The Chinese second hand market for PC components is reportedly getting flooded with custom NVIDIA RTX 4080 graphics cards. These RTX 40 Series GPUs, which use GDDR6X memory, have had their memory capacity bumped from 16GB to 32GB.
These modified RTX 4080 32GB cards have practically mushroomed across second hand platforms in the country, and they aren’t cheap either. According to Videocardz, some sellers are offering their cards at prices exceeding 10,000 yuan, which is roughly RM6,000 a pop.
Launched back in 2022, the RTX 4080 was once considered to be the second most powerful GPU of the Ada Lovelace era, before being dethroned by the RTX 4080 Super. Specs-wise, the card shipped out with 16GB GDDR6X memory, 9,729 CUDA cores, a memory bandwidth of 716GB/s, and a 256-bit memory bus.
Videocardz says that this isn’t the first Chinese modders have flooded their country’s second hand market with cards housing double their memory capacities. Prior to this, RTX 4080 Super GPUs with 32GB began appearing in their market last year, and in far greater quantities. Of course, there are also custom RTX 4090 and RTX 4090D GPU, also with double the memory capacity at 48GB, as evidenced by Gamers Nexus‘ video coverage of the NVIDIA AI GPU black market.
It also goes without saying that using these modified RTX 4080 32GB cards comes with its own set of problems which, in this case, is official support. Not only have these cards ceased production, there aren’t any official drivers for them. To be clear, NVIDIA’s GeForce drivers still work with the RTX 4080, but only those with the official 16GB GDDR6X capacity. As such, Chinese consumers who purchase these beefier cards may be required to use a modified version of the relevant drivers, as well as having to patch it each time a new game or official driver update to a related game is launched.
There’s also the question of reliability and stability of these modified RTX 4080 32GB GPUs, but this honestly depends on who it was that made the modification. To put it simply: if the technician does shoddy work, then you shouldn’t be surprised if the modified card dies midway of a gaming session.
(Source: Goofish via Videocardz)
