What just happened? It appears that for the second time in a few days, a PC gamer has found an unintentional bargain. The latest incident saw someone buy a pair of RTX 3080 GPUs from an eBay seller for $650. That alone is a pretty good deal, but it's even better when you realize the seller sent them two RTX 3090 cards.
The excellently named Redditor EmuAreExtiinct writes that he bought a pair of what was supposed to be Dell GeForce RTX 3080 10GB GDDR6X graphics cards for $325 each.
The cards were delivered on June 26, but the buyer got a nice surprise: a pair of RTX 3090 cards arrived instead.
EmuAreExtiinct writes that the cards, which were presumably taken from a prebuilt Dell system, are identifiable as RTX 3090s by the gold pins used for SLI. Nvidia officially dropped multi-GPU SLI support for gaming in 2021, with the 3000 series being the last to support it. The RTX 3090 was the only card in the series to have NVLink (SLI) edge connectors.
Bought 2 RTX 3080s on ebay, received 2 3090s instead
byu/EmuAreExtiinct inpcmasterrace
The cards had seen better days. The buyer notes that they both had bent backplates and ran a little hot at 70°C, but he confirmed they were functional by running a 3Dmark Time Spy Benchmark. EmuAreExtiinct said that he bent the backplates to the correct position and applied a new layer of thermal paste to bring the temps down.
When someone asked if the Redditor would use the cards in a multi-GPU setup, he replied that his 850W PSU would likely not be enough to handle them: a minimum of 1200W would likely be required for a system with two of these power-hungry cards.
Interestingly, the eBay user who sold the cards has also sold at least 20 more RTX 3080 GPUs with similar descriptions, so other buyers may have received welcome surprises.
There were reports last week of a Redditor whose dad had stumbled upon a PC in a Goodwill store. He paid $30 for it and discovered the hardware inside included an RTX 3080 Ti and a Ryzen 7 CPU.