Graphics cards are often the most expensive part of a gaming PC, and with prices rising—the RTX 5070 launched at $549 but can now cost more than $800—the old three-to-five-year upgrade cycle is likely to stretch. Engadget argues that a card you've outgrown is not worthless: used RTX 3060s are selling on eBay for almost what they originally cost, and the GTX 1060, now about a decade old, still typically lists for $50 to $100 in good condition.
Owners who don't want to sell can give an old GPU a second job. It can be installed in a home media server to handle hardware-accelerated video encoding and decoding through Nvidia NVENC or AMD AMF, which Plex and Jellyfin support. It can also power a TV-connected gaming PC for indie titles, emulation, and older DirectX 9-era games, or act as a secondary card for video capture, editing in DaVinci Resolve or Blender, and local AI workloads that benefit from extra VRAM.
There are caveats. Running two GPUs in one system requires adequate power, motherboard support, and enough PCIe lanes; a second card can slow the primary GPU if lanes are shared. If no repurposing use makes sense, keeping the card as a spare is reasonable, though its resale value will keep falling. And if the card is beyond use, recycling is the right call—e-waste processors can recover metals like gold, copper, and aluminum rather than sending electronics to landfill.