Another unreleased Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti 20GB Founders Edition engineering sample surfaces on the second-hand market — a previous sample sold for $1,999 on eBay earlier this year

An engineering sample of an RTX 3080 Ti has surfaced in the second-hand market, according to a post on the Nvidia subreddit. The Reddit user says that he unknowingly bought two GeForce RTX 3080 Ti cards that turned out to be unreleased engineering samples, showing that preproduction hardware from the Ampere era is still circulating years later.

The buyer, posting on Reddit under the handle Tommyjones91, said the cards were sold to him as standard RTX 3080 Ti units. After installing them, GPU-Z identified both boards as 20GB variants that was never officially released.

The cards would output video, but they would not work with standard GeForce drivers. To make them usable, the original poster relied on a third-party Nvidia driver patcher that bypasses device ID checks, which eventually allowed the GeForce driver 581.94 to work. Even then, functionality would be uncertain across driver updates, since Nvidia has never supported this configuration in public releases — but "Build quality is amazing..." remarked the OP.

The appearance of these boards follows earlier sightings of the Founders Edition model in June, when another engineering sample appeared on eBay with a green sticker explicitly stating it was not for sale and intended for development use only. That card reportedly sold for nearly $2,000 and required similar unofficial driver modifications to function in Windows.

Unlike the production 3080 Ti, which uses a 384-bit memory bus paired with 12GB of GDDR6X, the 20GB version is believed to use a narrower 320-bit interface. While doubling memory capacity would have benefited certain professional and compute-heavy workloads — indeed, one respondent to the Reddit post alludes to rumors that a 20GB model was going to be released to cater to crypto miners — the reduced bus width would have lowered memory bandwidth relative to the retail card. That trade-off placed the part awkwardly between existing products such as the RTX 3080, RTX 3090, and Nvidia’s workstation GPUs.

Normal industry practices typically require engineering samples to either be returned or destroyed once validation is complete, making their presence in resale channels unusual but not unprecedented. The fact that we’ve seen two cases in six months suggests that multiple samples are loose in the market and could easily be mistaken for ordinary used cards, particularly when sold without clear labeling.

Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News, or add us as a preferred source, to get our latest news, analysis, & reviews in your feeds.