AMD Radeon RX 500 Series ‘Polaris’ GPUs Recycled Into Keychains
computer shop in china discovered by @Orlac29 Apparently, I had a ton of faulty Polaris-based AMD Radeon RX 500 series graphics cards, so I decided to make a keychain out of them. Selling for about $5, the keychain is a little too big for your pocket, but it hangs nicely in your office or on your gaming console. When used as a key ring, its size almost guarantees that your keys will not be lost.
It’s hard to tell how these keychains are made. Indeed, they’re cut from a graphics card, machined to remove metal, painted, and stamped with the AMD Radeon RX 500 series logotype. It looks like it is Still, it’s quite possible that the GPU and memory were removed from the broken graphics card and glued to a PCB that already has Radeon RX 500 series ornaments.
Launched in Q2 2016, AMD’s Polaris microarchitecture represents the fourth iteration of the company’s GCN architecture, introduced in late 2011. Polaris GPUs were Nvidia’s top-of-the-line gaming solutions (e.g. GeForce GTX 1080 or GTX 1080 Ti), but they were aimed at the mass market.
With suggested retail prices ranging from $109 to $239 per graphics card, these GPUs will boost AMD’s discrete desktop GPU sales from 8.88 million units in 2015 to 13.49 million units in 2016 and 15.89 million units in 2015. helped increase John Peddy ResearchSo it wasn’t the best graphics board at the time, but it was certainly one of the best in its price range.
By now, AMD’s Polaris GPUs and Radeon RX 400 and RX 500 series graphics cards are morally obsolete and, in the best-case scenario, good enough for office PCs. On the other hand, they are many faulty graphics cards manufactured in 2016-2017. That said, it’s no surprise that some of these GPUs and boards have turned into keychains.