And they change the cooler
The ban on supplies of GeForce RTX 4090 to China not only caused an increase in the price of such video cards in China itself and even in the USA and Europe. It turned out that 3D gaming cards are actively used by Chinese companies to create AI accelerators based on them.
It is reported that these companies are buying up RTX 4090s that managed to get into China before the ban took effect, and then creating specialized facilities where the RTX 4090s are used for other purposes.
The performance of this adapter is very high, which is actually why it was banned. And there is already software that allows you to use this gaming solution for tasks related to AI.
Even more interesting is that the cards are turning from game cards into specialized ones, including physically. In fact, the card is completely disassembled. And we're not just talking about removing the cooling system. Although this is one of the reasons. The fact is that almost all RTX 4090 have very thick coolers and take up three or four expansion slots because of this. Chinese companies dismantle the original carbon dioxide in their factories and replace them with “turbines”.
However, this is not the most interesting thing. The GPU and memory chips are also unsoldered from the original card. And then all this is soldered onto a certain reference board specially created for this, and a new cooling system is installed on it.
It is unclear what volumes we are talking about, but in the corresponding photos you can see a lot of packages with the new RTX 4090.