The world's worst GPU can now be yours for a mere $1,024 in the form of a 'luxury purse'
Here's a question for you. How much would you pay for a non-functional, ten-year-old GPU stuffed into a plastic box, finished off with a golden chain so you can carry it around? It might depend on the graphics chip, so what if I tell you it's one of the worst-ever GPUs? $500, $50, $5? How about $1,024? Yeah…I thought so.
I've always liked seeing old chips fashioned into a key fob, and I especially like seeing graphics cards taken apart and then mounted in a display cabinet. I've got some really old chips lying around that I plan to do something with one of these days but I can tell you now, what I'm not going to do is badly glue one into a cheap-looking plastic case with a strap and then try and sell it as a luxury purse.
Unfortunately, this is precisely what the online store GPU Purse is doing and the chip in question is the mighty GeForce GT 730 (via Videocardz). That particular graphics card was pretty rubbish when it launched in 2014 but it was better than whatever integrated GPU you had in your CPU and for office machines, it was a cheap way to add a whole bunch of monitors to your PC.
One can still buy a new GT 730 (such as this 4 GB Zotac model for $80 at Amazon) but you'd probably be better off saving the money and just imagining that you have extra monitors.
They're utterly awful by today's standards and it's a bit puzzling to see them still being sold when a decent monitor will support DisplayPort daisy chaining and Intel's basic Arc 310 isn't hugely expensive—it comes with up to four DP ports and has a really good video encoder.
But what you should absolutely not do is spend $1,024 on a GT 730 in a plastic box with a chain on it. Not because it has the world's worst GPU in it but because, if I can be frank, the actual craftsmanship on display leaves a lot to be desired for that kind of money. Divide the figure by ten and maybe, but we're talking more than the MSRP for a Radeon RX 7900 XTX folks.
The seller is also offering an Nvidia Hopper-powered H100 megachip in a case for a cool $65,536 which seems equally ludicrous in terms of price. I mean, you can buy a new H100 for half that price. Not that you should because that's a ridiculous sum of money to spend on a single GPU—you're certainly not going to make that money back any time soon, using it to do its intended purpose which is AI stuff.
It's a little hard to tell if the whole 'GPU luxury purse' thing is genuine or not. The default Shopify storefront rings all kinds of alarm bells but GT 730s are so cheap that it's not hard to see why someone would decide to snap up some broken ones and repurpose them into something a bit quirky and possibly of interest to a few people.
Probably best to just leave this one alone or, if you're really keen on the idea, just make one yourself and save a big wedge of money.