RTX 2070 Super refurb

Facebook Marketplace was the backbone of my early builds. You can get great hardware cheap if you are willing to clean it up and deal with the occasional dud.

This RTX 2070 Super was a classic Marketplace find. The seller's photos were rubbish. The card was dusty. The thermal paste was basically dried up chalk. But the price was right and I had done this enough times to know what a deep clean and fresh paste could do.

Took the whole cooler apart. Cleaned the GPU die and PCB with isopropyl alcohol. Fresh Arctic MX-4 paste. Blew all the dust out of the heatsink fins and fan blades. Put it back together and ran some thermal tests.

Idle temps dropped about 8 degrees. Load temps dropped over 12. A crusty Marketplace card became someone's reliable GPU.

This was basically a third of my 110 plus builds. Refurbished parts kept costs down and gave perfectly good hardware a second life. You get really good at cleaning other people's dust out of graphics cards.