In China, we see all sorts of weirdness, but via VideoCardz, we learn that an emerging market is developing: that of custom graphics cards. This time it’s the RTX 4090 48GB. No, no, you’re not dreaming, in China it’s not uncommon to find 4090s with twice as much VRAM as officially announced. What’s more, our colleagues came across a single-slot liquid-cooled version!
A market for the RTX 4090 48GB in China!
Clearly, this type of card is not designed to be installed in a gamer PC, not with such a large memory capacity. No, this type of card is designed to be installed in a professional machine for artificial intelligence. In fact, we learned that factories had been set up to recover the GPU and memory from the 4090s, with the aim of transforming the custom cards into standard models with turbine heatsinks for installation in servers to power AI models.
In short, it seems that a real market has been built around these modified RTX 4090s. The cards boast huge memory capacities: 48 GB. On the other hand, these models are expensive: around 24,000 yuan. As a reminder, the official price of the card in China was around 13,000 yuan, almost double the advertised price. It should also be remembered that the card is no longer being produced, which automatically implies a rise in price, especially as this model is still in demand!
On this occasion, our colleagues came across a customised version with an integrated watercooling system. As you can see, the card benefits from a single slot waterblock coupled with a 360 mm radiator and a pump located remotely in the pipes.
Clearly, it’s only a matter of time before this phenomenon spreads to the RTX 5000. Once modders figure out how to trick the cards into handling more VRAM, we’ll start seeing 64GB RTX 5090s appear!