Amazon customer reportedly receives a bricked GPU - that's literally a lump of concrete

If you've ever experienced a bricked GPU, that's not a pleasant experience, obviously - though you don't expect this to happen to a graphics card right out of the box.

More to the point, you don't expect to open the box of a brand new GPU that's just been delivered and find an actual concrete brick inside - but as Tom's Hardware reports, that's what happened to an Amazon customer as reported on Reddit (see above).

Redditor GlassHistorical5303 explains that this was supposed to be an RTX 5080 bought from the official PNY store on Amazon, and they've asked for a refund (unsurprisingly).

As to how this could happen, as Tom's points out, Amazon uses a system of 'commingling' for GPU stock meaning that PNY products from different sellers are mixed into a unified pool. This makes the retail giant's life easier grabbing stuff from the warehouse, but theoretically allows slip-ups like this to happen.

One scenario that might occur is a scammer can buy a GPU from Amazon, take the graphics card out of the box, replace it with a lump of metal - or brick - that weighs about the same, and return this package. If the product isn't checked properly, it might slip through back into the inventory pool, and end up being sent out to another buyer.

We don't know what happened here, of course, but clearly something is amiss, and somebody has switched out the graphics card for a brick at some point down the line. The worry for the buyer is that Amazon may not believe them, and could suspect they've performed the switch themselves. All in all, not an ideal situation...

Hopefully the Redditor will get their money back, or an actual RTX 5080 sent over.