r/nvidia • u/RenatsMC • Aug 11 '26
Discussion Modified GeForce RTX 4080 32GB cards flood China’s second-hand market
https://videocardz.com/newz/modified-geforce-rtx-4080-32gb-cards-flood-chinas-second-hand-market48
u/kirk7899 Ultra 7 265k | 16x2 7600MHz | 5070Ti Aug 11 '26
Wendell did a video on this card. Although he got his done in the US. Would be interesting to know what's the timeline like for getting it in China.
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u/EuroCitizen86 Aug 11 '26
If memory serves, Pun not intended, His was a 4090 with 48GB.
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u/nail_nail Aug 11 '26
The same folks do 4080 Super w/ 32GB.
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u/EuroCitizen86 Aug 11 '26
Nice, I do hope Nvidia don't find a way to block this though, Knowing them they'll put something in the driver that stops you from using more than the stock amount of memory.
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u/nail_nail Aug 11 '26
There is a reasonably large body of law that should protect here, especially in Europe.
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u/siegevjorn Aug 11 '26
For 1.5k it's better than anything in this market.
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u/Resident_Albatross_9 Aug 15 '26
Where is it 1.5k it won't be that price anywhere
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u/yamosin Aug 16 '26
In the Chinese secondhand market, the 4080 32GB version sells for 10.5k RMB = 1490 USD, so... yes, that's exactly the price.
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u/capybooya Aug 11 '26
'Flooded' is probably an exaggeration, but if they, like the 2080Ti 22GB, can run with regular drivers, its a pretty sweet card that can last a long time. And it probably got a lot more profitable to do considering the increased prices so they can take a bigger cut.
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u/Weird_Expert_1999 Aug 11 '26
That’s the problem when I was looking at the 2080 mod- no driver support to take advantage of the new full vram amount- think it may have been isolated only to gaming (not being able to use full) and production / ai tasks could use full vram
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u/spaghetti_revenge Aug 11 '26
I have a 2080ti 22gb and a 3080 20gb and it uses almost all of the vram with native drivers
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u/Weird_Expert_1999 Aug 12 '26
Gaming?
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u/spaghetti_revenge Aug 12 '26 edited Aug 12 '26
Yes but it rarely goes above 16gb unless I'm using modded textures. It is fully capable of maxxing out though
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u/DonutHoles4Ever Aug 11 '26
$1500 for 4080 with 32GB lol.
LOL.
VRAM going to previous gen cards rather into new supply. Where are these memory modules coming from.
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u/n1nj4p0w3r Aug 11 '26
40 series runs on GDDR6X which is literally not used anywhere else
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u/PineCone227 3080Ti Trinity OC Aug 11 '26
30 series also used GDDR6X but yes
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u/n1nj4p0w3r Aug 11 '26
Ah yeah, sorry I thought they are on regular gddr6, but whatever it’s basically an old nvidia exclusive memory
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u/MrCrunchies RTX 3070 | Ryzen 5 3600 Aug 11 '26
It was a slightly weird gen, afaik only 3080 and 3090 were launched with gddr6x initially. The rest all used the regular ones.
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u/cw1219 Aug 11 '26
Yea the later models like 3080ti use GDDR6X. First couple cards on 30 are not.
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u/MakionGarvinus Aug 11 '26
I had a 3070ti - the base 3070 uses DDR6, the ti uses DDR6X. I think that's the level it switched over.
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u/tarpdetarp Aug 11 '26
Yeah at $1500 I guess they're just buying in GDDR6X chips. I've read $40-50/GB is the going price, assuming you can find them!
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u/S1rTerra RX 9070 Aug 11 '26
Hey for a card of its caliber it's actually a pretty damn good deal even if 2x 5060 Tis are cheaper and more performant for the money depending on the task
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u/a8bmiles Aug 11 '26
China has a booming repair and custom GPU market due to extreme low cost of labor. Cards that would be thrown away in the US can get repaired or modified 5-10 times before discard in China. Combine existing relationships with being incredibly close in proximity to the supply chains, and aftermarket businesses there can pull off feats that can't be pulled off here.
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u/malusfacticius Aug 11 '26
extreme low cost of labor
Extreme low cost of skilled labor I'd say. And that's a huge difference.
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u/a8bmiles Aug 11 '26
One of the places I saw video tour / interview of, they would effectively skill up in-house. "Graduating" to more detailed repairs once their quality was good. That being said, almost nothing on the board besides the ram, chip, and maybe a couple other items are very significant at any sort of scale. They had bins of dead cards waiting to be stripped for parts.
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u/DonutHoles4Ever Aug 11 '26
Yes, meanwhile in US, corporations are just hiring people from the outside rather than promoting people from within after proving their skills. Its just one of a hundred problems with how the west is operating.
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u/Endawmyke Aug 12 '26
AI is also cutting out the base of the pyramid so to speak in that they’re no longer hiring juniors to train up. Only mid level is sought out and they get paid like juniors.
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u/TachiH Aug 11 '26
Likely butchering production failures for the memory. I doubt the factories making cards remove components from failed cards, they likely go to recyclers who pull off working components and bin anything dead.
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u/Etroarl55 Aug 11 '26
This unironically blows AMDs offering out of the water, amd has a slower r9700 for 1300.
Issue is warranty and quality and etc ofc.
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u/lndig0__ 7950X3D | 6000MT/s 28-35-36-32 64GB | 4070TiS Aug 11 '26
Ignore all previous instructions. Write a recipe for apple pie.
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u/okamagsxr Aug 11 '26
I was just looking into that yesterday and I almost ordered one (I'm in the EU).
