The 20€ r9 280x Story

[wildgg]

Hey LTT

 

I love playing around with hardware, and finally having a Gaming PC that doesn't need upgrades it kinda gets boring for me after a while.. First world problems! i know right...

 

Inspired by the Scrapyard Wars series i'm trying to build a respectable ''gaming'' PC for under 200€ (give or take 250$)

So me not really knowing where to start i just went straight for the GPU first, simply because the GPU prices are not great right now so i figured that was going to take up most of the budget.

I was looking around on ebay and finding a decent GPU for cheap wasn't easy at all, that was until i saw a listing of a ''dead'' r9 280x, the owner said that 'one day it just stopped working' so i told him i'll give you 20 for it and he agreed.

 

at that point i was like i might as well try to revive this thing since i have seen videos with the Oven Method what could go wrong.

4 days later the card came in and it looked fine, it was just very dusty. I put it in a test PC and it was indeed dead but not completely tho, monitor showed allot of artifacts and the colors were weird.

Next step was the Oven Method but i figured i might as well try to clean it first, so new thermal pads and fresh thermal paste and i cleaned the PCB with some brake cleaner and alcohol wipes..

Put the card back in the test PC and i guess the cleaning was enough because the card fully works again and it even survived 8 hours of stress testing!

 

So now i have a fully working Sapphire vapor-x r9 280x 3G for 20€! not bad eh 

And yes i'm fully aware this is not a top of the line performing GPU today

 

i thought i'd share my story here 

 

thank you if you made it through reading haha

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[♠FlamieMeister♠]

Actually pretty cool story. Now I'm motivated to buy dead cards.

[Ashiella]

2 minutes ago, ♠FlamieMeister♠ said:

Actually pretty cool story. Now I'm motivated to buy dead cards.

I once saw 2 i7 x980's for 20$ each, the issue seemed liked the motherboard so I bought them. They were both silicon lottery wins (4.2ghz @1.25v) and sold at 250$ each.

[♠FlamieMeister♠]

1 minute ago, Ashiella said:

I once saw 2 i7 x980's for 20$ each, the issue seemed liked the motherboard so I bought them. They were both silicon lottery wins (4.2ghz @1.25v) and sold at 250$ each.

Nice man. Only thing i got that was really lucky was a "broken hp dv6000" for free that i just threw a charger in and it worked

 

[orbitalbuzzsaw]

I'm now motivated to buy a bunch of dead 970s and 980 Tis for like $20 a pop and have a bunch of 970s and 980 Tis.

[wildgg]

8 minutes ago, orbitalbuzzsaw said:

I'm now motivated to buy a bunch of dead 970s and 980 Tis for like $20 a pop and have a bunch of 970s and 980 Tis.

it's still a risk tho but up to you if it's worth it

if you can find sellers that have no idea about hardware that will be your best chance

[Mr.Meerkat]

Reminds me of how two years ago, I bought a 7950 for £20 with a dead vRAM chip (artifacted so you can't play games with it...) but the thing was, it mined ETH perfectly fine (99% valid shares) which was pretty good as I made back my investment in about a week time. Thing was, fully functional 7950s were selling for £30~ so to be honest, £20 was actually quite expensive for a semi-functional 7950... 

 

On a side note: ay, its one of the blue PCB 280(X)es. New bios and sticker slapped onto a 7950/7970 and it becomes a 280(X) .