A very rare and, what we’re assuming is a very rare engineering sample of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition (FE) with 20GB of GDDR6X memory was sold off in an auction on eBay. The GPU sold was sold at US$1,999 (~RM8,474), the price of a brand new RTX 5090 FE.
The images posted along with the RTX 3080 Ti 20GB included pictures of the GPU, along with a bright green sticker on its side with the words “Not for sale, for development only”. More importantly, the seller said that the card was in excellent working condition.
Now, as this is an engineering sample and not a full-fledged consumer unit, gaming on it is going to be less than ideal. Technically speaking, whoever purchased the card could still do it but they would need a third party driver, as there are no official drivers from NVIDIA to support the card.
The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti first came onto the scene four years ago. The card officially comes with 12GB GDDR6X and a 384-bit memory bus. With the unreleased 20GB, the card supposedly has a narrower 320-bit memory bus, which translates to a lower memory bandwidth of 760 Gbps, versus 912 Gbps.
So long as we’re going down memory lane, the NVIDIA RTX 30 Series and its Ampere architecture first launched back in 2020, with the RTX 3080 being the first enthusiast card to official hit the consumer market, followed by the launch of the RTX 3090. Throughout the company’s history, many engineering samples have been made manifest but never officially launched to the general public, and this RTX 3080 Ti FE is just one of those cards.
(Source: Tom’s Hardware, Videocardz, eBay)
