I recently bought a HIS 7970 from a guy online for an extremely great price. Everything was great until I received the package today. He didn't have the original box so he wrapped the gpu in aluminum foil, then placed that inside of a plastic grocery bag and tied it shut, presumably to keep it from getting wet. That was all packed in a box full of shipping peanuts. I have yet to plug it in and see if it works, but my question is does wrapping this in aluminum foil kill the card from esd?
Static is more or less random. If it's possible to destroy the card that way, it is by no means a guarantee. If you fire it up and it doesn't work at all, I would say the foil is probably why and you should call him on it. If the card does work, just mark it down as a stupid thing to do, but you still got a working GPU out of it, so no harm done.
It appears that I have lucked out! It works so that's good. I still can't believe he shipped it like that...