By definition, when you buy a Mystery Box you don’t know what you’re going to get inside. Normally, these mystery boxes are themed (such as the graphics card one we’re talking about today) and the content is random; Obviously, whoever sells it advertises the best that, in theory, you can get, but the reality is quite different.
The Mystery Box of graphics cards arrive at Amazon
As we said, although the sale of these mystery boxes was once something marginal and that we only found on certain platforms, now we have detected that even in the largest eCommerce in Spain, Amazon, they are sold. We are not going to put a link so that no one bites, but in the following screenshot you can see an example of what we are telling you, where they tell us that for just €49.99 we can even get a brand new GeForce RTX 3090.
As can be seen in the screenshot itself, this “product” is not sold by Amazon, but by one of the sellers registered on the platform, and therefore does not have the guarantee and security of the platform, but rather Amazon is a mere showcase (for this reason, these products have begun to appear here). On the other hand, the seller himself indicates that does not accept returnswhich is probably one of the biggest advantages of buying from an online store like Amazon.
According to the seller, in this Mystery Box of graphics cards we can get models that include RTX3090, RTX 3080 Ti, RTX 3070 Ti, RTX 3060 Ti, RX 6900 XT, RX 6800, RX 6700 XT or RX 6600 XT, and it also indicates that the products may be used (although it also clarifies that if you get an RTX 30 or an RX 6000, they will be new products). However, this seller is a little more honest than the others (or tries to deceive us more blatantly) and indicates the percentage that you get from one or another model.
As you can see, there is only a 2% chance that you will get an RTX 30 Series (which can be an RTX 3050 for example, it does not have to be the supposed “jackpot”, the RTX 3090), while there is a 4% chance of getting an RTX 20 Series or Radeon RX 5000 Series. Continuing with this, we have an 8% chance of getting a GTX 10 Series or an RX 500, already outdated graphics but, depending on the model, they would be well worth the 50 Euros that this mystery box costs.
Now the worrying thing, there is a 16% chance (as long as the seller is honest, of course) that you get a GeForce 900 Series or a Radeon RX 300 Series, graphics that today are no longer worth the €50 of this Mystery Boxand a 70% chance that you will get an even older graphic, which will not even remotely be worth the money invested.
In summary, in reality you only have a 6% chance of getting a graphics card that is worth the money invested (we do not count the 8% of the GeForce 10 Series and RX 500 Series because it will depend on the model you receive, imagine that you get a GT 1030 second-hand…), and what is more, to know what model you get and in what condition, because as the seller himself indicates, they may be used (perhaps you get a graph from 20 years ago with countless hours of use ). It also does not indicate that they are functional, so we assume that you could even receive a piece of junk, no more and no less.
In short, our recommendation is that you DO NOT buy these Mystery Boxes that have begun to appear on Amazon, since you will almost certainly not recover the money invested, and in fact there is a good chance that it is a simple scam.
