NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 40 series GPUs are now seeing their VRAMs bumped up by Chinese companies to sustain AI workloads, especially for cloud computing providers.
Well, GPU VRAM modding is a domain we all are aware of, and it's no surprise that this has been done countless times in the past to achieve extra performance gains, that too at a "relatively" lesser financial cost.
The last weird encounter we witnessed was with NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, which saw its VRAM being doubled by modders (22 GB) to get sufficient performance for the AI markets. It looks like the "modding fever" has now spread onto the latest GeForce RTX 40 "Ada Lovelace" GPUs.
A Chinese AI expert has disclosed that people in the region are selling Team Green's GeForce RTX 4090D and RTX 4080 SUPER GPUs with modded VRAMs. The GeForce 4090D is reportedly available with 48 GB GDDR6X memory, while the GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER is modded to house 32 GB memory. The source says that such GPUs are popular amongst cloud computing providers, and they are renting out computing power to address the demand for it in the market amid the AI hype. Interestingly, the modded GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER is available for $0.03 for a single hour, which is a shocker.
If you are looking to acquire GPUs, NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4090D 48 GB is reportedly available for $2,500 in the domestic market, which is still decent considering the alternatives available such as the RTX 6000 "Ada" which also packs 48 GB memory but costs around $7000 US.
Since such operations are running in backdoors, we haven't seen images of the modded GPUs surface up; hence, we don't have an exact idea of how they ended up in the first place, but our wild guess would be that the modders were
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