Old RTX 3080 GPUs repurposed and modded for Chinese market as 20GB AI cards with blower-style cooling

Comments

• db2@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  “Old RTX 3080 GPUs”

  🗿

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  • mriormro@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Old because they’re mostly repurposed crypto mining rigs, according to the article.

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    • KpntAutismus@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      that’s just called “used”, my 1060 is “old”.

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    • luthis@lemmy.nz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      FYI, LTT did a video showing ex crypto cards are totally fine. But let’s keep that between us so the second hand market for those cards keeps low prices.

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  • luthis@lemmy.nz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    That was my first thought, they are only last gen guys! And easily comparable to the top of the line in the current gen!

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    • GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      With 20GB?! I’d take that over a 4070 or even 4080 any day

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• cyd@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  At least having those GPUs training neural networks is vastly preferable to having them mining Bitcoin.

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  • 9488fcea02a9@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    GPUs havent been mining bitcoin for a long time now. Probably almost 10 years.

    The last big coin mined by GPU was ethereum but that stopped last year

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    • sebinspace@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Source?

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• Sabata11792@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I'm never going to be able to afford an upgrade.

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  • aniki@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    [deleted]

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    • Sabata11792@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      My Steam Deck replaced my old laptop and I keep it at work since its usually not busy. No need for it at home since my PC is faster.

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  • crimsonpoodle@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    What card do you have?

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    • Sabata11792@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      1080ti. Still strong but starting to show it's age with newer games and AI stuff.

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• TenderfootGungi@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I could really use a 20g 3080 in my gaming pc. How do I buy one?

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  • And009@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Make a tik tok, they find you.

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  • Kbobabob@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Call China

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• HakFoo@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Aside from anything else, the cooler looks spiffy. Not an over-the-top RGB monstrosity, and it’s obviously designed to be compact.

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  • Creat@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    The coolers work well, but at the cost of noise. under any gaming load they are exceedingly noticeable. The classic use case for this form factor is often servers, where noise doesn’t matter. you also see these on more professional cards, but their whole power budget is often under 100W, so remotely the same category.

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• Vilian@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  what is the appeal of blower-style cooling?, i always heard about it being worse for cooling

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  • Fermion@feddit.nl ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Blower fans are better if you want a bunch of cards in one system. Open air coolers dump too much of the hot air back into the case and are usually thicker. For non-gaming loads it’s frequently better to have more cards at less than max speed.

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  • Alto@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    They're really only worse in the sense that they can be louder. In a datacenter/mining rig/etc where you don't care about noise at all, they're pretty much the best solution to cooling a large amount of cards as they blow air out near the outputs instead back into the rack.

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    • brbposting@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Thanks – and what is the quieter solution vs. blowers? Liquid?

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• autotldr@lemmings.world [bot] ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  This is the best summary I could come up with:

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  Repurposed batches of “RTX 3080 20G AI” cards featuring blower-style coolers and with 20GB GDDR6X are being spotted in large quantities over in China, stored and sold via AliExpress.

  These are yet another attempt to work around U.S export controls that now prohibit the sale of the fastest data center and consumer GPUs to China and other countries.

  Prolific leaker I_Leak_VN also found many of these RTX 3080 20G AI blowers in warehouses via the Xianyu app, a Chinese-based used goods e-commerce website owned by Alibaba group.

  LLM (Large Language Model) workloads greatly benefit from more VRAM, and there are other offerings showing repurposed RTX 3080 Ti 24GB GDDR6X cards.

  Necessity is the mother of invention, and we’re now seeing Chinese retailers repurposing RTX 3080, 3090, and 4090 “consumer” graphics cards into AI accelerators to at least partially work around the U.S. sanctions.

  Earlier, these GPUs were sold for dirt cheap as miners wanted to get rid of them quickly to recover some of their investment.

  ---

  The original article contains 741 words, the summary contains 166 words. Saved 78%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

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