Six-year-old Ampere gets another chance
The graphics card market is moving in an unusual direction. Instead of older high-end GPUs disappearing, Chinese companies are giving them more memory and putting them back on sale. Large numbers of modified GeForce RTX 3080 cards with 20GB of GDDR6X memory are now appearing on the second-hand market for around 3,000 yuan, or about $445/€383.
This is not the first RTX 3080 20GB conversion we have seen. In fact, such mods are almost as old as Ampere itself. At the time, they were primarily intended for crypto farms that needed large amounts of memory and high-end GPUs. Those cards later shifted toward AI workloads, but with Ampere now two generations behind, gamers may finally be the ones benefiting from them.
I have always said that modded GeForce GPUs in China are not the problem by themselves. The problem was that many were built at the expense of fully working cards, often taken straight from retail channels and never reaching gamers. That was hard to accept during the GPU shortages. Today, however, these modified cards give gamers another option as they look for alternatives to otherwise expensive Blackwell models.
RTX 3080 20GB
The modified card uses the RTX 3080 configuration with 8,704 CUDA cores and a 320-bit memory interface, but doubles the original 10GB capacity to 20GB. That removes one of the biggest limitations of the original model in 2026. There are obvious disadvantages, including 320W-class power consumption, no official warranty for these modifications and no DLSS Frame Generation or Multi Frame Generation support.
Ampere is old, but NVIDIA has not abandoned it on the software side. GeForce RTX 30 cards still receive current GeForce drivers , and NVIDIA continues to extend newer DLSS technology to them. DLSS 4.5 Super Resolution with the second-generation transformer model works across all GeForce RTX GPUs. RTX 20 and RTX 30 cards can also use the newer transformer models.
RTX 50 prices have skyrocketed
Recent US tracking showed the median RTX 5070 price reaching $899.99 in August, around 64% above its $549 MSRP. The RTX 5060 Ti 16GB has also reached as much as $780 on Newegg and briefly crossed RTX 5070 pricing in the UK.
With new Blackwell cards moving further away from their official prices, a modified 20GB RTX 3080 selling for around $445 starts to look less strange. It is not a replacement for Blackwell’s newer features or efficiency, but the current market is giving six-year-old high-end Ampere hardware another opportunity that few would have expected.
Source: Goofish
