News 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 d...

[Admin]

Redditor found a functioning gaming PC with an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X, 32GB DDR4 RAM, and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti GPU.

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 d... : Read more

 

[ezst036]

Naturally, one will be curious about the reason for throwing a perfectly working PC

I do not find it curious.

A lot of people take the attitude (even article writers for Tom's Hardware) that current generation hardware is "aging" hardware.

The original computer owner probably thought his computer was an ancient dinosaur from Biblical times that simply had no more use in it.

What's also peculiar is that the PC did not have any storage drives, implying the original user took it out before setting its final destination in the recycle bin

Very likely that is where the actual problem resided(not hardware) was in software. Perhaps an OS issue, perhaps not.

 

[drea.drechsler]

Redditor found a functioning gaming PC with an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X, 32GB DDR4 RAM, and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti GPU.

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 d... : Read more

I can easily see this being the sort of thing a peeved ex would do cleaning out a former partner's stuff after an ugly break up.

Or a parent making the moves to get their kid's school grades back in line.

 

[Francis412]

I do not find it curious.

A lot of people take the attitude (even article writers for Tom's Hardware) that current generation hardware is "aging" hardware.

The original computer owner probably thought his computer was an ancient dinosaur from Biblical times that simply had no more use in it.


Very likely that is where the actual problem resided(not hardware) was in software. Perhaps an OS issue, perhaps not.

Striking GOLD in the gargabe bin. I used to fix computers for favors or food or equal value. I had a Linux CD that I would boot to and diagnose problems through dmesg and lspci and /var/log/messages. Many a problem was found to be the OS
Hard Disk the culprit. Now I have an ASUS A16 with an M.2 NVME and a Ryzen GPU. I could not be happier. Ill have to remake my rescue disk to allow for the new hardware. Lest I get caught without it.

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

Parted out on eBay after fees it only comes to about $900, most of that being the CPU, but it makes me think it was a student's PC given the incredibly small amount of RAM for a Threadripper setup, but it's also possible the PSU was faulty, they were moving and had limited space, something was spilled on it and thought ruined which is why it was wet instead of being from the garbage, or could have just been made redundant by a business and it couldn't be sold or donated and was disposed of irresponsibly.

 

[Notton]

Yeah, sometimes you just don't have the time, space, or patience to deal with parting and selling PC parts.

Do you know how annoying it is dealing with low ballers? damn waste of time for something that I'm already selling for a good price.

 

[punkncat]

An old friend of mine worked with a garbage collection company some years ago when the trucks still had the two fella hanging off the back. They worked a high profile area on one of their routes and were always finding brand new designer clothes, shoes, electronics. They set it up as a three way split. A few months into the job and he was more well dressed than anyone else we knew at the time.

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

Oh I didn't think about this when I posted: It's not Windows 11 compatible, only the Threadripper Pro CPUs are, so it'd make complete sense for an enterprise or institution to replace it per policy, so it was probably just irresponsibility disposed of.

 

[Moores_Ghost]

When I was in my mid 20s I drove livery. Mostly luxury cars to the airport.
One day I got a 5am airport call so I went. While waiting I noticed a tower in the trash area of the complex. Dell tower. There was a monitor next to it. Full size CRT. I put the case in my trunk and the monitor on my front seat and belted it in. My customer emerged from his apartment while I was carrying them to the car. He then asked if I wanted the keyboard, mouse, speakers, and printer to go with it. I said yes and threw the rest, with his baggage, into the trunk.
He wasn't really tech knowledgeable. Told me the original parts died so he bought a new Asus motherboard, a new chip and more memory to no avail. He also bought a new video card too. Although he couldn't remember much of what it was he was sure the GPU was Nvidia.
After I dropped him off I dropped the PC off at my house.
When I got home I opened it to find a brand new Asus motherboard, a 1 Ghz Pentium III, 1GB of 133 Mhz SDRam and a GeForce 2 GT with 32MB VRAM. There was a brand new Maxtor 20GB HDD in it as well. This was 2001. He told me he had ordered the parts in an attempt to salvage his old PC but gave up as he claimed he couldn't get Windows 98SE to run on it. He then gave up, called Dell, and ordered a new P4 that had arrived the night before. He said it was fast and didn't crash. He was also happy to be on "The newest tech".
After a clean, thermal paste, and a fresh install of Windows XP it worked no issues. What was the original issue? Dead motherboard battery and trying to use Windows 98SE.
That turned into the family computer. I put it in the living room. It was well used.
At the time I had a 1 Ghz Athlon (Thunderbird) on an ECS K7S5A motherboard and a GeForce 2 GT. It too had 1GB of memory (DDR 266) and a 20 GB Maxtor HDD.
It was fun pitting them against each other to see which was which. The PIII had a smooth desktop experience. Not smoother than the 1.4 Ghz I had penciled in my TBird to operate at, however, at 1 Ghz and later, 1.4 Ghz, the Athlon had the frames for the games.
It's funny how history repeats itself. AMD had the crown at the time. Intel was in a bit of a rut. The PIII was faster than the 1.4 Ghz Williamette core P4. But the P4 was the beginning of a huge era for Intel. I do believe this resembles the move from Raptor Lake+ to Arrow Lake. If so, once they sort out the issues, the chips to follow should be top performers. And just like with PIII/P4 and Athlon, it looks like the adoption of fast memory and on die memory like 3D VCache will be what saves the platform.

