It’s amazing how we can adapt to certain situations. In China, since the RTX 4090 was banned, specialized factories have sprung up. Basically, these factories reassemble 4090s to transform them into cards dedicated to AI!
RTX 4090: reassembling factories in China to convert them into AI-dedicated models!
As we reported here, the Americans are banning the export of high-performance graphics cards. So, all A100, A800, H100, H800 and co. are banned for China. Nevertheless, the country remains very keen on this kind of solution, and to satisfy its demand, it disassembles and reassembles 4090s.
To accommodate a large number of these in servers, the best solution is to opt for a double-slot blower-type heatsink. However, with different PCB designs from Asus, MSI, Gigabyte, etc., it’s not easy to adapt this heatsink. So China has come up with a solution: unsolder the GPU and memory and put them back on a “reference” PCB. From there, all that’s left to do is screw the cooling system onto the board.
Afterwards, the boards are tested to ensure that everything is working properly. However, as TechpowerUp points out, performance is not known, and the risk of HS cards is not zero. As for the boards’ original PCBs and cooling systems, they are going back on sale.
