Some older graphics cards are still worth almost as much as they initially cost, so don’t waste their potential.

Especially in the current climate, you probably don't have to be told that throwing away your old graphics card is a bad idea. They're expensive, and you can repurpose your prior one after you upgrade. Every three to five years is a common cadence for GPU upgrades, so it's important to think about what happens to your investment when the next cycle comes around.

The most popular card in the latest Steam hardware survey is the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070, which is installed in 6.15 percent of surveyed systems. It launched at $549 and can now cost more than $800 because of memory and silicon price inflation. Increased prices mean more people will use their GPUs for longer, which may stretch the typical upgrade cycle.

Just because you've outgrown your graphics card doesn't mean everyone else has, so selling your old GPU to get some value back is a good option. An eBay search at the time of writing shows some used RTX 3060s selling for almost as much as they originally cost. Even the 10-year-old $249 GTX 1060 is typically listed at $50 to $100 in good condition, though these are always subject to fluctuation.

You can repurpose your old graphics card by installing it into your home media server to handle hardware-accelerated video encoding and decoding using Nvidia's NVENC or AMD's AMF. Both Jellyfin and Plex support hardware-accelerated streaming, so your old GPU can gain new life converting video codecs in real time to offload tasks from the processor.

Source link