50 on Xianyu, a popular second-hand marketplace in China.
So this isn’t even an American retailer carrying bad cards? It’s a Chinese second-hand seller peddling admitted non-functional cards for refurbishment. I guess the general advice is good and knowing what to look out for is useful, but it feels niche.
You only need one piece of (timeless) advice regarding what to look for, really: if it looks too good to be true, it almost certainly is. Caveat emptor.
Seriously, ending up with nothing is always a risk you run when buying something advertised as non-functional in the hope of fixing it or recovering any undamaged parts. The fact that the components on this card weren’t original is almost irrelevant, because the result would have been the same if they were authentic but damaged beyond recovery.
You only need one piece of (timeless) advice regarding what to look for, really: if it looks too good to be true, it almost certainly is. Caveat emptor.
I mean…normally, yes, but because the situation has been changing so radically in such a short period of time, it probably is possible to get some bonkers deals in various niches, because the market hasn’t stabilized yet.
Like, a month and a half back, in early December, when prices had only been going up like crazy for a little while, I was posting some tiny retailers that still had RAM in stock at pre-price-increase rates that I could find on Google Shopping. IIRC the University of Virginia bookstore was one, as they didn’t check that purchasers were actually students. I warned that they’d probably be cleaned out as soon as scalpers got to them, and that if someone wanted memory, they should probably get it ASAP. Some days prior to that, there was a small PC parts store in Hawaii that had some (though that was out of stock by the next time I was looking and mentioned the bookstore).
That’s not to disagree with the point that @[email protected] is making, that this was awfully sketchy as a source, or your point that scavenging components off even a non-scam piece of secondhand non-functional hardware is risky. But in times of rapid change, it’s not impossible to find deals. In fact, it’s various parties doing so that cause prices to stabilize — anyone selling memory for way below market price is going to have scalpers grab it.
Scarcity breeds innovation /s
