I have had an extremely similar experience but with a CPU. I sold my old i7 3960X when I needed more CPU cores for software video encoding. The 6 core was still good for gaming at between 60 and 120 fps. I sold it, my Rampage IV Extreme and 16GB of 2133MHz DDR3 (four sticks, so quad channel worked). This was in 2019. Normal gamers were putting down like £30 on the bunch, which is fine it’s like a decade old, then this guy who worked in a boutique system builder bid £100 on it with the aim of putting it a system to sell as new.
He DMd me asking for a refund. I DM’d forward and back trying to work out what the issue was. It took a long time to even get what the issue was. I asked him what the error code was on the motherboard. He just said “it temperamental it like woman”. Which… ok, dealing with not just an idiot, but a misogynistic idiot nice, but what he meant by this was that there was no error code. “It temperamental” meant the code was constantly changing as it tested each component. As it is meant to. It was actually POSTing just fine. A CPU problem error code for this motherboard would be 00, and would be the first thing to fail. Obviously.
He then went into a bit more detail and complained that it was booting up into WIndows for a few minutes, then it was turning off and wouldn’t start up for about 20 minutes or so. I tried to explain that the fact that it was not only POSTing, but actually booting into an operating system meant that the CPU was clearly not DOA and that he was experiencing some other issue. This was evidence that the parts he’d actually bought from me were fine. What I suspect is that his cooler wasn’t fitted correctly and that it was shutting off when it overheated, and then wouldn’t boot for 20 minutes or so while the CPU was cooling down. I’ve experienced this behaviour before when an AIO cooler died.
Anyway, he forced the refund. I complained to Ebay and sent evidence that the CPU was booting when he had it, all I managed to achieve was the £5 shipping refunded. He sent the CPU, motherboard and RAM back all assembled together, without the anti-static bag I had packaged it in, just wrapped in bubblewrap, loose in a big cardboard box. When I took it out to test, it was actually dead. Error code 00. Whether by his spending a day trying to run it repeatedly without a cooler, by packaging it in bubblewrap without ASD protection, or by it being loose in a massive cardboard box, he had actually destroyed a very functional CPU, cheated me out of being able to sell it, and cheated a legitimate gamer out of a still very competent gaming CPU at a time when CPUs were inordinately expensive new.
Luckily the two GTX 1080s I sold at about the same time went fine, to actual gamers for about £400 each.
I was eyeing one for a starting bid price of 600 pounds from the UK. I was tempted, but decided against bidding. Nobody else bid, so the seller just re-listed it.
I’m afraid all the cards are post-crypto torture. And I’m not prepared to lose 600.
realistically, unless you’re planning to mine with it or have some need for high performance FP64 (which they do at 1/2 rate!!!), there’s little legitimate use case for these any more.
Gaming? A 5700 will be basically same, anything 6700 series and up will smoke it.
3d Rendering? Nvidia will probably be faster for same/less money
I kinda wanted one myself for the nerd reasons mentioned above, but at the price they sell for its simply not sensible unless you fit one of the very small niches for it.
As above they have a seemingly high failure rate, but that may well be from the HBM being long term overclocked for mining due to the insane ether hash rate they can get (ether basically scales linearly with memory bandwidth, and radeon VII is right at the top of the tree there even today).
I very much doubt virtually anyone with one of these hasn’t been mining for ether with it until it either died or ether goes proof of stake.
As a buyer you are incredibly protected, ebay sides with the buyer every time even when the buyer is clearly a scammer. I’ve been bitten selling but it doesn’t stop me buying, you just need to do the bare minimum to make things go smoother like not buying from someone with less than 10 transactions and/or 90% positive, and not buying something too good to be true.
My Radeon VII, with a Barrow water block on it, is the most used GPU in my house for some odd reason, LOL! In stock form, it’s not much to speak of IMHO. But put a water block on it, and some Fujipoly pads, and you can unlock the potential with MPT. Mine is capped at 2100mhz core, 1200 mem, and will struggle to break 41C on the GPU, hot spot is +20-25 above core. I love it dearly, and it plays Far Cry 6 in 1440p at ultra settings in HDR at around 85-90fps on average. Once you get the cooling under control and the clocks up, it’s an entirely different card.
I also ghetto’ed a huge heat sink on top of the back of my core, under 3mm of Fujipoly, just for giggles, LOL!
I appreciate that Debian isolates non-free software at the repo level. I like that they have stable and rolling releases, and the same tooling and ecosystem works on both servers and desktops.
I use Cinnamon because I like quadrant snapping by default and because of much better HiDPI support than MATE.
Xfce4-terminal because I’m not happy with the overall direction of GTK4 and that transition is starting to creep its way into my system via gnome-* depenedencies like gnome-screenshot, gnome-terminal, and gnome-calculator. When apps switch, I’ve been ripping them out for standalone or Unix-like replacements.
I would use KDE in Raspbian, chaotic neutral or even evil.
Not at all evil. All desktop environments, even Gnome, are “lightweight” compared to modern browsers, and should run fine on a Raspberry Pi.
You can actually get a responsive KDE experience on a Pi using the experimental 3D drivers or by disabling the loading screen and window animations.
still today the Radeon VII is one of the top 3 most efficient mining GPUs. and because of the underwhelming stock heatsink miners killed Radeon VIIs off in droves. really is sad.
Got mine shortly after it was released and then sold it late last year for 2.5x what i paid. Poured it all into another hobby which won’t give any return at all, still happy though!
