Recently, hardware blogger @BrotherZhangPCRepair released a video titled "A Costly Lesson: Don't Buy 'Girl's Personal Use' Graphics Cards on Xianyu, RTX 3070 Disaster." In the video, Brother Zhang shared the story of a player who purchased an RTX 3070 graphics card on Xianyu. Although the seller claimed the card was in good condition, it failed shortly after purchase.
According to reports, the player tested the card upon receipt and it did boot up initially. However, the good times didn't last; within two days, the graphics card started exhibiting various problems, such as failing to display or blacking out after a short while. The player provided a detailed description: "Sometimes it boots into the system but blacks out after a few seconds; other times, there's no response at all." When the player confronted the seller, the latter refused a refund, claiming, "The graphics card was working fine when I sold it to you."
The player then began to doubt themselves: could it be a problem with their computer? After trying various methods, such as consulting friends and replacing the power supply, the graphics card issue persisted. The player then sent the graphics card to Brother Zhang for inspection to determine if there were any actual problems with this second-hand card from Xianyu.
After some simple tests, Brother Zhang quickly identified that this second-hand RTX 3070 graphics card definitely had issues.
First, the card needed to "warm up" before it would display properly (the fans wouldn't spin and there was no display right after powering on). Second, GPU-Z detection showed the bus interface was running at 8X instead of 16X. The third issue was that it would black out immediately upon restarting.
Following extensive repairs, Brother Zhang successfully resolved the no-display issue. However, the 8X lane problem was due to a core fault and could not be fixed, indicating an inherent defect in the GPU core itself.
At the end of the video, Brother Zhang tested the card on a high-end PC, running games continuously for over two hours without any issues. It appears this second-hand graphics card has been perfectly repaired. There were no more instances of fans not spinning on startup, failure to display, or mid-game blackouts.