 

[DingusDog]

People with money to burn can be incredibly wasteful, I had a long time client who was going to throw away an entire kitchen's worth of expensive appliances including a $5k+ Wolf™ stove and a $3k+ king size bed just because they wanted different decor in their house. I told them I would happily cart them away, kept the bed and sold the stove for $3k. It boggles my mind.

 

[USAFRet]

Some years ago, Christmas time.

I went around the corner in the business park, to throw out a big bunch of wrapping paper.

Sliding open the dumpster, a laptop is sitting on top.
Reach in and grab it...another underneath.

2 hours later....5-6 laptops, a Dell laser printer, PC that turned out to be a mail server.

A company was closing an IT office right there, and just tossed all that stuff in the dumpster.

I refurbed all the laptops, and gave them to families who would not otherwise have one.
Sadly, a year later....not one of those laptops were still in use. Stolen, pawned, tossed out...

 

[PiersPlowman]

Isn't trash the property of the municipal government once it is thrown out and collected...? So this guy may have, technically, committed theft.

Or, the computer was "found" and "restored" the same way those Vietnamese YouTubers "find" and "restore" old crepe.

 

[USAFRet]

Isn't trash the property of the municipal government once it is thrown out and collected...? So this guy may have, technically, committed theft.

Technically, you are probably correct.

But, it is highly unlikely that he would face any repercussions over this.

 

[Sippincider]

Isn't trash the property of the municipal government once it is thrown out and collected...? So this guy may have, technically, committed theft.

Had a family friend in a similar situation. Policy was in the trash is in the trash, and recovering anything meant immediate termination. (There was some strict service contract language and TPTB didn't mess around.)

The amount of good stuff they had to take to the landfill was appalling.

 

[PiersPlowman]

Had a family friend in a similar situation. Policy was in the trash is in the trash, and recovering anything meant immediate termination. (There was some strict service contract language and TPTB didn't mess around.)

Hence my skepticism. Going public with this kind of find does not seem like the smart play.

 

[USAFRet]

Hence my skepticism. Going public with this kind of find does not seem like the smart play.

Have to get those social media reps!!

 

[FrozenGerbil]

Americans especially are a throwaway society - people will throw away perfectly good food at a fancy expensive gourmet restaurant instead of taking the leftovers home with them, perfectly good electronics/furniture/clothing will be left at the curb on garbage day instead of at least being given to charity, etc, etc.

This reminds me of one of my favorite childhood electronics that my mom threw away. I am in my 50s, and my parents bought me an Atari 2600 video game console for 1977 Christmas a few months after it was introduced that year. Over the next 5-6 years, I amassed about 120-140 game cartridges, priced around $30 to $40 each (which would be about $70 for each game cartridge today adjusted for inflation) using lots of money that I earned working as a supermarket stocker during high school. When I went off to college - the campus was a 2.5-hour drive from my parents' home - I had the 2600 console and cartridges boxed up in my bedroom's closet. I took my IBM PC/AT model 5170 to college and, 2 years later, also moved my fairly high-end (for a teenager) $7500 stereo to my college apartment (would be about an $18K-$20K stereo today). As I entered grad school, I had a phone chat with my mom who said they had just sold their house and moved to a new house. I asked my mom, "What did you do with my Atari game system that I had in my closet?" and my mom casually said, "Oh I threw that all away. I thought you did not want it anymore." I immediately said, "Why didn't you ask me first? I wanted to keep all that!!!" My mom felt my pain and said, "I will buy you another one then." But this was in the mid-90s and the Atari 2600 and its games were no longer sold. So I only hope that a garbage truck worker rescued my perfectly-working Atari 2600 instead of that console and 130 game cartridges buried in a landfill to this day. smdh

 

[abufrejoval]

Isn't trash the property of the municipal government once it is thrown out and collected...? So this guy may have, technically, committed theft.

Or, the computer was "found" and "restored" the same way those Vietnamese YouTubers "find" and "restore" old crepe.

Should be interesting to compare globally!

Around here in Germany, trash belongs to the municipal government the moment you put it out for them to collect.

The main reason being that those who fleece the trash don't necessarily do it properly: e.g. they might unpack packages and bags and leave a real mess, leaky, dripping stuff and wrappings, spread by the wind or even picked apart further by wildlife.

The municipal government can't really charge a lot for bulky stuff, broken biciyles, TVs or computers, because citizens could be tempted to throw stuff into the woods and fields (it was a hard lesson to learn), so they even pick it up for free, when you let them know.

