Don't be crypto crash collateral – avoid these graphics cards at all costs

Remember when you couldn't get the best graphics cards for love nor money because cryptocurrency miners were buying them all for silly prices? Well, they're back! Back! BACK! And you absolutely shouldn't buy them. Now that cryptocurrencies are worth less than a politician's promise or a corporate's Pride logo, panicking crypto minors are flooding the market with GPUs that have been run too hard for too long – and in some cases they're pretending they're brand new.

The news comes via WCCFtech, which reports that some of the biggest Chinese crypto mining operations are dismantling their entire setups and selling off GPUs in huge numbers. They look like bargains – a GeForce RTX 3060 Ti that was going for $800 a few months ago might be offered for as low as $300 – but if these GPUs were horses they'd be on their way to the glue factory by now. 

Why these bargain GPUs are a really bad buy

We're talking about a lot of GPUs here: since 2021, it's believed that cryptocurrency miners bought over $15 billion of graphics cards. And miners ride their cards hard: where a typical gaming rig will run at full pelt from time to time, it doesn't do it 24/7 and it doesn't do it in a packed, insanely hot room where it's sat next to similarly hard-pushed GPUs heading for meltdown. You wouldn't buy a car that had been driven at 100mph 24/7 for a year and you shouldn't do it with a graphics card either.

Even if you're not worried about the longevity of the card, there's a moral issue here: screw these guys! They've driven the price of GPUs through the roof, they've made life miserable for genuine gaming fans and they've made stacks of cash, often while being really arrogant and dismissive of GPU-starved gamers. It's payback time: save your tears and save your cash for the next GPU generation that's coming this year.