Yet another person has had the unfortunate experience of finding something other than the graphics card they purchased in the box after opening it. Shopping for graphics cards in 2025 has become a bit more precarious than most might anticipate, with Forest Gump quote-worthy circumstances occurring in greater frequency. After, like a box of box chocolates, you never know what you’ll find when opening a box these days.
This time around, we have what was reportedly supposed to be a PNY GeForce RTX 5080 ordered by Reddit user u/GlassHistorial5303, who posted an image of a brick inside the static packaging instead of the actual graphics card. The card had been ordered from Amazon, which typically has good customer support, so this person should be able to resolve this issue with minimal effort. They’ve actually already updated that Amazon is processing this as a return/refund.
Amazon sent me a brick instead of a 5080
byu/GlassHistorical5303 inpcmasterrace
Sadly enough, this is just one of a growing list of unlucky folks to have received anything but what they had purchased, and while the majority of these instances involve online orders, let us not forget how Micro Center had its share of woes this year. The well-known big-box store found over thirty boxes that had their GPUs replaced with other items (one customer got backpacks). As reported by Tom’s Hardware, instances of unwanted substitutions have occurred, ranging from metal blocks to pasta and rice for RTX 5090 cards, to a bag of salt for an RTX 5070 Ti. Reports of swapped CPUs from Amazon sellers have also occurred as recently as this past spring. In regard to this brick, a similar situation was experienced by someone who reported the same when ordering from Newegg last year.
As far as this case goes, the card in question was ordered directly from PNY’s official Amazon store page. However, official store pages such as this do use other sellers to fulfill orders in an effort to meet logistical challenges, so even then, something like this can happen when ordering a brand-new product. Things only get worse for those trying to get a bargain for a used product, as there has also been at least one report of an RTX 4090 PCB sans GPU arriving as well.