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Buying Second Hand GPU - Best Way To Avoid A Lemon!

Nemiyen

Nemiyen

Nemiyen

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Joined
23 Nov 2018
Posts
569
I'm looking to upgrade from my 12 year old PC with upgraded 3070 gpu and I'm planning on getting something second hand.

With limited messing around or time to test *everything* what's the quickest, easiest and free :p download to prove the GPU is stable and not broken.

I've used furmark in the past but I read that's a no now and to go with something like heaven or firestrike but I think those run on 3dmark, which isn't free.

I'd use Prime95 for a CPU but not sure what's good for a graphics card any more.
 
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The quickest way imho is to satisfy yourself that you are buying from a real gamer who has upgraded, because that by far is the most plausible situation for a reliable used GPU to be offered for sale.

The next best way is to install the GPU into your PC and test it with a game for a few mins, a gamer would get this and understand your request to do so if its a high end part. Obviously if its lower tier then that is going a bit overboard but if say you have your eye on a 4090 then perfectly reasonable imho.
 
I buy cards that look in good condition that have nice pictures and is clean with little to no dust on the heatsink/fans and I avoid cards ( people I know been burned before) that have been opened and/or repasted.

I spend abit of time running some games at first then move on to some benchmarks then finish with furmark any hardware/software issues that come up I'll spend a little time to fix problems and I'll do a couple of re-installs of Windows with the bios is on the defaults if needed. If that doesnt fix it any persistant problems within the return window the GPU will go back for a exchange/refund.
 
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Cheers everyone, if I don't report back then I may have been murdered :D but I'm planning on picking up a 4090 PC tower with all the trimmings. It's going to be a massive improvement on my 4930k with a 3070 but it's worrying there's an issue I might miss. Seller seems genuine and says they have upgraded to a 5090 and looks to be quite well off to be honest. Will see, I'm sure a scammer would say the same things as well to be honest!

I was hoping to skip the 13th and 14th intel cpus for obvious reasons but I'm going to run the intel processor check about 3 to 4 times and the superposition on extreme 3 to 4 times and if no issues ill take a chance.

It's a 14900k so could have the degrading issue but hopefully they upgraded pretty quick and it has no issues.

Edit: But could mean the BIOS is out of date so maybe I should update that straight away but ill do that when I get it home, if I get it home.
 
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Still alive, bought the PC. :)

Ran the unigine superposition test a few times on 1080p extreme and once on 4k and no issues at all.

Ran the intel processor diagnostic tool 3 times on the CPU so thought that's good enough.

What @BigBANGtheory says is correct and the seller had another [oops can't say name] 5090 build right next to this one and said the 4090 hadn't been used since March (6 months!) as they tried to sell it. I've done the latest bios update so my microcode should be up to date as best I can be.

Freshly installed Win 11 and now putting all the drivers on and testing Horizon Zero Dawn and it's playing great, thankfully.

There is 1 slight issue and that is the anti sag bracket built into the card has... sagged lol. It looks like it's pulled away from the card at the end but it's not dipping at all. (Noticed it when I bought the PC) it probably needs bending back but I'll look for a riser or something.
 
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Whenever ive visited someones home to buy a GPU i always ask to see it running in the pc before i buy it. Similarly if someone buys off my i leave it in and show it working.

With my current 4080S the guy brought it to me and was happy for me install and test it before handing over any cash
 
If it's a circuit board with a fan and heatsink on it, then it's a GPU. If it's yellow, round and smells citrusy, it's a lemon.
 
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