Modders are selling modified NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti cards on eBay, at US$500 (~RM2,388) a pop. What sets these modified RTX 2080 Tis apart from the original Turing-powered high-end card is that they sport double the amount of GDDR6 graphics memory at 22GB.
The RTX 2080 Ti, which launched back in 2018 and marked the first time NVIDIA introduced real-time ray-tracing to the masses, shipped out with 11GB GDDR6 graphics memory. In this case, modders are doubling the amount of memory on said card and selling them to individuals looking for the hardware to run artificial intelligence (AI) applications. More importantly, these cards aren’t just being sold in China exclusively. As mentioned at the start of this article, one modder was discovered selling this 6-year old card in what we believe to be the US.
The seller goes on to claim that no special software is required to operate these modified RTX 2080 Ti, and that they will still run even with the most recent NVIDIA GeForce drivers. Further, they claim that these cards have been tested with popular public AI models, including Stable Diffusion and LLAMA2.
As for how they managed to get so many RTX 2080 Ti cards, the seller is clearly not letting anyone in on their source but it wouldn’t surprise us if they actually managed to get a bulk purchase of the GPUs from someone who was done with cryptomining.
(Source: Videocardz, eBay)
