In this era of constantly rising GPU prices, many people must be reluctant to spend money on upgrading their graphics cards, and there’s no telling when prices will return to normal. Unexpectedly, one lucky netizen abroad found an RTX 2080 Super graphics card at a junkyard. What’s more, after installing it, it actually worked perfectly, directly replacing his HD 6950 that he’d been using for over a decade—a massive performance upgrade.
Image source: TweakTown
Netizens found a working RTX 2080 Super at a garbage dump! A leap of a full nine years from the 2010 HD 6950.
According to a TweakTown report.A Reddit user named Total_Pirate7125 recently shared their good fortune on r/eWasteFinds, saying they dug an RTX 2080 Super out of their “local dump” and it works fine. However, they didn’t reveal the brand and model of this RTX 2080 Super, but in the comments, some netizens identified from its appearance that it might be an MSI Gaming X Trio:
Image source: Reddit
He originally used an MSI HD 6950, a card launched in December 2010, which means it’s been over 15 years now—very old. As for the specs, it uses AMD’s Cayman core, TeraScale 3 architecture, with 1,408 shader units, 2GB GDDR5, a 256-bit memory interface, bandwidth of 160GB/s, a 40nm process, and a TDP of around 200W.
Here’s a key difference: AMD only started supporting DirectX 12 with the later GCN architecture. The HD 6950’s TeraScale 3 is much older—not only does it lack modern GPU features like hardware ray tracing, but it also doesn’t support DirectX 12, which is a baseline requirement for many new games. It’s stuck with DirectX 11, so even if the performance is still adequate, the API incompatibility prevents it from running those games, leaving a fairly limited selection of playable titles.
Meanwhile, the RTX 2080 Super, launched on July 23, 2019, uses the full TU104 chip with 3,072 CUDA cores, 8GB GDDR6 memory at 15.5Gbps, a 250W TDP, dedicated ray tracing cores, and also supports DLSS technology.
In other words, thanks to this stroke of luck, he not only didn’t spend a single cent, but also skipped nearly nine years of graphics card evolution in one go. The games he can play, the graphics settings he can tweak, and the FPS performance are all on another level entirely.
Found a RTX 2080 Super at my local dump
byu/Total_Pirate7125 ineWasteFinds
Total_Pirate7125 also mentioned in the comments that this RTX 2080 Super has an idle temperature of around 35°C, which is a healthy state. He also fully disassembled the card, replaced the thermal paste and thermal pads, and then put it back together.
However, the processor might hold the graphics card back. This PC is equipped with an Intel Core i7-4770K, a 2013 Haswell-generation processor that’s six years older than the RTX 2080 Super. So in newer, more CPU-intensive games, CPU bottlenecks may occur.
TweakTown also half-jokingly noted at the end of the article that, given current graphics card and memory prices, a trip to the local landfill or scrap metal yard might actually be worthwhile—one of the few places left to find cheap hardware.
Source: KOCPC Chinese