Can’t forget the glory days of 2014, when you were playing games on your Nvidia GeForce GT 730? No, me neither. It wasn’t a card for serious gamers, even when it launched in 2014, but it was a cheap and cheerful GPU that was almost certainly an improvement on integrated graphics. Ten years on, it’s back, in purse form. The GeForce GT 730 purse for the “GPU rich” can be yours for the cool, cool cost of $1,024.
Yes, that’s right. You can now buy a mediocre Nvidia graphics card from a decade ago, slapped into a plastic enclosure with a fan and a chain strap, and use it to carry all of your belongings for roughly the same cost as an RTX 4080 Super, which is still one of the best graphics cards out there. As far as best graphics card-purse combos go, though, there aren’t any others right now, so this GT 730 is your only option, as far as we know.
Jokes aide, this is a real item that you can buy right now from GPU Purses, a side hustle business set up by Theresa Burton, an AI researcher. Details are light, but from what we can see, it’s built around a Gigabyte GV-N730D3-2GI graphics card. It comes with a working fan, although I can’t imagine it’s easy to plug it into a power supply. You can also choose between a long or short metal chain strap.
In comments made to PCMag, Burton says the graphic cards she uses are “ethically sourced” for her creations. She also explains that she’s a fan of the GPU chip fabrication process and that the GPU chips, once they’re made, are “beautiful”, which might explain why she’s creating them in the first place.
This isn’t the first time that someone has taken an old GPU and upcycled it into something different. There are several examples on Reddit where old GPUs have been turned into wall art, while keyrings made from old CPUs are commonly available to buy online from stores such as Etsy. This is probably the first GeForce GT 730 that’s ever been honored like this, though, especially at this price.
According to her website, Burton is planning on making “like 10 more” GPU purses from the GT 730, but she also has other ideas in the pipeline. Her next project, teased on her website, is the launch of a purse made from an Nvidia H100, an enterprise GPU used heavily in the AI industry. That one is going to set you back $65,536, though. On the bright side, that makes the $1,024 cost for the GT 730 purse look positively affordable in comparison.
If you’ve got a cool G to recklessly blow on a limited edition, once-in-a-lifetime piece of art made from an office-quality graphics card, this one’s for you. Otherwise, if you want a real piece of art, look at buying an Nvidia Geforce RTX 4090 and loading up Elden Ring to play instead.