Recently I've been considering buying a GeForce Now subscription to offset my ageing gaming PC, but now I'm thinking it might be worth hitting the local auctions. Apparently you can get fully-fledged RTX 3080 Ti PCs for just $32 from them.
No, really, that's what one lucky (he says, through gritted teeth) Redditor got from a "small auction place up in Columbus Ohio that only offers local pickup." It was advertised as just a chassis and they bought it "specifically to build an AI development rig in later as I would need a large case for it" and were naturally "shocked to find out exactly what was in it … I've never gotten lucky like this before."
The auction screenshot says the final bid was $23.50 but the Redditor says $32. Maybe there were additional fees for using the auction service. Whatever the case, it's a whole lot cheaper than getting a new gaming rig these days; I certainly wouldn't be quibbling over an extra $9.50.
I bought a "Case" for $32 at auction from r/pcmasterrace
Oh, and this isn't your average RTX 3080 Ti gaming PC, either. It's a powerhouse of a workstation with a Threadripper CPU and 256 GB of RAM.
Specifically, that's an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X, a 24-core, 48-thread, 280 W monster. It also has tons of L3 cache for games to gobble through. That being said, it's still a few generations old now, and will be beaten by top-end chips of recent generations—even non-HPC ones.
The RTX 3080 Ti is also a couple of generations old, but it's only a little slower than the current-gen RTX 5070 for pure rasterisation performance. In other words, it's still a very capable card today, although it doesn't benefit from DLSS frame gen.
256 GB of RAM is, of course, completely overkill for anything gaming-related. The fact that it's DDR4 isn't a problem, but that many RAM sticks means they won't be running with a high clock speed or fast timings. So for gaming-only, I'd probably yoink a few of those sticks or swap them all with a fast DDR4-3600 kit.
This seems to be a Puget Systems workstation, as we can see from the branding inside the chassis, and a Puget employee in the comments section says this system would have cost around $8,000 back when it was new, circa 2021/2022.
A system like this one would have most likely been used for some heavy lifting in the form of rendering workloads, powering multiple virtual machines, and so on. Gaming would have been more of a happy addition to that mix rather than a primary use case.
I'm usually a little sceptical of claims such as this auction story on Reddit, but after checking through the comments and seeing some details about the auction site, I reckon it's legit. Which makes me and my RTX 3060 Ti more than a little jealous.
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