In modern realities, video cards are in demand not only among gamers, but also among companies involved in artificial intelligence algorithms. Since specialized graphics accelerators cost exorbitant amounts of money and there are not enough of them for everyone, savvy entrepreneurs have begun modifying regular old gaming video cards for AI tasks.
Image source: eBay
According to the VideoCardz portal, on various trading platforms you can find flagship video cards GeForce RTX 2080 Ti of the Turing generation, in which the amount of video memory has been increased from standard 11 GB to 22 GB, specifically for the needs of AI. Moreover, such offers are found not only on Chinese platforms. For example, such cards have filled the American trading platform eBay. The cost of one such modified video card is $500.
The process of increasing the memory of video cards is very simple and consistent, especially for models that have previously been subjected to such experiments by enthusiasts for the sake of interest.. All you need to do is find the appropriate GDDR memory chips and short-circuit a few pins on the card's PCB to trick the GPU into thinking it supports more video memory.. In some cases, modification of the video card BIOS may also be required.. After such changes, cards may exhibit strange behavior in games. However, in terms of pure computational performance available for AI tasks, these issues are irrelevant.
According to one of the sellers of such modified GeForce RTX 2080 Ti with 22 GB of memory, the card does not require special software; it works with regular official drivers, even in games.
On eBay, similar modified cards are offered by a company based in the USA. According to the seller, “this is the best affordable alternative to the RTX 3090 model for 1/3 of its cost”, taking into account the tasks of use. He also claims that the cards have been tested in some popular AI models, including Stable Diffusion or LLAMA2, where they showed high efficiency. As a rule, such cards are equipped with simple cooling systems with a tangential fan.
It is unknown where exactly the seller gets such cards. But, very likely, in the same place where special cards for mining are converted into affordable gaming solutions.