Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti with 22GB Memory Appears on eBay for USD500

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/chinese-workshops-recondition-nvidias-old-flagship-gaming-gpu-for-ai-rtx-2080-ti-upgraded-to-22gb-for-dollar499

by teleforce • 2 years ago

91 112 2 years ago

tomshardware.com

abledon• 2 years ago

dreams of a time where EU regulates GPU manufacturers into providing a pluggable interface for VRAM on the cards... 2035?

jsheard6• 2 years ago

The signaling requirements are way too tight for pluggable VRAM to ever be a thing. If anything we're headed in the other direction, with CPUs losing pluggable memory in order to achieve tighter timings like GPUs do, Apple is already doing it and Intel is set to follow.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-demos-meteor-lake-cp...

sspiff2• 2 years ago

Exactly. There's a reason these chips are always surrounding the processor (since the 2000s) and why we haven't seen GDDR based plugable memory modules.

For this same reason (timing precision) you see that soldered DDR5 memory often reaches way higher speeds than what's available in DIMM or SODIMM form.

dist-epoch4• 2 years ago

One could imagine a two deck PCB, where you have another PCB board underneath the main one for additional close memory chip locations with a high density vertical interconnect.

DrNosferatu3• 2 years ago

Or the EU enforces competition on the AI hardware market by funding an “Airbus for GPUs”.

I would say it’s even more strategic than the original.

dist-epoch4• 2 years ago

The EU Airbus for GPUs will appear 10 years from now and have the performance of a GPU from two years ago.

DrNosferatu3• 2 years ago

As with the Concorde, the UK could be included. So this would encompass:

ARM Holdings;

Imagination Technologies (UK) - PowerVR GPUs (mobile, automotive, embedded)

NXP Semiconductors (Netherlands) - GPUs for automotive & industrial

STMicroelectronics (France/Italy) - GPUs for automotive, industrial & consumer

BrainChip (Australia, subsidiary in France) - neuromorphic computing chips (similar to GPUs)

Graphcore (UK) - intelligence processing units (IPUs) for machine learning (alternative to GPUs for some applications)

InCore Semiconductor (Netherlands) - custom high-performance computing (HPC) solutions, including GPUs

Kalray (France) - programmable processors for data centers (alternative to GPUs for some applications)

RISC-V International (non-profit, enables European companies to design own GPUs)

Think Silicon (Greece)

...any others?

sva_2• 2 years ago

the modified GeForce RTX 2080 Ti will not face any Nvidia driver issues as the graphics card is seemingly supported and working without vBIOS modifications.

That seems very surprising. Bet Nvidia will push out an emergency update soon, and then you'll have bricked and unbricked cards.

mdorazio2• 2 years ago

Easy enough to get around - don't update your BIOS/drivers when they do. Same game that used to be played with pirated software and even iPhone updates for jailbreaking.

cyanydeez3• 2 years ago

the speed at which open source models are moving, that's not a long term solution

greggsy• 2 years ago

The market buying these would probably be savvy enough to avoid driver interference

fredoliveira• 2 years ago

Bet Nvidia will push out an emergency update soon, and then you'll have bricked and unbricked cards.

The crazy potential for that backfiring is, IMHO, reason alone for them to not even try.

calamari40653• 2 years ago

What possible consequences could there be? Are people going to start buying GPUs from the competition?

There is no competition. There's no choice for the consumer. You buy nvidia or you don't get to play.

Nvidia's reputation is already in the toilet. They have literally nothing to lose. There's no consequences for their actions.

RobotToaster• 2 years ago

Bet Nvidia will push out an emergency update

The attempt on their profits has left them scarred and deformed

gymbeaux6• 2 years ago

There aren’t really VBIOS updates for GPUs like there are for motherboards. They exist, but for the most part NVidia nerfs cards with driver updates. For a while, to mine Ethereum you just needed to use a specific GPU driver version. It really was that simple.

nottorp2• 2 years ago

Ok maybe I'm a pessimist but when I saw the title I thought they just rewrote the bios to say 22 Gb, like sd cards...

jsheard6• 2 years ago

It's happened before, silly as it is, AMD once decided that a new 8GB card needed a 4GB variant at the last minute before launch so they shipped the first batch of "4GB" cards with 8GB installed and half of it just disabled in the VBIOS. You could easily flash it to unlock the full 8GB - the one time you really could download more RAM.

mysterydip• 2 years ago

I recall sometime around the 2000s they had Athlons that you could overclock by using a pencil to connect a couple contacts on top of the chip.