If things are left on the street for pickup, you'll have "specialists" driving around and carefully picking through the stuff: they try to be careful, because with smartphones in everybodies hands it's to easy to report them if they make a mess.

Of course you can also drop of e-waste at their collection point or in fact any store that sells it. Stores can give you a bit of a run-around, I guess, I can't say I've observed it often, nor tried it yet myself, but it's a legal obligation.

I had managed not to throw computer stuff away for decades, always passing things along to family and friends while it was still working, but in recent years some stuff actually broke or became too outdated to pass to anyone.

And of course, by now I've left quite a huge trail of e-waste, because I can't imagine my Apple ][ and early PCs (starting with an 80286) still being used by anyone.

These days it's getting a bit harder, because I have a lot of hardware still on hand, that would be quite usable for many of family and friends and performs well enough, e.g. Kaby Lake i7-7700k with 32GB of RAM and 0,5TB of SATA SSD.

But thanks to M$ Windows that won't be an option and a lot of thee folks use PCs for doing their banking, financial stuff, personal correspondence and documents, so security is a concern, performance not the issue.

* * *

Decades ago I swapped out hardware as part of my then job in IT support. I collected a life-time's supply of original IBM PC and PS/2 keyboards during those days, the best ever made. They make a bit of noise so I guess they got thrown out when individual offices were consolidated into open space cubicles or worse.

 

[SirkoSobaka]

Things like this happen, especially in rich societies.
A few years back a friend asked me to help her throw away her ex's stuff as she didn't have a car. He wanted to be a miner, bought 6 x 580 8gb, 6 x 1070ti, 2 high wattage PSUs, 2 z270 mobos, 2 penthiums, risers and stuff. He broke up with her and moved abroad, leaving all of that at her place. I took it all and an old but excellent sound system her late dad had.
I bought her young son a Macbook she was delighted with, and even with that it was en excellent deal for me after I sold most of the stuff. One of the PSUs, the 1600W one, is right now in my office computer, lol, and my retired dad is rocking one of the 1070tis playing COD every day.
But had she had a car then, all of that would've ended up in the bin along with her ex's pants and shirts.

 

[SethNW]

From my experience, quite often people will throw away stuff because they think it is broken or defective in some way. So it makes me wonder if either PSU was bad or if there was software issue that looked like hardware issue and owner just threw it away. But with fresh PSU and OS install, issue was fixed.

Like I got absolute deal on few "broken for parts" graphic cards, that weren't really broken, just owner either didn't have good enough PSU, or it got old enough to where it couldn't quite deliver full rating or deal with power spikes and they thought card was defective.

 

[GalactusTheDestroyer]

I can completely relate to this. I found a 160 gig slim PS3 with controller and GTA IV in the original PlayStation box in the trash. It needed some TLC and a Blu-ray Drive ($25 on ebay) and it was fully functioning. I'm guessing a disgruntled girlfriend threw it away but also it needed a patch to fix so maybe they didn't know how to fix it. Took me 5 minutes and a USB. I can thank my current PlayStation username for this, KrasikTrash.

 

[tommyhardware]

Yeah, sometimes you just don't have the time, space, or patience to deal with parting and selling PC parts.

Do you know how annoying it is dealing with low ballers? damn waste of time for something that I'm already selling for a good price.

So, you'd rather throw it away instead of donating it or giving it away?

 

[newtechldtech]

I once worked at a company that out more than 1000 old PCs and laptops in a huge container and give it all for some $5000 ...

each PC in that container costed around $5000 ... they just dont care . every 7 years ALL must be replaced .

I got for free a Dual Xeon System (16 cores total) with 160GB DDR4 ECC and Quadro P5000 with 4TB SSD , 1300 watts power supply , was Lenovo think station . and a 30 inch $2000 Value monitor once from it. the container had Dozens of them.

The laptops were X1 carbons , X1 yoga Thinkpads $3000 each original cost , hundreds of them !

They did not care , just put it in a container and get rid of it.

 

[Jame_Gumb]

My mother is a fan of throwing things out. "Why do you have a second laptop. Do you need a second laptop? The wires look messy. Why do you have a second laptop? We can throw it out." On and on and on..until she saw her chance and tossed it. Fired for theft of a work laptop. Of course it was my fault.

Same with everything I owned that did not look cute it fancy (trinkets, lamps, vases she likes). She tossed out a brand new 7.1.2 setup when she snuck in because she doesn't like the wires. She could out a new painting on the wall instead.

Some people just are like that.

 

[Notton]

So, you'd rather throw it away instead of donating it or giving it away?

For me? It depends on how far away a donation center is.
For the bro who tossed the PC to the curb? Apparently the answer was YES.

I toss a lot of things to the curb too. Someone always picks it up before the day is over.
I wouldn't do it with a PC, but hey, I can't speak for the person who did toss it.