I dunno where you are seeing pics of these “modified” AI cards as the article is using stock photos of 4090s. They say in the article they are dual slot/ dual blower fans. NONE ARE PICTURED IN THE CONFIG.
"removing the cooling systems and extracting the AD102 GPU and GDDR6X memory from the main PCBs. These components are then re-soldered onto a domestically manufactured “reference” PCB, better suited for AI applications, "
Can nobody read?
Why do they even bother to add GeForce RTX branding on the shroud if these are unofficial mods? Attention to details, or Nvidia involvement?
Why would they bother to REMOVE GeForce branding? They are designed and manufactured with it.
They are
"removing the cooling systems and extracting the AD102 GPU and GDDR6X memory from the main PCBs. These components are then re-soldered onto a domestically manufactured “reference” PCB, better suited for AI applications, "
Not just remoiving branding.
New PCB but reusing existing cooler from original GPU? It looks like the Chinese are making the PCB smaller and moving the power connector to the side and using the standard 8 pin PCIe rather than 12vhpwr which is thick, can start fire if it’s the older version, and be an issue with clearance on top of the GPU.
They sell them within China and want them to look like the real deal
Are you stupid? You sure think everyone else is.
These are AI solutions, how stupid can you be if you’d think they are genuine cards? IN CHINA, where it’s banned.
My my, aren’t you a pleasant fellow.
Are you stupid? You sure think everyone else is.
Dotjzzz is a massive prick, how stupid can you be if you’d think they are a pleasant fellow ? IN /R/HARDWARE, where they’ll soon be banned.
Probably existing designs from factories that produced legitimate blower 4090 coolers before the ban.
Anyone have any insight on why you would want to change PCBs and not just the coolers?
we’ve seen some people modding cards to clamshell mode, apparently there is nothing burned into the core itself that determines whether it’s a quadro or a 4090, or whether a 4090 should have 24GB or 48GB, just a resistor array on the PCB itself. So if you resolder it onto a new PCB with twice the RAM chips, you can make it a “4090 48GB”, or even make it into a quadro.
this has been around for a while, I remember people doing this to turn 780s into titans/780 tis into titan black, but normally they weren’t adding more RAM capacity, just trying to get the ECC working and stuff, they’d just mod a couple resistors and boom it reports as quadro.
Compare 2nd picture replacement PCB with original PCB in 4th picture.
You’ll notice that the power connector of the replacement PCB has foot prints for two good old 8 pin power connectors on the side of the PCB instead of the troublesome new ones (a lot of RMA issues). :) The 4090 is already a tall card with the power connectors on top requiring even more height clearances for the cable and bend radius. Notice they have power connectors on the side of their PCB instead of the top in their stress test in 3rd picture. I would say those mods are nice.
everything ive read china is putting them onto inferior pcbs and worse cooling and its just gonna end up burning the chips out.
They deliberately put the consumer power connector on the top instead of the back so it doesn’t work in servers, since 4090 is much cheaper than L40 or RYX 6000 Ada
The flood of fake AI accelerators will be interesting.
So the sanctions are cutting into Nvidia’s profits while creating new jobs in China, and the upside to this is what exactly?
At the very least, it is causing some short- and medium-term trouble in China’s AI advancements. China has to build its own industries and architectures as they’re cut off from high-end processes in the West and SK/Taiwan. Companies like Alibaba and ByteDance used to buy Nvidia because domestic alternatives were uncompetitive. Now they’re forced to buy domestic, which is very good for China’s aspirations of Chip autonomy, but problematic in the short term.
The upside (if your goal is to hobble China) can only be evaluated in the future, based on how much China can catch up using indigenous processes. My impression is that they’re doing quite a bit better than expected, but obstacles (EUV especially) remain.
There’s no stopping china w/ AI in the long term. All the US can do is slow them down and hopefully make sure America is sufficiently provisioned to deal with whatever China is cooking. That said, I don’t buy into the argument that slowly China down today is only going to speed them up later. China has been going full bore on silicon for a while and is spending and doing as much as possible to decouple from the west in these segments. So, yes, sanctions are an effective tool to slowing them down. China’s only speed is lightning fast. Sanctions puts them at more like “thunder fast”.
why do we want to keep china down? so we can reign supreme at raping the world for it’s resources instead of them? lol
I half-agree with this. China has definitely been pushing for a domestic chip industry, but the Huawei debacle, and last year’s October surprise lit a fire under their feet. Both in terms of state funding, but especially because it forced the private sector to make changes.
