What to do with your old Graphics Card
So, you’ve upgraded your graphics card and you now have a less powerful but still usable graphics card which you no longer have use for. You may be wondering what you can do with your older graphics cards. Whilst there aren’t many things that useful you can do with an older graphics card, you can still make some money with you graphics card.
Graphics cards tend to progress quite quickly in terms of technology and performance. This means you’re probably want to do something with it sooner rather than later when the worth of your graphics card will be a lot less. In this article we will show you what to do with your old graphics card. Let’s get started
Table of Contents
Sell it
So the obvious one first is sell it. You can sell your old graphics card on Ebay and Amazon and other marketplaces such as craigslist depending on where you live. A lot of the newer graphics cards still go for quite a bit and they can definitely earn you some money on the side.
Older graphics card tend not to sell for as much due to the fast progression in performance in the newer graphics cards. This means that we don’t really recommend selling a graphics card unless it will actually make you a fair amount of cash. Lower end, cheaper and older graphics cards don’t sell that well.
If you have a good graphics card worth a bit then it might be worth just selling it especially when it’s still new and worth more money.
Give it away
The next option you can do is to simply give it to someone who wants or needs it. There’s nothing better than giving an item to someone who may want the item but can’t afford it.
Use it in a Home theater PC, Stream PC or Emulator
You can get all sorts of Home Theater PC cases and small itx cases. These are great for using your old graphics card in a pc for watching movies, listening to music and more on your TV. You may also be able to play games on your HTPC and stream games from your gaming PC.
You can also use an emulator for older classic games which, when adding a controller make it a great experience.
Home Server
Instead of using it as another computer for your TV, you can also use it as a home server for NAS (network attached storage). This would mean you could store all your files on your local network and not locally on your computer. You can then access your files from any PC on your network.
If you want to take it one step further there are ways to make your server available from anywhere in the world. Furthermore, you can use plex to store movies and have your own media server where you can watch all your digital content from anywhere with internet.
Build an Arcade Cabinet
If you’re feeling a bit adventurous, then you can try building an arcade cabinet. You can get buttons and joysticks that connect to your pc via USB and the graphics card will provide good gaming performance for the emulator.
This one requires you to build a whole cabinet and will be a big project which will look very good in the end.
You can buy kits like these which include the buttons, joystick and connections you need to connect it to a pc via USB.
Mine crypto
This option is usually not worth it. But if you have relatively cheap power it can make you some extra money. As long as your old graphics card was fairly decent there’s a good chance you can make a bit of money mining with your GPU.
You can use utilities such as nicehash to mine crypto and sell on Coinbase.
Store it in a safe place for later use
An easy option is to store your graphics card away for later use. You never know when you might need your old graphics card. It can make a great testing item and a great spare if your graphics card dies.
Remember that the price of your graphics card will most likely decrease over this time so you should decide if you would rather sell it or put it to use.
Conclusion
There are a few options you can do with your old graphics card. If you’re wondering what to do with your old graphics card then we recommend selling if it’s a decent graphics card. The other options are also good but it vastly depends on what you want. Be sure to check out our other articles.
