As we reported here, since the embargo on high-performance computer components came into force in China, we’ve seen some serious tinkering. Some 4090s are stripped of their PCBs and cooler to be fitted with double-slot blower … Others see their memory capacity explode to power LLM-type AIs. In this case, RTX 2080 Ti CPUs have had their VRAM capacity increased.
RTX 2080 Ti: 22 GB cards on sale on eBay!
As you can see from the eBay ad, California-based seller customgpu_official is offering 2080 Ti customs. These cards have undergone a considerable increase in memory capacity, from 11 GB to 22 GB. What’s more, the blower-type heatsink leaves little doubt as to their use: powering AI models.
In itself, doubling a board’s memory capacity doesn’t seem like a particularly complicated operation. We’ve seen Brazilian modders double the memory capacity of an RTX 3070 without much difficulty… So if it’s done by specialized factories in China…
In any case, the announcement indicates that these cards are a budget alternative to the RTX 3090. What’s more, official NVIDIA drivers will be supported, without the need for modded drivers or third-party software. Finally, these boards have been tested on Stable Diffusion and Llama2, and a priori, they run without a hitch!
The question is whether you’d be prepared to invest $500 in this kind of product.