__alexs• 2 years ago

There were a bunch of Ryzen 1600s that came with 8 cores unlocked instead of 4. Probably a similar reason.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/7pipjq/just_got_a_ryze...

HWR_144• 2 years ago

I mean, Tesla did the same thing with battery packs. The range limitations were in software (at least initially, and maybe also now)

nottorp2• 2 years ago

That's not like sd cards though. Everyone in this subthread is optimistic assuming the hardware is there but disabled.

I was thinking the hardware is not there but the bios is modified to falsely report it is.

coffeebeqn• 2 years ago

You could at least physically inspect the board when you get it and report them for fraud if it doesn’t have 22GB of memory chips

mdorazio2• 2 years ago

I wish US sellers would start doing this, too. Nvidia's continuing refusal to put higher amounts of VRAM into its "affordable" cards combined with AMD's head scratching resistance to entering the ML space leaves average consumers who want to run bigger models locally with very few options.

izacus3• 2 years ago

I think it leaves them with an option nVidia wants right? Paying them more for the VRAM.

cyanydeez3• 2 years ago

right. it's bizzare watching tech heads confused about price segregation like it's some phantom force and not one of the glorious tools of monopolies and price gouging.

michaelt3• 2 years ago

Even that, nvidia doesn't make easy.

The RTX 4090 is so huge and power-hungry you can barely fit two into a case, let alone any more than that.

And even if you replace your case, and your power supply (and maybe your motherboard and CPU too, gotta have enough PCIe lanes) you'll still only have 48GB of vram.

OK, so we can't use an RTX GPU. Good luck even understanding the rest of nvidia's product range. The A40? "The World’s Most Powerful Data Center GPU for Visual Computing". V100? "The most advanced data center GPU ever built". H100? "Unprecedented performance, scalability, and security for every data center". A100? "Unprecedented acceleration at every scale to power the world’s highest-performing elastic data centers". H200? "The world’s most powerful GPU" L4? "The breakthrough universal accelerator".

Good luck figuring out who sells them in your country, or if they're in stock.

Oh, and remember to read the entire spec in excruciating detail. That $2700 L4 24GB is slower than an RTX 4090.

Think you'll launch something in the cloud? With Google Cloud half the cards are only available in some regions - and even if you're in a region that offers a given GPU, maybe there's a shortage and support tells you to just keep requesting GPUs repeatedly until you get lucky.

OJFord2• 2 years ago

I wish US sellers would start doing this, too.

Isn't that exactly what's happening? From OP:

The GeForce RTX 2080 Ti 22GB has found its way outside China. eBay seller customgpu_official, an upgrade and repair store in Palo Alto, California, sells a similar MSI GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Aero with 22GB for $499. The store is touting the graphics card as a budget alternative for students and startups that want to get their feet wet in AI workloads. The graphics card is allegedly stable in Stable diffusion, large language models (LLMs), and Llama 2. According to the merchant's website, it has sold over 500 units of the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti 22GB.

The China stuff is just background story I think.

Nvidia's continuing refusal to put higher amounts of VRAM into its "affordable" cards [...] leaves average consumers who want to run bigger models locally with very few options.

That's market segmentation and product differentiation for you. You want that much VRAM you're doing ML; you want to do ML you can pay us ML prices.

What 'average consumer' wants to 'run bigger models locally' anyway!

If they made the 'affordable' cards with VRAM ranging from say 8GB to 80GB, it would be only gamers buying at the bottom end and only MLers at the top. And they can charge the latter a lot more - so even if they did what you want, you'd end up with Applesque pricing bumps for beefier/more GDDR chips.

KeplerBoy2• 2 years ago

That's not how this traditionally worked. A few generations ago board partners were allowed to solder whatever RAM they wanted onto the GPU board.

Boards from different OEMs were different in meaningful ways and OEMs had the chance to differentiate themselves from the competition with some actual engineering. More RAM, multiple GPUs per board, AGP to PCIe chips, you name it.

Nowadays Nvidia restricts is partners from all that fun and undercuts them with their own models. No wonder EVGA quit this game.

alecco• 2 years ago

Yeah, plus no NVLink for RTX 40xx cards. And 4060 with only half PCIe lanes.

wruza4• 2 years ago

Are PCIe lanes really that important for ML? I've seen reports that x4 isn't any different from x16 for a single card.

