Recently, on some second-hand platforms, people can find a lot of RTX 4090 in the early 100 yuan, but if you look closely, you will find that these so-called RTX 4090 are just an "empty shell", and they have removed the most important core and video memory parts of the graphics card. And only the PCB board and heat sink part are sold, what is the situation?
And the reason for this is because of the recent ban on sales. Before the ban went into effect a few days ago, Nvidia had reportedly prioritized the sale of a large number of AD102 GPUs and RTX 4090 graphics cards from its AIB partners to China.
This prioritization is also one of the reasons why the RTX 4090 is now in short supply in other parts of the world, priced at more than $2,000 (about 14,000 yuan).
And at present, professional factories are also being set up in various parts of the mainland to receive these RTX 4090s (purchased before the ban takes effect). As for their use, it's clearly not a game.
At present, in order to ensure that the graphics card has sufficient heat dissipation when in use, each RTX 4090 is designed with at least 3 slots or even 3.5 slots thick, but this is redundant for the server AI environment, and it also takes up more space, so these heavy heatsinks will be removed in the factory, leaving only the cores and video memory.
At the same time, in order to adapt to the environment of multi-GPU operation of servers, the PCB will also be redesigned, and it will be equipped with a thinner and lighter dual-slot heatsink. At this point, a new AI graphics card was produced.
And this process has also led to a large number of RTX 4090 heatsinks and bare PCBs flowing out to the major dealer markets. And because the most valuable AD102 cores and GDDR6X video memory have been removed, the "RTX 4090" that everyone sees is sold at a very low price.
As for whether such a thing is useful to buy?
On the one hand, I think it's collectible, after all, a flagship-level RTX 4090 cooler is the "crystallization" of engineering expertise, and it can still be called a good collector's item.
On the other hand, if you have some expertise, you can completely replace the existing core and video memory on this PCB, such as the RTX 4080 or RTX 4080 SUPER, which have a PCB design that is very close to the RTX 4090, and the thermal effect is absolutely top-notch.
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