Garbage truck driver finds a working 32-core Threadripper, RTX 2080 Ti gaming PC in the trash — the PC powered on after a good cleaning and a few days to dry

AMD Ryzen 3970X based PC found in trash
(Image credit: Seizo via Reddit)

If there ever was a PC gamer equivalent of the 'One man's trash is another man's treasure' story, it doesn't get any better than what Reddit user 'Siezo' had to say in the PCMR subreddit. The Redditor, who works as a garbage truck driver, found a functioning gaming PC with a 32-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X that originally debuted at $1,999, a stack of 32GB DDR4 RAM, and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. All it needed was to be rescued and given some love, a PSU, a storage drive, and a good cleaning with isopropyl alcohol.

The build had an ASUS Prime TRX 40-Pro motherboard, four sticks of Kingston's HyperX Fury DDR4 DIMMs, a liquid cooler - possibly a Fractal Celsius+ S36 Dynamic, a Be Quiet Straight Power 11 series power supply, and two key components — an Asus ROG Strix 2080 Ti 11G graphics card and the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X. All these components were inside a Fractal PC case.

As any proper PC enthusiast would do in this situation, he dried up the components, as they were wet because of other garbage piled over them before they were rescued. To be understandably cautious, Siezo made a wise decision to change the power supply to prevent a potential working PC from being destroyed once powered on. The result is a working PC, with an exception being the display on the AIO liquid cooler. Remarkably, even the case fans are working perfectly.

AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X was released in 2019 with a $1,999 MSRP, and it is still a capable high-end processor. Getting a brand new RTX 2080 Ti would also be tricky, though it fetches a reasonable price in the pre-used market. Regardless, one can't complain about getting this 'technically' for free, and hence, one could say it has been a sweet find. Siezo admits this is a very rare situation where a perfectly good PC is found in the garbage, and he mentions that 99% of garbage is simply trash.

Naturally, we're curious about the reason for throwing away a perfectly working PC—a story we can only speculate on for now. What's also peculiar is that the PC did not have any storage drives, implying the original user removed them before sending it to its final destination in the recycle bin. The possibility of someone throwing it away out of anger is somewhat minimized as someone took the effort to remove any drives in the system. 

Though it is not every day you find something good in the garbage, Seizo mentions there have been times he found people throwing perfectly working items in the garbage, such as a working power drill, ratchet sets, a chainsaw with a bad spark plug, and an unopened Bluetooth keyboard, which he uses on his TV. To make this an even sweeter experience, Seizo mentions he's been doing it for three and a half years, and this is his first PC.

Users should sell their PCs and components they no longer need or donate them to someone who needs them. Throwing away anything that's in good condition simply ends up as trash, which might take years to be recycled. Regardless, it is a happy story about a perfectly good PC finding a new home and someone finding a really good system from a pile of wet trash, and it has a story that goes with it.

Roshan Ashraf Shaikh
Contributing Writer

Roshan Ashraf Shaikh has been in the Indian PC hardware community since the early 2000s and has been building PCs, contributing to many Indian tech forums, & blogs. He operated Hardware BBQ for 11 years and wrote news for eTeknix & TweakTown before joining Tom's Hardware team. Besides tech, he is interested in fighting games, movies, anime, and mechanical watches.

  • ezst036
    Admin said:
    Naturally, one will be curious about the reason for throwing a perfectly working PC
    I do not find it curious.

    A lot of people take the attitude (even article writers for Tom's Hardware) that current generation hardware is "aging" hardware.

    The original computer owner probably thought his computer was an ancient dinosaur from Biblical times that simply had no more use in it.

    Admin said:
    What's also peculiar is that the PC did not have any storage drives, implying the original user took it out before setting its final destination in the recycle bin
    Very likely that is where the actual problem resided(not hardware) was in software. Perhaps an OS issue, perhaps not.
    Reply
  • drea.drechsler
    Admin said:
    Redditor found a functioning gaming PC with an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X, 32GB DDR4 RAM, and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti GPU.

    Garbage truck driver finds a working 32-core Threadripper, RTX 2080 Ti gaming PC in the trash — the PC powered on after a good cleaning and a few d... : Read more
    I can easily see this being the sort of thing a peeved ex would do cleaning out a former partner's stuff after an ugly break up.

    Or a parent making the moves to get their kid's school grades back in line.
    Reply
  • Francis412
    ezst036 said:
    I do not find it curious.

    A lot of people take the attitude (even article writers for Tom's Hardware) that current generation hardware is "aging" hardware.

    The original computer owner probably thought his computer was an ancient dinosaur from Biblical times that simply had no more use in it.


