Friday, November 24th 2023

Special Chinese Factories are Dismantling NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Graphics Cards and Turning Them into AI-Friendly GPU Shape

The recent U.S. government restrictions on AI hardware exports to China have significantly impacted several key semiconductor players, including NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel, restricting them from selling high-performance AI chips to Chinese land. This ban has notably affected NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4090 gaming GPUs, pushing them out of mainland China due to their high computational capabilities. In anticipation of these restrictions, NVIDIA reportedly moved a substantial inventory of its AD102 GPUs and GeForce RTX 4090 graphics cards to China, which we reported earlier. This could have contributed to the global RTX 4090 shortage, driving the prices of these cards up to 2000 USD. In an interesting turn of events, insiders from the Chinese Baidu forums have disclosed that specialized factories across China are repurposing these GPUs, which arrived before the ban, into AI solutions.

This transformation involves disassembling the gaming GPUs, removing the cooling systems and extracting the AD102 GPU and GDDR6X memory from the main PCBs. These components are then re-soldered onto a domestically manufactured "reference" PCB, better suited for AI applications, and equipped with dual-slot blower-style coolers designed for server environments. The third-party coolers that these GPUs come with are 3-4 slots in size, whereas the blower-style cooler is only two slots wide, and many of them can be placed in parallel in an AI server. After rigorous testing, these reconfigured RTX 4090 AI solutions are supplied to Chinese companies running AI workloads. This adaptation process has resulted in an influx of RTX 4090 coolers and bare PCBs into the Chinese reseller market at markedly low prices, given that the primary GPU and memory components have been removed.
Below, you can see the dismantling of AIB GPUs before getting turned into blower-style AI server-friendly graphics cards.

For assurance that these cards work, factories are stress-testing them after modifications in Furmark, 3DMark, and AI applications, probably running some smaller LLMs locally to test their compute capability. Indeed, this process could potentially brick a lot of AD102 GPUs if not handled with care, but the yields of this experiment are unknown to anyone outside these factories.
Sources: Baidu Forums, via WCCFTech
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48 Comments on Special Chinese Factories are Dismantling NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Graphics Cards and Turning Them into AI-Friendly GPU Shape

#1
the54thvoid
Super Intoxicated Moderator
As much as I complain about NV's pricing policy, there's no denying the 4090 is a tremendous card. With that said, reading this story is like reading about a bunch of old masters paintings being chemically treated to remove some archaic and valuable pigment. It's a murderscene. Or it's body modding, Scav style in CP2077.
Posted on Reply
#2
TumbleGeorge
the54thvoidAs much as I complain about NV's pricing policy, there's no denying the 4090 is a tremendous card. With that said, reading this story is like reading about a bunch of old masters paintings being chemically treated to remove some archaic and valuable pigment. It's a murderscene. Or it's body modding, Scav style in CP2077.
Technical question. How much time would a cyborg get on a single battery charge if fitted with an desktop RTX 4090 GPU?
Posted on Reply
#3
Chomiq
That's just barbaric and wasteful. I doubt that the shortage of 4090's is linked to Nvidia clearing stock for Super, more likely it's just that they shipped everything to China.
Posted on Reply
#4
Broken Processor
I'm guessing they need as much AI brain power as possible so it can hopefully find a solution to the financial wildfire the country is heading into./s
Posted on Reply
#5
R0H1T
Well it's at least a small surprise they're not being escorted directly from the factories, or maybe not o_O

Pretty sure if CCP wants these chips/parts they can get them almost any way possible, after all most(?) of them are "assembled" in China!
Posted on Reply
#6
Yashyyyk
AI Friendly more like sensible sizes

sffpc/comments/12ne6d7
There were 200W single fan cards, 1080/2070/3060Ti (no 4070 though lol)



A 4090 can simply be a double fan card then (assuming linear scaling between size and power, but see AFOX 4090 in thread)
Posted on Reply
#7
TheDeeGee
YashyyykAI Friendly more like sensible sizes

sffpc/comments/12ne6d7
There were 200W single fan cards, 1080/2070/3060Ti (no 4070 though lol)



A 4090 can simply be a double fan card then (assuming linear scaling between size and power, but see AFOX 4090 in thread)
Ofcourse they can be 2-slot, but then the majority of users would complain about noise.
Posted on Reply
#8
Toothless
Tech, Games, and TPU!
R0H1TWell it's at least a small surprise they're not being escorted directly from the factories, or maybe not o_O

Pretty sure if CCP wants these chips/parts they can get them almost any way possible, after all most(?) of them are "assembled" in China!
Taiwan (technically not China) and other locations. Coolers maybe in China but not the chips.
Posted on Reply
#9
Wirko
TumbleGeorgeTechnical question. How much time would a cyborg get on a single battery charge if fitted with an desktop RTX 4090 GPU?
With a range extender in the backpack, made from an old chainsaw and a car alternator, and running on iGPU 75% of the time, an entire day!
Posted on Reply
#10
Bwaze
Finally a use Nvidia can be proud of! Cryptoscamming wad borderline illegal, so theh had to resort to appologies for catering exclusively to miners and promise to limit gaming cards to gaming exclusively (a promise they broke the second they released the LHR gaming cards).

