A man shares on reddit how he found a broken Dell Alienware gaming PC with an Nvidia GTX 1080Ti graphics card in a landfill and got it working again with a repair cost of just $1.
Again and again we hear stories of allegedly defective PCs and notebooks in landfills that are not broken at all or can be repaired with little effort. A reddit user reports such a lucky find and explains how he found the gaming PC and what he did to get it running again.
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Cleaning up can pay off
How did the find come about? His story begins with the mucking out of his parents’ garage. At the end of his cleanup, there was still a pile of electronic scrap that he had to take to the landfill. Arriving at the landfill, he discovered the said gaming PC in the electronics area and took a closer look at it.
He noticed two stickers with a Dell Alienware logo and the words “Intel i7 processor 7th generation”. When he then saw that there was a graphics card in the system, he was full of euphoria. His father, who accompanied him, didn’t like it and probably only thought that the next piece of junk would soon be in his garage.
Repair with minimal cost and effort
How was the PC? At home, the lucky finder inspected the PC more closely and found out that the built-in graphics card is an Nvidia GTX 1080Ti and even has water cooling for the processor.
So he started troubleshooting and started the PC.
The PC could be switched on, but switched itself off immediately, restarted and then ran in this endless loop without a picture.
Here’s how he made him fit again: Using Google, he searched for possible causes of the problem and found that it could be the CMOS battery on the motherboard. After swapping out the battery, which he bought in a 6-pack for about $5, the device actually output an image again.
The PC was still showing problems starting the operating system, but the reddit user was able to solve this by restoring Windows.
Last but not least, he got a message regarding the power cable of the graphics card and was able to fix this error as well by simply plugging the corresponding cable back into the graphics card.
In search of clues
What PC was that? After a brief search of the service tag number on the PC, he also knew which other main components were installed in the “Alienware Aurora R6” model in addition to the Nvidia GTX 1080Ti:
During his search, he also discovered an old Wal-Mart ad from 2017 with an original price of $1600 for the system.
In the future, the man wants to upgrade the PC with a faster SSD data carrier at a reasonable price in order to install the Windows operating system on it.
Reddit users congratulate on the “honey”
What are other users saying? In the reddit comments on his story, many readers congratulate him on this find, while others seem downright jealous. We have compiled some of the reactions for you:
What about you? Have you already experienced something similar and were you able to revive hardware that you thought was dead?
There are also people who have had similar luck with Magic cards in the “Treasure Hunt in the Garbage” only to end up almost empty-handed.