A Reddit user managed to save a PC with an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X and Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti from the garbage and bring it back to life.
If you're looking for a new PC, you might think the trash isn't the best place to get one. However, on Reddit a garbage truck worker found a gaming PC abandoned among the garbage. While it needed a little bit of TLC, the finder was able to bring it back to life, proving that one person's trash is another man's treasure, especially when there's a Threadripper involved.
Yes, that's right - this garbage PC came stacked with a 32-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X, a CPU that originally sold for just under $2,000, along with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. While the best gaming CPU market has moved on for gaming performance, the five-year-old 3970X is still a beast of a performer for multi-threaded tasks, and while the Nvidia graphics card is certainly showing its age, it's still fairly capable at 1080p, too.
The story starts, as you'd expect, in the garbage. In a now-deleted post on the r/pcmasterrace subreddit, Reddit user siezio explained that he came across a fully-functional gaming PC, containing the Threadripper 3970X, RTX 2080 Ti gpu, and 32GB of Kingston DDR4 RAM. It also came with an Asus Prime TRX 40-Pro motherboard inside a Fractal Design case.
Some of the pictures that siezio shared in his original post show the sorry state of this dumpster PC. While the machine was still working, it had been placed with other garbage and was contaminated, getting wet in the process. In the comments, the Redditor explained that he stripped down and cleaned the PC using isopropyl alcohol and, as it lacked storage, installed a 1TB SSD. As a precaution, they replaced the existing power supply - even dried out, it wasn't worth the risk.
Other than a broken AIO cooler display and a slightly battered PC case, the PC worked perfectly, including the case fans. All in all, a good find for this Redditor - despite the PC's age, this is still a powerhouse of a PC, and all it cost was some time, effort, and a few spare components they already had to get it fully operational again.
If garbage isn't your thing, but you're in the market for a new PC with a more modern CPU, check out our new Ryzen 7 9800X3D review, as well as our best gaming PC guide, where we take you through all of our favorite options right now at a range of different prices.