Affordable Luxury: ‘Worst GPU’ Now a $1,024 Purse for the Discerning Tech Enthusiast

Here’s the thing: how much would you pay for a ten-year-old, non-functional GPU stuffed into a plastic box with a golden chain, so you can carry it around? It might depend on the graphics chip, but what if I told you it’s one of the worst-ever GPUs? $500, $50, $5? How about $1,024? Yeah, I thought so.

I love seeing old chips repurposed into keychains, and I especially enjoy graphics cards taken apart and displayed in a cabinet. I’ve got some ancient chips lying around that I plan to do something with eventually, but I can tell you one thing I’m not going to do is badly glue one into a cheap-looking plastic case with a strap and then try to sell it as a luxury purse.

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what the online store GPU Purse is doing, and the chip in question is the infamous GeForce GT 730. Yeah, it was a bit 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 bunch of monitors to your PC.

You can still buy a new GT 730 for $80 at Amazon, but I’m not sure why you’d want to. 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.

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 the craftsmanship on display is, quite frankly, lacking for that kind of money. Divide the figure by ten, and maybe you’ll get a better deal, but we’re talking more than the MSRP for a Radeon RX 7900 XTX.

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.