Thursday, July 27th 2023
Curious MSI GeForce RTX 3080 Ti 20 GB Card pops up on FB Marketplace
An unusual MSI RTX 3080 Ti SUPRIM X graphics card is up for sale, second hand, on Facebook Marketplace—the Sydney, Australia-based seller is advertising this component as a truly custom model with a non-standard allocation of VRAM: "Yes this is 20 GB not 12 GB." The used item is said to be in "good condition" with its product description elaborating on a bit of history: "There are some scuff marks from the previous owner, but the card works fine. It is an extremely rare collector's item, due to NVIDIA cancelling these variants a month before release. This is not an engineering sample card—this was a finished OEM product that got cancelled, unfortunately." The seller is seeking AU$1100 (~$740 USD), after a reduction from the original asking price of AU$1,300 (~$870 USD).
MSI and Gigabyte were reportedly on the verge of launching GeForce RTX 3080 Ti 20 GB variants two years ago, but NVIDIA had a change of heart (probably due to concerns about costs and production volumes) and decided to stick with a public release of the standard 12 GB GPU. Affected AIBs chose to not destroy their stock of 20 GB cards—these were instead sold to crypto miners and shady retailers. Wccftech points out that mining-oriented units have identifying marks on their I/O ports.
The seller included a higher-res screengrab of their desktop—showing a score of 21.9K points in TimeSpy (3D Mark) benchmarks, various details exhibited by TechPowerUp GPU-Z v2.53.0, and some tweaks made through MSI Afterburner:
The up-for-sale card (based on Ampere GA102) has 10,496 CUDA cores and 20 GB of GDDR6 memory with a 320-bit bus, clocked at 1188 MHz. NVIDIA does not offer official drivers for this variant—some custom software modding is in play here. In theory this MSI RTX 3080 Ti SUPRIM X 20 GB model could perform at a higher level with proper first party support.
Sources:
Facebook Marketplace, VideoCardz, Wccftech
MSI and Gigabyte were reportedly on the verge of launching GeForce RTX 3080 Ti 20 GB variants two years ago, but NVIDIA had a change of heart (probably due to concerns about costs and production volumes) and decided to stick with a public release of the standard 12 GB GPU. Affected AIBs chose to not destroy their stock of 20 GB cards—these were instead sold to crypto miners and shady retailers. Wccftech points out that mining-oriented units have identifying marks on their I/O ports.
13 Comments on Curious MSI GeForce RTX 3080 Ti 20 GB Card pops up on FB Marketplace
A few possibilities come to mind:
A) It is a heavily modded 12 or 8GB card, by someone with both hardware & BIOS skills
B) Somebody's photoshoppin skills were workin overtime
C) It is/was stolen
www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/rtx-3080ti-20gb.307413/
The TPU database page for the 20GB version shows it with the same specs as the 12GB model, but the database is also manually maintained and fallable. I've found mistakes in it before. In fact, I own a card which is listed as having completely the wrong GPU in the TPU database. I'll submit a correction one of these days...
Anyway this is a prototype RTX 3080 Ti. Originally it was intended to have the same core configuration of the RTX 3090 but with 20 GB over 320-bit, this was later changed to retain the full 384-bit interface but with 12 GB installed (this increased bandwidth but reduced capacity), with the enabled SM count being reduced from 82 to 80, amounting to 10,240 CUDA cores over the 10496 present in the 3090. Thus, 328 TMUs is correct as it's essentially the same GA102 cut, but with less memory channels installed.
MSI had made a lot of Suprim X 3080 Ti 20 GBs and had actually distributed them primarily in Russia to resellers before Nvidia canceled it and decided to do a last minute spec change. This GPU likely originates from that lot.
NVCleanstall can modify the setup files and force the driver to install, which should work because end of the day there is no difference between the chip that this graphics card possesses and that of the GA102 configuration that is sold as RTX 3090 - with that out of the way, it should perform and behave just about the same as a real 3090, just with less memory bandwidth and capacity.
Remember, cryptocurrency miners are generally not gamers and they do not see these things as anything other than money making tools to be spent, and they are definitely interested in making one last buck out of their tools that weren't completely spent by the operation while it was still viable.