We see China as this top-down governed behemoth, but this does not capture the whole picture. Most private companies operate in a relatively autonomous fashion. That is why until recently, most tech companies (Tencent, Baidu, ByteDance, even Huawei) were not interested in domestic chips: because they were uncompetitive. So they bought Nvidia, Qualcomm, and TSMC chips. Now, all their funds are going to domestic manufacturers, which is bad for the tech companies, but good for China’s goal of chip autonomy.
So my main argument is that China was indeed already doing a ton to decouple from the West before (and during the initial phase of) the sanctions, but the private sector has accelerated this shift out of necessity.
This does not mean that sanctions were a bad idea from the US perspective. Absent those, something like M60 Pro may have only been developed by 2026, but China would still be transitioning towards indigenous chip production – while also reaping the benefits (AI race, increased global profits bein funneled into R&D) of access to foreign tech.
Why do you want to see trouble in China’s AI advancement?
US doesn’t have a clear strategy. It was originally to keep China permanently under 14nm and when that failed, it switched to “slowing” without any clear objectives or definitions of success, at expense of Nvidia market access.
Success is slowing down China.
Long term, China is inevitably going to develop its own super intelligent AGI, and without those pesky safety filters.
Slowing them down gives breathing room.
Yup. This is pretty much the goal. Slow em down any way possible to keep that tech advantage.
Not enough, they are making breakthroughs, it’s nowhere close to stopping them.
It doesn’t do enough to slow them down, they made a breakthrough at 7nm. US policy wonks making up these sanctions don’t understand the tech and trying to balance economic interests.
The US and China are both preparing for war in the near future. China is building up their military power extremly fast, pumping out jets, ships, missiles, drones etc. and US is doing what it can to slow them down. It is inevitable that China will be able to manufacture their own chips, nothing will stop them.
Economic interests are lower priority.
Success is slowing down China.
Why?
Damn this is awesome, I want one of these Frankenstein GPUs
Anyone wanna see what’s under my hood? Oil Can appreciated! Kawaii!
It’s going to be nasty if these things flood the second-hand market in the future. Sustained high temperature operation combined with likely substandard power delivery with questionable reballing quality. What a perfect recipe.
Lol
How about all the old 4090 shrouds being reused with other gpus? Influx of fake 4090s incoming?
At least those would be useful for the people wanting them. No need for an AIO if a 4090 cooler was somehow compatible with the mounting/VRM layout.
Scammers have already returned 4090’s to retailers with just the cooler inside for weight, and just kept the GPU. They have no need to even attach some other card to it.
I’d love to see a comparison between these different home brewed cards and official ones.
Hopefully they are gonna look exactly like us including hands as grappers and pipes as mouths ;D human friendly A.I. robots!
Could the 4090 run 48GB of VRAM? Doubling memory of certain models has been done before of course Just curious :)
In theory, in 24GB VRAM cards, only the 3090 is possible since it has 24x1GB GDDR6X chips, so if you change the chips to 2GB each, you would have 48GB GDDR6X.
3090Ti and 4090 has 12x2GB GDDR6X chips on the front pcb.
Not sure if 3-4GB GDDR6X chips exist (I think not)
There’s now a black market for the X090 series from the 40 series onwards. Nvidia will not make a X090 series GPU with the AI stuff turned off.
Nvidia will not make a X090 series GPU with the AI stuff turned off.
That’s what they said about the Titan line, at one point…
If there was a western way to get something like this, I’d actually pay for that. Main reason I boycott Nvidia now is how fat their cards have become.
You can buy them from unofficial sources if you’re lucky enough to find one. The OP in that thread was offered one from and unofficial, small batch of AI cards and had to pay about 1.5 times what you’d pay for a regular 4090. The cards may very well be from a similar source to this one.
So “you can buy 2-slot 4090s” is technically correct, but isn’t actually true for most people even if they had the money.
Msi Liquid Suprim 4090 is 2 slot but with an extra radiator hookup.
They’ve become pretty much impossible for anyone in the west to get since the ban started.
Is it just me, or do those photos look AI generated? In particular the photo of the guy holding the card.
It’s probably just you. The photos just look like they were taken with a mediocre cell phone camera. The background in the “guy holding the card” photo makes sense, which is from very hard to impossible to do with AI for now for such a niche subject.
Plus, we know blower-style 4090s already exist and can be gotten through backroom deals if you’re ordering in bulk from the right place and can pay a lot of money. And there’s a lot of demand for them. So there’s nothing to fake.
all the backgrounds look too realistic and detailed. i think AI usually slacks on backgrounds so i’d lean on these being real.
If anything AI can do really well, it’s detailed backgrounds.
Just check /r/dalle2
Explains the shortage of the gpu.