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Old RTX 3080 GPUs repurposed and modded for Chinese market as 20GB AI cards with blower-style cooling
(www.tomshardware.com)
"Old RTX 3080 GPUs"
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this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
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Technology
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Old because they're mostly used, repurposed crypto mining rigs, according to the article.
that's just called "used", my 1060 is "old".
Ouch, that hurt me right in the gtx 1060
I was clarifying that 'old' was not a descriptor of its age (it's a very modern GPU), rather a description of its potential wear and tear; so 'old' as in beat up.
FYI, LTT did a video showing ex crypto cards are totally fine. But let's keep that between us so the second hand market for those cards keeps low prices.
They can be fine. If they were properly undervolted and cooled. It's still a gamble.
After the last controversy around him, I'd take everything they release with a huge mound of salt.
Linus Media Group's main goal is to maintain their break neck schedule of releasing content, not to ensure 100% accuracy or that they've properly listed all caveats. Not to say that they don't care about accuracy, but that it is greatly eclipsed by their release schedule.
That was my first thought, they are only last gen guys! And easily comparable to the top of the line in the current gen!
With 20GB?! I'd take that over a 4070 or even 4080 any day
At least having those GPUs training neural networks is vastly preferable to having them mining Bitcoin.
GPUs havent been mining bitcoin for a long time now. Probably almost 10 years.
The last big coin mined by GPU was ethereum but that stopped last year
Source?
Edit: Multiple, independent sources have been provided. Thank you, Lemmy.
The first ASIC came out in 2013 https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2020/04/26/the-rise-of-asics-a-step-by-step-history-of-bitcoin-mining/
It was more profitable to mine alts in 2014 already, like Litecoin
The coin literally went from proof of work to proof of stake or some shit like that. All mining of ETH will no longer generate any value.
Source on the 10 year part?
I'm not the person you're asking either lol but I was curious so I poked around till I could find something. This says that the last time GPU mining for Bitcoin was 2014.
https://www.nicehash.com/blog/post/the-history-of-cryptocurrency-mining#!
This isn't an area I know like literally fucking anything about. So this was just me googling. I don't know how reliable this source is
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Bitcoin has been mined on ASICs since 2013. GPUs are outclassed when it comes to specialized hardware. The Reddit classic of downvoting a completely correct comment has carried over to Lemmy I see.
I am over on kbin.social and upvotes and downvotes don't carry over instances, but on my end there are no downvotes at all in this whole thread. I am just stoned and thought that was interesting.
How do you access kbin.social?
On Memmy for iOS, downvotes were displayed by default. On Voyager for iOS, I had to enable downvotes in settings.
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You got the sources you asked for, but your sentiment wasn't wholly off.
There are still other crypto being mined on video cards.
So if you dont think that's worthwhile for all crypto there's still a lot of waste
If you specifically don't like bitcoin, you'd need to see what the other projects using video cards do to make an informed decision
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I'm never going to be able to afford an upgrade.
What card do you have?
1080ti. Still strong but starting to show it's age with newer games and AI stuff.
If youβre not doing huge models a used 2080ti can be picked up on eBay for 300 ish bucks which is pretty capable (best price to performance cuda core count I think)β just a little lacking in ram for huge stuff.
I use it for mostly gaming, AI is just a bonus. I'm looking for a big upgrade if I can ever afford one.
1080 ti is still a beefy card, about the same performance as a 3060 ti / 4060, just without the AI core shenanigans and more VRAM - not bad for a 6 year old card. I recently updated from a 1060 to a 3060 ti, which gave me roughly 50% extra performance, you'd have to grab a 4080/4090 to do the same. But yeah, not fast enough anymore if you do 4k or high hz stuff.
At this point I'm just waiting a few more generations. I donβt think there going to be reasonably affordable any time soon.
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I could really use a 20g 3080 in my gaming pc. How do I buy one?
Make a tik tok, they find you.
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Aside from anything else, the cooler looks spiffy. Not an over-the-top RGB monstrosity, and it's obviously designed to be compact.
The coolers work well, but at the cost of noise. under any gaming load they are exceedingly noticeable. The classic use case for this form factor is often servers, where noise doesn't matter. you also see these on more professional cards, but their whole power budget is often under 100W, so remotely the same category.
what is the appeal of blower-style cooling?, i always heard about it being worse for cooling
Blower fans are better if you want a bunch of cards in one system. Open air coolers dump too much of the hot air back into the case and are usually thicker. For non-gaming loads it's frequently better to have more cards at less than max speed.
They're really only worse in the sense that they can be louder. In a datacenter/mining rig/etc where you don't care about noise at all, they're pretty much the best solution to cooling a large amount of cards as they blow air out near the outputs instead back into the rack.
Thanks β and what is the quieter solution vs. blowers? Liquid?
Most mainstream solutions will be quieter than a blower at full tilt (i.e. the normal GPU design on having fans on the face that blow air back into the case). That said, blowers aren't inherently stupidly loud or anything. I've got a reference model blower 5700XT and have the fan curve set that I can't ever hear it with my (open back) headphones on and never really go above 80C. If I said fuck it I could turn the fan curve up and have it sound like an original Xbox 360, but my temps sure would drop!
Oh, simply having a fan does not a blower make then!
Blower is specifically referring to coolers that are designed to blow air through the GPU heats ink and then out the back of the case. In contrast, open air coolers use (typically more numerous and larger fans) to force air at the GPU heats ink but without much concern for where it goes after that, so the air ends up partially blown out the back of the case, and partially recirculate back into the rest of the case where the case fans are hopefully promoting enough exchange that ambient temps remain sufficiently low. The recirculation is less than ideal, but is offset by the larger fans and heatsinks for a typically quieter and cooler solution. The fans can be larger because they are blowing on the larger side/cross section of the heat sink. Pass through are a somewhat newer variant of open air coolers common on newer Nvidia cards that push or pull air through a heat sink that is not blocked on one side of a pc so air flows though the heat sink with less back pressure for more efficient dissipation at the expense of a more compact PCB to put all the GPU components on
The quietest solution is passive but you won't get very good performance out of that.
It's all a balance
Passive would be like a heat sink?
Yeah, big hunk of metal, lots of fins, lots of passive airflow.
Yes exactly. Only a heat sink and no moving parts.
The liquid system really just helps move the heat to a new place in your rig. To get rid of it, in general the bigger the fan the more air it can displace at a lower speed, which in turn means less noise.
A good liquid system which moves the heat to a radiator at the top/front/back (depending on where your have clearance) of your case and big fan or fans to push it out would probably work best
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Repurposed batches of "RTX 3080 20G AI" cards featuring blower-style coolers and with 20GB GDDR6X are being spotted in large quantities over in China, stored and sold via AliExpress.
These are yet another attempt to work around U.S export controls that now prohibit the sale of the fastest data center and consumer GPUs to China and other countries.
Prolific leaker I_Leak_VN also found many of these RTX 3080 20G AI blowers in warehouses via the Xianyu app, a Chinese-based used goods e-commerce website owned by Alibaba group.
LLM (Large Language Model) workloads greatly benefit from more VRAM, and there are other offerings showing repurposed RTX 3080 Ti 24GB GDDR6X cards.
Necessity is the mother of invention, and we're now seeing Chinese retailers repurposing RTX 3080, 3090, and 4090 "consumer" graphics cards into AI accelerators to at least partially work around the U.S. sanctions.
Earlier, these GPUs were sold for dirt cheap as miners wanted to get rid of them quickly to recover some of their investment.
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