Here’s a 3D printed RTX 3080 piggy bank while you save up for the real deal
Since you can't buy one anyway, you might as well squirrel away your money.
Good luck getting your hands on an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080—it's the hottest selling GPU right now, along with the much more expensive 3090. But while you might not be able to find one in stock for a bit, you can 3D print a miniature replica that is also a piggy bank.
Take those sour lemons and make some sweet lemonade, in other words. Use it as a swear jar to fast track your savings (if you have a potty mouth), or otherwise just keep dumping change into the thing until you've saved up enough coin to fund a GPU upgrade. Hopefully by the time you do, there will be ample stock. Or you could be ironic and save up for a Radeon RX 6000 card, which AMD suggests will be in ample supply.
Regardless, the design is the creation of Nils Kal, who uploaded the schematic to Prusa Printers (via OC3D). It is "scaled down a bit to fit on the MK3 print bed," but you can scale it to 142 percent if you want a true-to-life replica of the Founders Edition model. There is also a schematic that nixes the money slot.
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"The design won't require any supports and is pretty easy to print and assemble. You also won't need any extra hardware. The color changes are layer based so no MMU required. The 'PCI-E' part has a built-in support that needs to be removed after the print," Kal explains.
As to how much coin you can fit in this thing, if printed at 100 percent scale and only put €2 coins inside, it can hold €851, Kal says (which I guess would really be €850). That's equivalent to around $990 in US currency, more than enough to fund an RTX 3080.
For reference, a €2 coin has a diameter of 25.75mm, which sits between a US quarter (24.26mm) and US dollar (26.49mm) in size. That means if you jammed quarters into this piggy bank, you'd have to fill it up several times to save for an RTX 3080—it should hold around 425 quarters by my math, which is $106.25.
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Paul has been playing PC games and raking his knuckles on computer hardware since the Commodore 64. He does not have any tattoos, but thinks it would be cool to get one that reads LOAD"*",8,1. In his off time, he rides motorcycles and wrestles alligators (only one of those is true).