According to VideoCardz , on various trading platforms, users can find the top-of-the-line Turing generation GeForce RTX 2080 Ti GPU models, in which the video memory capacity has been increased from the standard 11 GB to 22 GB, specifically for the needs of AI. Moreover, these “homemade” graphics cards are not only available on Chinese platforms, but also flooded the US eBay trading floor. The price of each of these cards is $500.

The process of increasing the memory of a graphics card is simple and consistent, especially familiar to enthusiasts. All they need to do is find the appropriate GDDR memory chip and short a few pins on the card's circuit board to trick the GPU into thinking it supports more video memory.

In some cases, modifying the GPU BIOS may also be required. After such changes, game content may appear strange. But in terms of pure computing performance for AI tasks, these issues are not too important.

One of the sellers of a modified GeForce RTX 2080 Ti with 22GB of memory said that this GPU does not require special software as it works with the usual official drivers, even in games.

On eBay, similar modified GPUs are offered by a US-based company. According to the seller, this is the most reasonable alternative to the GeForce RTX 3090 at a third of the cost. The seller also claims that the GPUs have been tested in several popular AI models such as Stable Diffusion or LLAMA2, where they showed high efficiency. As a rule, such graphics cards are equipped with simple cooling systems with tangential fans.

It is not known exactly where the seller got the aforementioned graphics cards from, however it is likely that they came from the same place, with special GPU models that were used for “cryptocurrency mining” before being converted into the aforementioned solutions.