China’s GPU market now has plenty of modified GeForce RTX 4080 32GB cards
RTX 4080 joins the 32GB club.
China’s market for modified GeForce RTX 40 graphics cards appears to be expanding again. Numerous GeForce RTX 4080 cards upgraded from 16GB to 32GB of GDDR6X memory are now being listed on Chinese second-hand platforms, with asking prices generally exceeding 10,000 yuan, or roughly $1,480. This is almost three times as much as the recently covered RTX 2080 Ti models with doubled memory to 22GB.
These are standard RTX 4080 cards that have been modified with additional memory capacity. The official RTX 4080 has 16GB of GDDR6X memory on a 256-bit interface, along with 9,728 CUDA cores. Doubling the capacity does not change the 256-bit bus or increase memory bandwidth.
The modification reportedly involves replacing or adding memory chips and changing the memory configuration on the board so the GPU recognizes 32GB. The extra capacity is aimed primarily at AI inference and other workloads where fitting a larger model into local GPU memory is more useful than increasing memory bandwidth.
RTX 40 memory mods have become a business
This follows several similar cases we have covered over the past two years. Modified RTX 4090 and RTX 4090D cards with 48GB memory have been sold in China, while RTX 4080 SUPER 32GB cards appeared in much larger quantities last year. We reported in October that sellers were offering batches of RTX 4080 SUPER 32GB cards for around 9,200 yuan, complete with custom blower coolers. Naturally a lot has changed since.
© Goofish The latest listings show that the regular RTX 4080 is receiving the same treatment. This suggests these conversions are no longer limited to individual repair shops or one-off projects. Modified RTX 40 cards are being produced and resold in quantities large enough to form their own segment of China’s second-hand GPU market (called Goofish).
There are still several drawbacks. These cards are not supported configurations from NVIDIA or board partners, may require modified drivers and no longer carry the original manufacturer warranty. The modified driver is often the biggest issue because it requires users to patch the driver each time they want to use them for gaming. This also wasn’t the problem with 2080Ti 22GB models.
Long-term stability also depends on the PCB, memory installation and whoever performed the conversion. For buyers interested mainly in VRAM capacity, however, a 32GB RTX 4080 provides more memory than an official 24GB RTX 4090 at a much lower cost than professional 32GB or 48GB cards.
Source: Goofish
