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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.
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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.