Technology @lemmy.world Lee Duna @lemmy.nz 11mo ago

Old RTX 3080 GPUs repurposed and modded for Chinese market as 20GB AI cards with blower-style cooling

www.tomshardware.com Old RTX 3080 GPUs repurposed and modded for Chinese market as 20GB AI cards with blower-style cooling

A lot of these are probably old mining cards.

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"Old RTX 3080 GPUs"

🗿
- Old because they're mostly used, repurposed crypto mining rigs, according to the article.
  
  that's just called "used", my 1060 is "old".
  
  FYI, LTT did a video showing ex crypto cards are totally fine. But let's keep that between us so the second hand market for those cards keeps low prices.
- That was my first thought, they are only last gen guys! And easily comparable to the top of the line in the current gen!
  
  With 20GB?! I'd take that over a 4070 or even 4080 any day
At least having those GPUs training neural networks is vastly preferable to having them mining Bitcoin.
- GPUs havent been mining bitcoin for a long time now. Probably almost 10 years.
  
  The last big coin mined by GPU was ethereum but that stopped last year
  
  Source?
  
  Edit: Multiple, independent sources have been provided. Thank you, Lemmy.
I'm never going to be able to afford an upgrade.
- What card do you have?
  
  1080ti. Still strong but starting to show it's age with newer games and AI stuff.
I could really use a 20g 3080 in my gaming pc. How do I buy one?
- Make a tik tok, they find you.
- Call China
Aside from anything else, the cooler looks spiffy. Not an over-the-top RGB monstrosity, and it's obviously designed to be compact.
- The coolers work well, but at the cost of noise. under any gaming load they are exceedingly noticeable. The classic use case for this form factor is often servers, where noise doesn't matter. you also see these on more professional cards, but their whole power budget is often under 100W, so remotely the same category.
what is the appeal of blower-style cooling?, i always heard about it being worse for cooling
- Blower fans are better if you want a bunch of cards in one system. Open air coolers dump too much of the hot air back into the case and are usually thicker. For non-gaming loads it's frequently better to have more cards at less than max speed.
- They're really only worse in the sense that they can be louder. In a datacenter/mining rig/etc where you don't care about noise at all, they're pretty much the best solution to cooling a large amount of cards as they blow air out near the outputs instead back into the rack.
  
  Thanks – and what is the quieter solution vs. blowers? Liquid?
This is the best summary I could come up with:

Repurposed batches of "RTX 3080 20G AI" cards featuring blower-style coolers and with 20GB GDDR6X are being spotted in large quantities over in China, stored and sold via AliExpress.

These are yet another attempt to work around U.S export controls that now prohibit the sale of the fastest data center and consumer GPUs to China and other countries.

Prolific leaker I_Leak_VN also found many of these RTX 3080 20G AI blowers in warehouses via the Xianyu app, a Chinese-based used goods e-commerce website owned by Alibaba group.

LLM (Large Language Model) workloads greatly benefit from more VRAM, and there are other offerings showing repurposed RTX 3080 Ti 24GB GDDR6X cards.

Necessity is the mother of invention, and we're now seeing Chinese retailers repurposing RTX 3080, 3090, and 4090 "consumer" graphics cards into AI accelerators to at least partially work around the U.S. sanctions.

Earlier, these GPUs were sold for dirt cheap as miners wanted to get rid of them quickly to recover some of their investment.

The original article contains 741 words, the summary contains 166 words. Saved 78%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

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