But with AI they can fully support this worthy use of otherwise almost useless hardware - come on, gaming on a $2000 cards? And gaming in general?

Too bad the main customers seem to be from a country they shouldn't sell those cards to, but bussiness is bussiness, right?

:p
Posted on Reply
#11
nguyen
Just watch this clip yesterday, Chinese made a frankenstein desktop 3060 out of 3060 mobile chips, and they came out superior to the original desktop ones in term of efficiency
Posted on Reply
#12
Metroid
ChomiqThat's just barbaric and wasteful. I doubt that the shortage of 4090's is linked to Nvidia clearing stock for Super, more likely it's just that they shipped everything to China.
Everything nvidia say is a lie and they still get away with it because the demand for its products is massive, Intel used to do the same and look what happened to them.
Posted on Reply
#13
FreedomEclipse
~Technological Technocrat~
ChomiqThat's just barbaric and wasteful. I doubt that the shortage of 4090's is linked to Nvidia clearing stock for Super, more likely it's just that they shipped everything to China.
Not really "wasteful." a lot of the boards will get repurposed as 'Frankenstein' GPUs with chips ripped from faulty unrepairable laptops or anywhere they can source chips that havent been blocked from sale.
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#14
JAB Creations
I really enjoy the fact that I didn't get totally ripped off on VRAM and performance when I purchased my RX 6800. I've got several games that blow right past 12GB of VRAM at 1440p.
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#15
R0H1T
ToothlessTaiwan (technically not China) and other locations. Coolers maybe in China but not the chips.
Not sure about that, there's no Chinese brands which make/made the 4090 cards before this?
Posted on Reply
#17
Wirko
I don't understand the usefulness of the great and costly effort of: making multilayer PCBs, equipping them with quality VRMs, transplanting chips, wasting some chips, thorough testing etc. All they can possibly save is some PCB surface area - 39% if the "end product " is an OAM module (102 x 165 mm = 168 cm2) or something similar, compared to the 4090 FE (135 x 205 mm = 277 cm2). But OAM (or SXM, or similar) modules also need precision, high density, high power connectors that can't be cheap.

Just transforming the GPUs into single-slot-wide, liquid cooled PCIe cards would seem a better way to achieve very high density in this case.
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#18
Chrispy_
This is the new ETH crunch.
Only it doesn't affect gaming cards this time around (thank f*** for that!)

As good as the 4090 is for gaming, it's wasted in most games and unless you're playing the Nvidia-sponsored tech demo CP2077 with RT Overdrive and RR and DLSS3 Frame-gen you simply don't need one to get a top-tier experience in any game today, even at 4K resolution. There are plenty of alternatives from both AMD and Nvidia that do the job just fine without costing anywhere near $2000.
Posted on Reply
#19
Bwaze
There are now plenty of games that don't even reach 60 FPS in 4K withpot DLSS upscaling with RTX 4090 - and that's without even turning the ray tracing on! You can argue that they are just broken, but we have them.

Also, VR would gladly take several times the processing power of RTX 4090...
Posted on Reply
#20
Toothless
Tech, Games, and TPU!
R0H1TNot sure about that, there's no Chinese brands which make/made the 4090 cards before this?
There are Chinese brands that, like all other AIB, buy the chips from NVIDIA/AMD and make the cards in China.
Posted on Reply
#21
Chrispy_
R0H1TNot sure about that, there's no Chinese brands which make/made the 4090 cards before this?
Sanctions.
They can't buy 4090 chips direct from Nvidia right now, but they can buy 4090 cards from Asia-based manufacturers not under the same sanctions as US-based Nvidia.
Posted on Reply
#22
Legacy-ZA
nguyenJust watch this clip yesterday, Chinese made a frankenstein desktop 3060 out of 3060 mobile chips, and they came out superior to the original desktop ones in term of efficiency
And at a price, this product range should have been from the get-go.
Posted on Reply
#23
TheDeeGee
ChomiqThat's just barbaric and wasteful. I doubt that the shortage of 4090's is linked to Nvidia clearing stock for Super, more likely it's just that they shipped everything to China.
Yeah, looks like a freakin' slaughter house for hardware : /
Posted on Reply
#25
P4-630
Voiding Warranty doesn't matter it seems....:nutkick:
:peace:
Posted on Reply
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