A TechTuber and GPU enthusiast by the name of Blighted Agent recently posted a teardown of an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Founders Edition that they said to have purchased for a measly US$50 (~RM204). Sounds too good to be true? Well, it actually was.
Instead of the uniquely V-shaped PCB that NVIDIA developed for the RTX 3080 and 3090 GPUs, what Blighted Agent found hiding beneath the Founders Edition cooler shroud was a butchered-up PCB belonging to a heavily modified Gigabyte Radeon R9 280 3GB. And when we say butchered, we mean that whoever committed the act had taken a saw blade to the top half of the GPU.
Hell, it’s clear that whoever did this was sloppy as well: you can see from one image that it wasn’t even a clean cut. On that note, the person who initially “modded” the card also took about five memory chips from the original Radeon RX 9 280 PCB.
Ultimately, Blighted Agent said that they would not attempt to repair the card, and we understand why. Honestly, there’s just no saving the PCB. The teardown was just his way of providing the community with a simple warning: if someone is selling you a “repairable” top-tier NVIDIA GPU that launched six years ago at US$50, alarm bells should start ringing inside your head.
On the plus side, though, Blighted Agent does now have a spare RTX 3090 Founders Edition cooler shroud, although it isn’t clear if it can still be reused, or if they can even find an RTX 3090 lying around in their digital used marketplace.
(Source: Blighted Agent via YouTube, Videocardz)
