Here’s a question: How much would you pay for a non-functional 10 year old GPU packed in a plastic box and finished off with a gold chain for portability? It may vary by graphics chip, but what if I told you this is one of the worst GPUs ever made? $500? $50? $5? How about $1,024? Yeah, I thought so.
I always love seeing old chips made into keychains and I especially love seeing graphics cards taken apart and mounted in display cabinets. I have some pretty old chips that I’ll eventually use for something, but I can tell you right now I’m not going to stick a strap on a cheap plastic case, glue it down clumsily and try to sell it as a luxury handbag.
Unfortunately, that’s exactly what online store GPU Purse has done, and the chip in question is the powerful GeForce GT 730 (via Videocardz). This particular graphics card was pretty terrible when it was launched in 2014, but it was still better than any GPU integrated into the CPU, and for office machines, it was a cheap way to add loads of monitors to your PC.
While you could buy a new GT 730 (such as this 4GB Zotac model on sale for $80 on Amazon), you’re probably better off saving your money and imagining having an extra monitor.
These are absolutely terrible by today’s standards, and it’s a bit puzzling that they’re still being sold when any decent monitor supports DisplayPort daisy-chaining and Intel’s basic Arc 310 isn’t that expensive (it comes with up to four DP ports and has a very good video encoder).
But what you definitely shouldn’t do is spend $1,024 on a GT 730 in a plastic box with chains on it, not because it has the worst GPU in the world, but because it quite frankly lacks the actual craftsmanship you’d expect for that money. Divide that number by 10 and you’ll see that it’s more than the MSRP of a Radeon RX 7900 XTX.
The seller is selling the H100 megachip with Nvidia Hopper for $65,536 with the case, which seems equally ridiculous price-wise – you could buy a new H100 for half that price. But you shouldn’t, because that’s a ridiculous amount of money to spend on a single GPU, and you’re not going to recoup that money any time soon by using it for its intended purpose: AI-related work.
It’s a bit unclear whether this “GPU luxury wallet” thing is the real deal — the default Shopify storefront sets off all kinds of alarm bells, but the GT 730 is so cheap that it’s not surprising that someone would grab a couple of broken ones and try to remake them into something a little more quirky and maybe interesting to a few people.
It’s probably best to leave it as it is, or if you’re really into this idea, make it yourself and save yourself a lot of money.