Rare engineering sample of Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti with extra VRAM sells for almost $2,000
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Not every version of a graphics card manages to make it to market. Occasionally, early prototypes, engineering samples, or unreleased models can appear in the wild. These are often highly sought after by collectors and tinkerers. Such was the case for an engineering sample of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, which recently sold on eBay.
An engineering sample is an early version of a component or device used internally by the company for testing and validation. Sometimes these engineering samples can contain features not included in the final production model.
The RTX 3080 Ti sold on eBay was a Founders Edition card, which contained a whopping 20GB of VRAM. This particular version was never commercially sold, making it an unusual device for the Ampere architecture.
The seller of the graphics card provided detailed photos of the graphics card and the original packaging. The packaging had a prominent sticker saying: “Not for sale, for development only.” The seller also confirmed the card was fully working and in excellent condition.
Sold for almost $2k
This rare card eventually sold on eBay for a remarkable $1,999, which is an extremely high price for a GPU that is two generations out of date, especially since there are no commercial drivers available. As such, the buyer would need to use a third-party driver platform or tweak the drivers themselves to run any games or utilise the card for any 3D-based workloads.
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When the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti was released commercially in June 2021, it featured 12GB of VRAM, though rumors persisted of a 20GB version. Some YouTubers managed to find examples of 20GB versions of the card marketed in Russia under the Gigabyte branding. Further examination suggested that the only difference between models was the VRAM capacity.
It is unknown why Nvidia decided against releasing the 20GB model widely.
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