Buying used is the single best way to keep good hardware out of a landfill - and to save money. But a used GPU can hide sins a five-minute test won't show.
Before you pay
- Ask for a photo of the back of the PCB near the core. Discoloration around the VRM means it ran hot for a long time.
- Check the fan bearings - spin them by hand. Grinding is a cheap fix; you can use it to negotiate.
- Look for corner cracks near the mounting screws. That's a reball waiting to happen.
When you get it home
- Reseat it and run a memory-stress test for an hour.
- Watch VRAM temps, not just core temps.
- If artifacts appear only when hot, that's a classic reflow/VRAM story - see our Fix It write-ups.
One cheap first step before you panic: clean the gold PCIe edge connector with DeoxIT D100L contact cleaner. Oxidized contacts cause more "dead" and flaky used cards than people think.
A card that's cheap because it "needs a reflow" is only cheap if you can do the reflow.
