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

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.

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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.