Redditor Struck Gold With $20 Goodwill Tech Find Worth Hundreds Of Dollars

It's not uncommon to find a tech enthusiast at a Goodwill or garage sale, looking to uncover rare, vintage, and undervalued gadgets at a steal. It's that last one in particular where some strike gold when the less tech-savvy let go of extremely valuable tech simply because they don't know what they have. Such was the case with a Redditor who goes by the name Sam_Under_Ice, who posted on Reddit that they bought an i7 desktop at Goodwill for $20. When they looked at what was inside, they discovered they had hit one of the biggest motherlodes for a tech find in 2026 — 64GB of DDR4 RAM.

There was more inside the chassis, too. It contained an i7-12700K, which is a 12th-generation Intel CPU, with 12 cores and a clock speed of 3.6 GHz (up to 5GHz via Intel Turbo Boost Max). It offers good performance as a gaming machine or high-powered workstation. It also had a 1TB SATA HDD inside, which is just one of the four types of hard drives.

But the star of the show was the RAM. It's a very coveted item in an age where its prices are skyrocketing due to the AI-driven chip shortage. It's no DDR5, but even DDR4 can fetch hundreds of dollars these days. The Redditor is thinking of using this find to upgrade his main rig, which has a Ryzen 7 5800X, maybe because he knows it's too valuable to part with.

When Sam_Under_Ice posted about this deal, he didn't think much of it, but the Reddit post went viral overnight. It has thousands of upvotes with hundreds of comments on the r/pcmasterrace Subreddit expressing jealousy, joy, and even rage. The 64GB of RAM is split into two 32GB chips, and each of those is worth between $150 and $180. The RAM is expensive because there is a global shortage of consumer-grade RAM. It's not that people are buying a lot of it. Its cause is as artificial as the thing the data centers that are gobbling it up are trying to enhance the capabilities of: AI.

The demand for AI has skyrocketed in the past few years, so data centers need more RAM to help them process and store vast amounts of data. This situation has led to what is known as the "RAMmageddon" or "RAMpocalypse." Since there's little RAM left for consumer products, its prices have shot up because there's not enough to go around. Manufacturers of these products are making tough choices. They either have to scale down production, raise the prices of their products, or both.

As for the i7-12700K, that alone starts at $350. The hard drive is the cheapest find, as even new ones start at $50. All in all, Sam_Under_Ice walked away with components that could cost over $700 (conservative estimate), which is not bad after initially spending $20.