GTX 1060 bought for $5 turned out to be a GTX 560 Ti — Black Friday shopper learns the hard way to always check what's in the box before walking out the door

(Image credit: Reddit - u/scorpionthecruel)

Black Friday is prime time for GPU shopping. One Black Friday shopper got lucky when they stumbled upon an alleged GTX 1060 that would have been an absolute bargain. Redditor "scorpionthecruel" shared the story of how it turned out to be a GTX 560 Ti instead, a graphics card that launched 14 years ago.

The Redditor was shopping at a Salvation Army and stumbled upon a random GTX 1060 "chilling on a shelf" with a $10 price tag — but since it was Black Friday, the store had everything half off, dropping the price down to $5. After buying the alleged GTX 1060, the Redditor opened the MSI GTX 1060 3GB box only to find a Gigabyte GTX 560 Ti inside.

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Salvation Army GTX 1060 — (Image credit: Reddit - u/scorpionthecruel)

The purchase was disappointing for the now-GTX 560 Ti owner who had hoped to flip the GTX 1060 for a small profit. Losing $5 is unlikely to keep the owner awake at night. We've seen and reported on much worse GPU purchases, including those where buyers paid full price or over MSRP. Many of these switches involve either full-blown GPU swaps, missing GPU cores and/or memory, or GPU boxes full of rice and macaroni.

These stories are good reminders that not every graphics card listing on the market is a good deal. If the price is too reasonable to be true, it probably is. For example, the prices of used GTX 1060 3GB are around $50 at the time of writing, and 6GB trims are around $60-$80, so seeing a GTX 1060 for under $10 should be suspicious.

If you are in the market for a new graphics card, there are a plethora of Cyber Monday sales still going on right now, from high pricing to low. For instance, MSI's Shadow GeForce RTX 5050 is $30 under MSRP at Amazon, at a mere $219, while there are also far beefier GPUs on offer, as you can see in our tracking of the latest Cyber Monday GPU deals.

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Aaron Klotz is a contributing writer for Tom’s Hardware, covering news related to computer hardware such as CPUs, and graphics cards.

18 Comments Comment from the forums

bit_user

Admin said:
Black Friday shopper spots a GTX 1060 at Salvation Army for only five bucks, or so they thought. The GTX 1060 box turns out to be holding an old GTX 560 Ti inside.
If it's not even a shroud-swap, and they lost only $5 on a thrift-store purchase, how is this news??? What's passing for "news", on this site, is seriously concerning.

First of all, the buyer should've opened it before completing the purchase. That's just common sense, and you can do it at the register if you want. I'm sure they'd let you. Secondly, I'd say $5 is a fair price for a working GTX 560 Ti. Its scrap value is probably almost worth that!
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JayGau

bit_user said:
If it's not even a shroud-swap, and they lost only $5 on a thrift-store purchase, how is this news??? What's passing for "news", on this site, is seriously concerning.

First of all, the buyer should've opened it before completing the purchase. That's just common sense, and you can do it at the register if you want. I'm sure they'd let you. Secondly, I'd say $5 is a fair price for a working GTX 560 Ti. Its scrap value is probably almost worth that!
I guess the good stuff is all behind the paywall now and we are left with this.
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bit_user

JayGau said:
I guess the good stuff is all behind the paywall now and we are left with this.
Even though I have a premium subscription, I find myself uninterested in the majority of those articles. I definitely read some, but a lot of them seem focused on high-level industry analysis that I either don't care about or already pretty much know.

I wish they'd do more interviews with industry insiders and more testing. There are lots of things you could test that I haven't seen. Lots of things to do with E-cores and hyperthreading, for instance. Other sites do PCIe scaling analysis on GPUs (and I assume - but haven't actually seen - on SSDs, as well). However, I'm not saying I want testing to be paywalled, just that they could do so much more of it. Testing is how you can make your own news, on slow news days.

There's also lots of other areas much more PC-related that they don't cover than some of the stuff about drone wars and cyber hacks that they do cover. For instance, server and networking coverage has been lacking. Can't remember the last time I saw a server or workstation review, on here. I just bought a new network switch - would've been nice to see a professional review of it (I checked ServeTheHome, but they hadn't reviewed it either and it's hardly a no-name brand).
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DingusDog

That's learning the hard way alright. They could probably sell it for at least $10 and double their money.
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DRagor

If the card is working then I would say he got exactly what he paid for.
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valthuer

Honestly, getting a GTX 560 Ti in a 1060 box for $5 is the most authentic Black Friday experience possible — a mix of hope, disappointment, and a life lesson all in one cheap cardboard package. Still, for $5 you basically bought a GPU-themed scratch-off ticket… and somehow won nostalgia instead of performance.
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Azuki_5

This is what happened, the previous owner upgraded their GPU and put the old one in the new box for safe keeping, and that was picked up by the Salvation Army.
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Varsaggo

valthuer said:
Honestly, getting a GTX 560 Ti in a 1060 box for $5 is the most authentic Black Friday experience possible — a mix of hope, disappointment, and a life lesson all in one cheap cardboard package. Still, for $5 you basically bought a GPU-themed scratch-off ticket… and somehow won nostalgia instead of performance.
It was a salvation army not a retail store or a seller online. He never even opened it up in the store to see what he was buying. You can't go by the box as it usually is the box from the new card and inside is the replaced older card at these stores. It wasn't listed as gtx1060 or sold as it.
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valthuer

Varsaggo said:
It was a salvation army not a retail store or a seller online. He never even opened it up in the store to see what he was buying. You can't go by the box as it usually is the box from the new card and inside is the replaced older card at these stores. It wasn't listed as gtx1060 or sold as it.

Oh absolutely — thrift stores are always a gamble. That’s why stories like this are so funny: you go in hoping for a deal and walk out with a surprise relic from a past era. It’s part of the charm of second-hand tech hunting.
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mike.stavola

This is an actual scam that my local Goodwill does. They get boxes for nice parts, stuff junk inside, tape it shut, and hope to rip off customers with their "no refunds on computer parts" policy.
I just saw a dude buy a boxed 8TB external drive for $80, marked "tested working" and he opened it to find a bubble wrapped 20GB laptop drive taped to a USB adapter in the box.
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