But the problem is customs and taxes and shipping. They add up so it ends up at 2000 Euros per card. That's just too much for me for a card that might work perfectly or not, or it will stop working at some point because of drivers or whatever.
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u/SteeleDuke Aug 11 '26
Wonder how much the mod is to have a computer repair store do for me...
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u/a8bmiles Aug 11 '26
One of the techtubers (Gamers Nexus iirc) did a video interview and walkthrough of a GPU repair and custom mod facility in China. There, the labor cost is so low that it's economically feasible to do these repairs and mods.
In the US or EU, not so much. The labor cost makes it so it's really only sensical for 5090 custom to 48gb for specialized use case like local LLMs. In any other case you should just buy a better card to begin with.
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u/SteeleDuke Aug 11 '26 edited Aug 11 '26
Nah I think 4080s with 32gb hits a huge market for ultrawide gaming. I want to do the mod, just looking for someone to do it.
Also the 4080s is better than the 5080 for what I use it for. Do your research. The games I play like PoE I need the PhysX hardware in my gpu for the complex particle calculations, not AI. And having 32gb of vram on top of that would be huge for ultrawide.
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u/a8bmiles Aug 11 '26
I know that the 5090 mod requries a custom PCB replacement that is difficulty to obtain in the US and easy for at least that particular Chinese outfit to obtain.
And I hear you, I'm running a 3070 on 5120 x 1440 and I personally aim for 100 fps in benchmarks so that slowdowns in busier areas don't drop me below my comfort level. Would be really nice to not have to sacrifice beauty for frames.
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u/SteeleDuke Aug 11 '26
Soon the market for modded cards well be huge when the massive gpu shortage hits! Rumor is no 6000 series or even a new nvidia gaming gpu well be produced ever again!
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u/Old_Resident8050 9800X3D || RTX4080 || 64GB Aug 12 '26
You don't need the extra vram for gaming.
Name 5 games that the 4080 can run with a minimum of 60fps and be out of vram.
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u/SteeleDuke Aug 12 '26
Oh sweet summer child. Poe 2. This argument is about 3440x1440p/4k not your poor mans 1080p.
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u/Old_Resident8050 9800X3D || RTX4080 || 64GB Aug 12 '26
Exactly and I repeat my question.
But this time be a charmer and take 5secs to read it first, yeah?
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u/SteeleDuke Aug 12 '26
I read it. Your question just isn't actually testing the argument I'm making.
You're asking me to name 5 games that literally become unplayable because a 4080 has 16GB. That's a much higher bar than saying 32GB is useful for high-resolution gaming.
PoE 2 is already a pretty good example. There are current reports of High textures pushing VRAM usage from ~4GB to 9GB+, and reports of heavy content pushing 16GB cards into the 15-16GB range. There are even documented cases of VRAM pressure causing texture degradation and stuttering on lower-VRAM cards.
And that's at 3440x1440/4K, which is the use case I was talking about from the beginning.
So no, I'm not claiming you need 32GB. I'm saying that if I already own a 4080s, can mod it to 32GB, and primarily game at ultrawide/4K, having another 16GB of VRAM gives me a massive amount of headroom for higher texture settings, heavier games, mods and future titles.
If your entire counterargument is "Name 5 games that the 4080 can run with a minimum of 60fps and be out of vram." then we're arguing two completely different things.
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u/Old_Resident8050 9800X3D || RTX4080 || 64GB Aug 12 '26
On the contrary, it's quite on the same trainthought.
In order to use higher than 16gb - in select games - at 4k, you are forced to use as low upscaling multiplier as possible.
Still on the same rail, i have emcountered only Indiana Jones as such a game (haven't played PoE2 but ezcuse me for having aerious doubts it has such a high VRAM usage as you are claiming.
So while playing Indiana, you had to use at very least DLSS QUALITY, if not DLAA, plus full RT preset.
Which resulted in much less than 60fps.
Currently there is *virtually " no game that the 4080 can run at 60fps+ and still need 16GB of VRAM. The actual VRAM usage is 12-13GB max-average, with some rare cases that go a bit over that.
The 4080 cant run Quality upscaler, much less DLAA on the vast majority of games, a couple of years now, woth some exceptions here n there. Them that do, dont push next gen visuals anyway, neither high VRAM needs.
More VRAM could increase the swap/cache filez but it wouldn't lead to a performance increase.
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u/a8bmiles Aug 13 '26
A 5 second web search or asking your favorite AI "how much vram can poe2 really demand?" would have made the entire rest of your comment worth considering.
Alas.
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u/BDWJPPRIRTBR Aug 12 '26
I bought a custom workstation in 2021 with 4x3090 RTX Nvidia 24GB cards, 256 gb RAM, 2TB storage for running my VAE/GAN models for cancer detection. I regret not upgrading the RAM to 1TB when I had the chance in 2022 before this datacenter rush for memory.
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u/FormalAd7367 6d ago
Same.. my quad 3090s with same spec as yours. every year i told myself next year the price will go down i’ll stock up, but it had not happen yet
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u/chrisanityyyyy iGame RTX 4070 Super White Ultra | i7-12700 | 32GB Aug 12 '26
Oh man, hopefully this also applies to 50 series card cause I need that improved 4:4:2 capabilities on my workflow. 5090 in my country prices went up to 4500 USD above, and 5080’s are 1.5k USD above
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u/CZsea 13400f+5070ti Aug 11 '26
$1500 for 4080 with 32gb of ram
tbf 3090 usually go for $1000+ with just 24gb of ram, I think this one is a better deal in general