A year or two ago, I needed a newer graphics card because my R9 390 couldn't handle the resolution of my new ultrawide monitor. This was when prices were crazy, everything was out of stock, and second-hand cards were selling for higher than the retail prices of brand new cards.
I got a 1080Ti for free from someone at my workplace because they hadn't used it for a while and would have felt bad selling it while prices were ridiculously high. He didn't want to take advantage of anyone. Good guy.
To pay it forward, when I upgraded my PC I gave away all the old parts (PSU, motherboard, RAM, CPU) for free. I posted about it, waited a day or two, and picked someone randomly for each item.
This took me down a rabbit hole, thanks for the link. Time to start saving my dollars. I didn't realise just how much of an upgrade a new GPU would be for me.
Bought a laptop with a 1050ti back in 2018, still use it to this day. Though I don't game on it as much as I used to. I've upgraded everything else in it that I could
My 980 is still alive, but I replaced it because I thought it had a bad fan bearing. I had just forgotten to remove the protective plastic on the fan shroud, so it peeled off a bit and the fan was hitting it.
It lived in my wife's computer until the psu I put in burnt up.
I bought an RX480 6 years ago and while it probably can't run the most modern games, it's still a trusty work horse for the ones I still play.
At one point I realised that my games have been crashing with BSOD for a year because the cooling paste melted and spread all around the chip. Fixed it, started working with no issues.
Its right fan was so loud that I thought it was shredding some plastic part. I replaced it, was fine for a week, it's loud as hell again. But it's still working like nothing happened.
I'm considering to replace the TIM (repasting) + thermal pads at some point... The card is now ~5 years old, and if the paste goes bad that would be end of it. The dust that all boards accumulate overtime is also a risk factor of how long components last.