Lucky bidder scoops $8,000 PC for $23 at auction — Mislabelled Fractal Design case listing had 24-core Threadripper 3960X, 256GB of memory, and an RTX 3080 Ti inside

In what has to be the luckiest case of a mislabeled auction item ever, a user in the PCMasterRace subreddit has posted a string of jealousy-inducing images of a full system they won for just $23. Although the original auction listing was for just a case, there was actually a full system inside containing some seriously powerful hardware, including a 24-core Threadripper 3960X, 256GB of memory, and an RTX 3080 Ti.

Capital City Online Auctions is a small auctioneer that requires local pickup, so it's not something that anyone could have taken part in, but the auction winner was very lucky nonetheless. The auctioneer sells a wide range of items, from mattresses to rowing boats, to full-on desktop PCs complete with internal hardware. In what appears to be a case of the seller not knowing what they had, they listed the lot as a Fractal Design Define 7 XL computer case. The images used in the listing were stock case pictures from Fractal Design, so there was no way any of the bidders could have known what they were actually bidding on.

Even if it were just the case, the lucky Reddit user LlamadeusGame would have gotten a great deal on a very good PC case from a few years ago. It still sells for around $250 new all by itself. But what they ended up getting for a mere $23.50 ended up being worth much more than that.

Green-eyed Reddit posters spotted the clear-acrylic Puget Systems graphics card support bracket in one of the posted pictures, suggesting it was originally from that workstation and professional desktop builder. Indeed, a purported Puget staffer posted in the thread, claiming this system was probably sold in 2021 for around $8,000, highlighting what a steal the auction winner managed with their comparatively meager bid.

The system in question appears to be a photo editor's personal work computer. The Reddit user reportedly found it with all the previous owner's files on it. They postulate that perhaps it was traded in as part of an upgrade program, or sent in for a service and never picked up.

Regardless, the system Llamadeus won was a good one. None of it is cutting-edge hardware, but it's still seriously powerful. The RTX 3080 Ti is roughly equivalent to an RTX 5070 but with 12GB of VRAM, and though the Threadripper chip is a couple of generations old, it still has more cores than you'll find in any consumer AMD CPUs.

They originally planned to use the case as part of an AI development build, so they will now use the CPU, motherboard, memory, and storage as part of that. They're going to swap out the graphics card, though, as even though a 3080 Ti is still great for gaming, it falls far behind in AI performance compared to more modern Nvidia GPUs.

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