    Very likely that is where the actual problem resided(not hardware) was in software. Perhaps an OS issue, perhaps not.
    Striking GOLD in the gargabe bin. I used to fix computers for favors or food or equal value. I had a Linux CD that I would boot to and diagnose problems through dmesg and lspci and /var/log/messages. Many a problem was found to be the OS
    Hard Disk the culprit. Now I have an ASUS A16 with an M.2 NVME and a Ryzen GPU. I could not be happier. Ill have to remake my rescue disk to allow for the new hardware. Lest I get caught without it.
    Reply
  • Alvar "Miles" Udell
    Parted out on eBay after fees it only comes to about $900, most of that being the CPU, but it makes me think it was a student's PC given the incredibly small amount of RAM for a Threadripper setup, but it's also possible the PSU was faulty, they were moving and had limited space, something was spilled on it and thought ruined which is why it was wet instead of being from the garbage, or could have just been made redundant by a business and it couldn't be sold or donated and was disposed of irresponsibly.
    Reply
  • Notton
    Yeah, sometimes you just don't have the time, space, or patience to deal with parting and selling PC parts.

    Do you know how annoying it is dealing with low ballers? damn waste of time for something that I'm already selling for a good price.
    Reply
  • punkncat
    An old friend of mine worked with a garbage collection company some years ago when the trucks still had the two fella hanging off the back. They worked a high profile area on one of their routes and were always finding brand new designer clothes, shoes, electronics. They set it up as a three way split. A few months into the job and he was more well dressed than anyone else we knew at the time.
    Reply
  • Alvar "Miles" Udell
    Oh I didn't think about this when I posted: It's not Windows 11 compatible, only the Threadripper Pro CPUs are, so it'd make complete sense for an enterprise or institution to replace it per policy, so it was probably just irresponsibility disposed of.
    Reply
  • Moores_Ghost
    When I was in my mid 20s I drove livery. Mostly luxury cars to the airport.
    One day I got a 5am airport call so I went. While waiting I noticed a tower in the trash area of the complex. Dell tower. There was a monitor next to it. Full size CRT. I put the case in my trunk and the monitor on my front seat and belted it in. My customer emerged from his apartment while I was carrying them to the car. He then asked if I wanted the keyboard, mouse, speakers, and printer to go with it. I said yes and threw the rest, with his baggage, into the trunk.
    He wasn't really tech knowledgeable. Told me the original parts died so he bought a new Asus motherboard, a new chip and more memory to no avail. He also bought a new video card too. Although he couldn't remember much of what it was he was sure the GPU was Nvidia.
    After I dropped him off I dropped the PC off at my house.
    When I got home I opened it to find a brand new Asus motherboard, a 1 Ghz Pentium III, 1GB of 133 Mhz SDRam and a GeForce 2 GT with 32MB VRAM. There was a brand new Maxtor 20GB HDD in it as well. This was 2001. He told me he had ordered the parts in an attempt to salvage his old PC but gave up as he claimed he couldn't get Windows 98SE to run on it. He then gave up, called Dell, and ordered a new P4 that had arrived the night before. He said it was fast and didn't crash. He was also happy to be on "The newest tech".
    After a clean, thermal paste, and a fresh install of Windows XP it worked no issues. What was the original issue? Dead motherboard battery and trying to use Windows 98SE.
    That turned into the family computer. I put it in the living room. It was well used.
    At the time I had a 1 Ghz Athlon (Thunderbird) on an ECS K7S5A motherboard and a GeForce 2 GT. It too had 1GB of memory (DDR 266) and a 20 GB Maxtor HDD.
    It was fun pitting them against each other to see which was which. The PIII had a smooth desktop experience. Not smoother than the 1.4 Ghz I had penciled in my TBird to operate at, however, at 1 Ghz and later, 1.4 Ghz, the Athlon had the frames for the games.
    It's funny how history repeats itself. AMD had the crown at the time. Intel was in a bit of a rut. The PIII was faster than the 1.4 Ghz Williamette core P4. But the P4 was the beginning of a huge era for Intel. I do believe this resembles the move from Raptor Lake+ to Arrow Lake. If so, once they sort out the issues, the chips to follow should be top performers. And just like with PIII/P4 and Athlon, it looks like the adoption of fast memory and on die memory like 3D VCache will be what saves the platform.
    Reply
  • DingusDog
    People with money to burn can be incredibly wasteful, I had a long time client who was going to throw away an entire kitchen's worth of expensive appliances including a $5k+ Wolf™ stove and a $3k+ king size bed just because they wanted different decor in their house. I told them I would happily cart them away, kept the bed and sold the stove for $3k. It boggles my mind.
    Reply
  • USAFRet
    Some years ago, Christmas time.

    I went around the corner in the business park, to throw out a big bunch of wrapping paper.

    Sliding open the dumpster, a laptop is sitting on top.
    Reach in and grab it...another underneath.

    2 hours later....5-6 laptops, a Dell laser printer, PC that turned out to be a mail server.

    A company was closing an IT office right there, and just tossed all that stuff in the dumpster.

    I refurbed all the laptops, and gave them to families who would not otherwise have one.
    Sadly, a year later....not one of those laptops were still in use. Stolen, pawned, tossed out...:(
    Reply