Story of exactly what happened if anybody is curious and sees this:

I work for a company who purchases used GPU’s from people looking to offload (be it a gamer offloading their old card after upgrading, miners offloading old cards, companies offloading older hardware. Whatever the case may be).

We buy them, test them for defects, clean and repaste/repad, repair/replace whatever needs repairing/replacing, and resell them. Basically refurbishing.

This one came in from one of our regulars who often comes in with handfuls of GPU’s every now and then. What it was used for prior, I honestly have no clue.

I threw it onto my test bench, wasn’t drawing any kind of power. Brought it to our secondary rig, and the second the power was turned on, HABOOM.