Havoc2• 2 years ago

Love the upcycling, but still reckon a 2nd hand 3090 is the better play.

50% more price, 100% more performance (at least in resnet). Plus ofc 2GB extra and newer architecture

postalrat• 2 years ago

I'm hoping hear more about the 44gb 2080's.

Havoc2• 2 years ago

It can apparently be done:

https://videocardz.com/newz/nvidia-geforce-rtx-2080-ti-gets-...

...but sounds rather janky (custom driver)

alkonaut4• 2 years ago

The dream of game graphics was murdered first by crypto and then by LLMs. Is there any hope for a time when the market for high-spec GPUs will actually be games? Or has that ship sailed forever? At least AI has some sort of real world utility I guess, but I still wish neither revolution had happened.

borissk5• 2 years ago

The price of gaming GPUs have risen mainly because very few gamers buy AMD and Intel GPUs.

wruza4• 2 years ago

Tbh, graphics is not what games lack today. Personally I was fine with what we had 7-10 years ago graphics-wise, and most modern cards hit FPS limits for these games, apart from few pathological cases. But if you're into graphics, I agree it sucks, and probably forever now. Otoh those who were into graphics brought us here, didn't they, so maybe it's karma ;). Imagine that the great filter is not supernovae nor nuclear, but the fact that species may happen to have good enough eyesight to glimpse into the box of pandora computing.

alkonaut4• 2 years ago

I really do like fancy graphics in games. Once you have seen the good ones, I now find it pretty off-putting when something looks like it was made 10 years ago (Recent example: Starfield).

I think some games like the modern iterations of CP2077 are just mind blowing - all gameplay aside. But it's a shame that it costs basically north of $1000 to play it the way its developers hope you will.

tacocataco• 2 years ago

I personally prefer larger maps in game over graphics.

I_Am_Nous• 2 years ago

I think for the most part graphics have been "good enough" for a while, and since raytracing is the new hotness that's what games are working on improving rather than pure polygon count or resolution. The market for gamers spending insane amounts of money on hardware is kind of disappearing as well, I know so many people who just buy "upgrades" to their existing hardware to play newer games, but they certainly aren't buying 4090s.

It's a similar issue with EVs, the market they were trying to sell to didn't really exist. They wanted people with enough money to buy an expensive car, but also people who are not expecting oodles of luxury features which would normally come on a car that expensive. So now they are having to lower their EV prices in general because inflation kind of murdered any market they may have had. Add on the EV growing pains of battery tech still being susceptible to reduced range in the cold, increased tire wear, and defects...I don't know many people who will take such a risk for such a price.

scorxn• 2 years ago

Hmm, not sure what you mean. The consumer cards from AMD and Nvidia are still gaming-first, and games utilize new features like ray-tracing and DSS. Speaking as a lifelong PC gamer and current Twitch addict, the industry still seems very healthy.

alkonaut4• 2 years ago

Games are targeting 3090 or 4090 for decent settings and frame rates. My 2070S is tired as hell. The mid range jumped from $150 to $500 in a couple of years. The enthusiast range jumped from $250 to $1500. That’s painful.

givinguflac• 2 years ago

So close. I want 24GB so I can run stable diffusion video! That’s the bare minimum anyway is my understanding. Some day…

aaron695• 2 years ago

Here's the thread were Aisawk does it - https://tiebac.baidu.com/p/8178695637?pn=1 (It's over a year old)

The news is there is one for sale on eBay US?

They are on AliExpress I think? - https://www.aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-2080TI-22G.html

Video of someone else modding it - https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1sc411q73B/

Not sure I get the story.

sva_2• 2 years ago

Not sure why this comment got nuked, but I vouched for it. Perhaps automatically falsely detected as spam? Anyways the first and last link show the modification. Very cool.

adultSwim• 2 years ago

Ever since the U.S. banned Nvidia from selling its most prominent AI products .. in China

This is so wrongheaded and shortsighted of us. This isn't the way to build a world of cooperation and prosperity.

rldjbpin• 2 years ago

this is not a new kind of mod, and it existed from many years now and has been demonstrated in 30 series GPU also (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26389996 from 3+ years ago).

i am still unsure why doubling the vram works so seemlessly, but i wonder if you need modifications at driver/vbios level to fully utilize the new capacity.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti with 22GB Memory Appears on eBay for USD500

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