NVIDIA’s RTX 2080 Ti Now Comes Modified With 22GB VRAM For AI On The Cheap
NVIDIA’s RTX 2080 Ti Now Comes Modified With 22GB VRAM For AI On The Cheap
AI is the hottest thing in the tech town right now. As a matter of fact, it has pushed NVIDIA right up as the fourth most valuable company on the planet, surpassing four of the five FAANG companies (only Apple ranks higher) at this writing with a staggering valuation of 1.825 trillion USD.
One can argue the sole driving force pushing NVIDIA to unprecedented heights is all thanks to the emergence of AI, and today the demand for AI hardware, such as GPUs, is extremely high – with the workloads demanding huge amounts of VRAM. However, they’re expensive as a result, but what if one can revisit an old GPU and strap some extra VRAM for good measure?
Enter the modified Turing flagship GPU, the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti – now with 22GB of VRAM, doubled from 11GB from the factory. Surprisingly, this modified GPU didn’t emerge from Chinese marketplaces like we expect with most of these unsanctioned hardware, instead, it came from eBay with the starting price of $499 – half of its original MSRP in its 11GB VRAM form.
Although VRAM modifications aren’t uncommon under the hands of skilled modders, such endeavors are still largely reserved for a small dedicated market that wants more VRAM at any cost (including reliability). Modding VRAM often involves physical modifications such as shorting pins, and BIOS files need to be modified to accommodate the changes. Naturally, this will affect its gaming behavior as drivers find themselves in a weird spot – but for the case of AI workloads, it wouldn’t matter.
As for where these GPUs and PCBs come from, one can make a guess this is likely a batch of GPUs previously used for cryptomining workloads – which has since found itself no use since the market crash and regulatory crackdown that rendered GPUs infeasible for cryptomining. Potentially repurposed for AI, the seller also claims it’s the “best budget alternative to RTX 3090 (and) RTX 4090.”
One thing to note – despite being only two generations older than the current flagship GPU, the RTX 2080 Ti was launched in 2018, and that’s 6 years ago. Feeling old yet?
Source: Wccftech
Pokdepinion: DRAM manufacturers would be really happy selling these modules to GPUs today, that’s for sure.
