AtGraphics CardIn an era of rising prices and scarcity, more and more people are turning to thrift stores to hunt for hidden gems. While luck plays a big part, if you make the right bet, you can really hit the jackpot. Recently, another lucky internet user in the U.S. struck gold, finding and purchasing an item at the well-known Goodwill thrift store for just $4.99. AMD The Radeon RX 5700 XT isn’t ready to use right away, but with just a simple repair, it will work just fine.
Image source: Reddit
Overseas user Goodwill scored a great find: A simple repair brought his RX 5700 XT graphics card back to life
A Reddit user, u/12kdaysinthefire, shared that he found this ASRock-branded Radeon RX 5700 XT at Goodwill, priced at just $4.99. He bought it almost without a second thought and wrote in his post: “That’s the best $5 I’ve spent in 2026.”
Image source: Reddit
According to his follow-up explanation, this RX 5700 XT graphics card wouldn’t boot properly after he bought it. Upon opening it up, he discovered that the previous owner had haphazardly attached copper heat sinks inside, without any thermal paste or thermal pads at all. So he removed a few thermal pads from an extremely old graphics card, reapplied thermal paste, and once he had the entire card reassembled, it worked normally.
It’s a bit of a shame, though, that he didn’t share any actual gameplay footage from his tests.
For those who aren’t familiar, the AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT was released in 2019. It features AMD’s first-generation RDNA (Navi) architecture, is built on a 7-nanometer process, and comes with 8GB of GDDR6 memory, a 256-bit memory bus, 2,560 stream processors, 160 texture units, and 64 ROPs, and is positioned for the 1080p and 1440p gaming markets.
The AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT had a suggested retail price of $399 at launch, which is about 13,500 New Taiwan Dollars, but the current used price is at least NT$3,500, so the fact that 12kdaysinthefire snagged one for less than NT$200 is a total steal.
Many netizens also left comments below saying they were incredibly envious.
However, he also admitted that he was really lucky this time.
這家二手店用任何標準來看都稱不上「好」，哈哈。有 98 次裡面賣的都是別人原本打算直接丟垃圾桶的東西。我上一次在這間買東西，大概是一年前買了一雙球鞋而已，哈哈。
That said, there have been more and more similar cases of people snagging bargains over the past year; at the end of last year, there was also a netizen who similarly…I scored a used GTX 1660 Super at a super low price of $8.40 at Goodwill：
Image source: Tom’s Hardware
As we can see, in an era when computer hardware prices are on the rise, more and more people are heading to secondhand stores to hunt for bargains. This proves once again that secondhand stores truly hold hidden gems—items that can be brought back to life with just a little basic maintenance and cleaning.
But keep in mind that only the good stuff gets publicized; in most cases, what you find will probably be junk. After all, this hardware hasn’t been tested, so don’t set your expectations too high.
Source: KOCPC Chinese