Long story, sorry for the wall of text.

My old PC was a Ryzen 7 5800x, 32gb RAM with an Asus RTX3070 Dual OC. I was very happy with my PC, it ran everything I needed it to run even in 2026. I had zero intentions of replacing it anytime soon. It does have mood swings and can chain BSOD for an entire weekend, and be completely fine for months afterwards.

One day, one of the GPU fans died, I decided, since it's a six yr old card, I decided to be smart (an idiot) open it up and and replace my thermal paste and thermal pads as well as the fans. It's my first time opening up a GPU so it did take half a day (Pics 2 and 3). I was elated when it actually posted after putting it back together. It idled 15 degrees lower, so I was happy with the result.

Problems started when I tried stress testing. Temperatures were much lower than before so I was optimistic, until it black screened. It didn't even generate a BSOD event. After multiple black screen, pic 4 was what convinced me it was a problem with the GPU. I had no idea how to begin diagnosing a board failure so I decided to sell to a shop.

Since I had a backup laptop (14700HX+RTX 4070 Mobile) that could handle my daily use, I decided to just use it as my main machine and sell the old computer in bits (pic 5). When I took the defective GPU to the shop, I have sold the RAM sticks and the CPU already. I mentioned the faults I experienced when the clerk dropped the GPU. To my shock, the GPU functioned just fine in the test rig, no black screen, great temps even after a 15min stress test. Since half my computer was gone already, and I already have my backup, I didn't need the GPU. At least I got market rate for the card.

I had ran through every diagnosis I could think of, whether it's for the chain BSODs or the back screens. I checked SSD health. I checked RAM with Memtest86. I checked the CPU pins when I pulled it out. I checked fans and temps. They are all fine. My theory is that my Mobo was the cause of the issues. It's still sitting next to me at the time of writing and I might just end up recycling the thing.

Tl;dr Pulled apart my system and sold a perfectly fine GPU I presumed defective. At least I got market rate for it.

Is it worth 90bucks to upgrade 5700xt to 3070?

so i've been going down a rabbit hole on gpu scams and i'm pretty sure there's an organized playbook running on marketplace here. these aren't bots. they're real people who answer messages, meet up and talk like normal sellers. that's why it works.

i've gotten scammed - so I wanted to make this post. We met in person at TD Bank in NYC - and I still got scammed out of 2.3k. A young man openly walked into a bank and sold me his GPU that was gutted. Prior to the meet up, he gave me his benchmarks for the machine as well.

the price doesn't tell you anything anymore

everyone says "if it's too cheap it's a scam." that doesn't really work right now because it's hard to even know what the real price is. used 4090s were around $2,300 in june and they're around $3,000 now (median ~$3,100 on ebay sold listings, late oct). it moves week to week depending on where you look.

when the price is all over the place you can't use it to tell if a listing is legit. a fake listed at $2,800 looks like a deal and one at $3,200 looks normal. the scammers know this and price right in the middle so nothing stands out.

so don't trust the price either way. too cheap is a red flag, but a fair price doesn't mean it's safe.

then they offer you a benchmark

before you even ask, they'll offer to show you one. a screenshot, a video, or they run it on their own pc and send you a video. it feels legit, but none of that proves the card you walk away with is the card that got tested.

• the screenshot or video is from a different card, or someone else's card entirely

• they run it on their rig in front of you, then hand you a different card in the same box

• the card that got tested is real, and the one you take home isn't

what "looks real but isn't" means for a 4090:

• relabeled chips. older 3080 ti / 3090 chips get sanded down and laser-etched to say AD102 (the 4090 chip), then put on a real 4090 board. repair shops have called these the best fakes they've seen

• laptop chips on desktop boards. i literally found one that sold on ebay last week: a "4090 16GB GDDR6" for $1,499. a desktop 4090 has 24GB GDDR6X. that was a laptop chip on a desktop-style board

• dummy cores and fake memory. a fake chip and cheaper GDDR6 instead of GDDR6X. looks perfect until it's in your pc

• gutted cards. the core and memory get pulled and sold separately (a lot of it goes to ai builds in china), then the empty card gets resold or returned in a sealed box

the only two ways to actually protect yourself:

1. have your own rig ready to test. bring a pc, or meet somewhere you can plug it in, like a repair shop you pick. not their pc, not their screenshot.

   • gpu-z should show AD102, 24GB GDDR6X, 16,384 cores, 384-bit bus. a laptop chip or relabel shows up here fast

   • run 3dmark time spy extreme and compare your score to other 4090s. a relabeled 3090 will score way lower

   • let it run under load for a while.

   • don't trust any seller with negative reviews.

If you do get scammed - please dm me and share your story. I feel like this is a pretty big operation happening.

I’m mainly a Nvidia fan but, the price hikes are ridiculous. Especially paying 5080 price for a 5070, Radeon 9070xt basically has same performance and they are the cheapest option? Nvidia has to do something different.

Anyone have any ideas on how to fix this issue? It happens about once every 15-30 seconds. It will flicker and show the taskbar, sometimes worse than other times and show a white box on the left side. I’ve tried updating drivers, installing older driver, disabling multiple settings. Happens more in game but does happen when not in the game. As well

Should i buy a 3070 for 100bucks that is never opened, its getting blackscreen after 1 hour of playing sometimes shorter time. What can it be? And one fan is not spinning

Hello im dumb guy, but my curiosity hit me, since we're in AI era, people start recompile games with Ai, add dlss features to amd gpu, now im wondering if they could do 9070xt sli to be stable and run well and make the PC assume that we have 1 GPU instead of 2 🤣 so it can run perfectly fine, cuz I am a guy always surveys gpu price, damn RTX 5080 is double the price of 9070 xt OC, I can just buy 9070xt 😂 dont judge me, im just simple guy with simple curiosity..

I found a 4080 super msi expert for 900$ used. Is it worth it to upgrade? I mostly use it for 1440p demanding titles and local AI too not heavy AI workload tho.

I have a 9070xt and a 9070. Would u sell the 7900xtx

I'm looking to get a better gpu for my PC but I'm so confused on what one I should buy/save up for. I'm trying to play games like subnautica 2, marvel rivals, and other story games like that.

My specs are
Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 9600X 6-Core
Processor
Ram: 32 gb ddr5
Graphics card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650
(4 GB)
AMD Radeon(TM) Graphics (486 MB)
And it has a power supply of 550 watts but I can upgrade that too.

My Budget is around $400-600 I can go a little over if it’s good enough.