A unique engineering sample of the GeForce GTX 2080 Ti found in an old PC from a flea market
One of the buyers on Facebook Marketplace accidentally stumbled upon a real rarity — a prototype of the Nvidia GTX 2080 Ti graphics card, which never went into mass production. For $500, he bought a PC that contained a modified version of the 2080 Ti with 12 GB of GDDR6 video memory (instead of the standard 11 GB), increased memory bandwidth (384-bit), and an increased number of ROP and TMU blocks.
Technical characteristics of the prototype in GPU-Z. Illustration: u/RunRepulsive9867 on Reddit
This specimen likely belonged to an internal Nvidia test project that was never officially presented. The card has an unusual board design, lacks a serial number, and has a non-standard memory chip configuration. It was discovered by an enthusiast who immediately noticed anomalies in the GPU-Z utility in Physically Installed Memory.
Considering the GeForce GTX branding and the fact that utilities do not display RT cores, it can be assumed that the graphics card belongs to early prototypes when Nvidia had not yet decided on transitioning to a new architecture and allocating transistor resources for specialized ray calculations.
Nvidia GTX 2080 Ti. Illustration: u/RunRepulsive9867 on Reddit
Experts speculate that it could be an engineering sample or part of an experimental series tested before the launch of the RTX 30xx. The graphics card operates stably, has full driver support, and demonstrates performance close to the RTX 3070.
This case is a rare find for collectors and a reminder that sometimes you can come across real technical artifacts on the secondary market.
Source: www.tomshardware.com
