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Comment by sippeangelo | Hacker News Reader

Some Chinese sources sell modded Nvidia GPUs with extra VRAM. They're quite affordable in comparison to even a Mac Pro.

Any links to them? Never heard of this..

It’s been going on for a while. Search YouTube or the web for 48gb 4090 (this is one of the most popular modded Nvidia cards), Nvidia of course never officially made a 4090 with this much memory.

There are some on sale via eBay right now. The memory controllers on some Nvidia gpus support well beyond the 16-24gb they shipped with as standard, and enterprising folks in China desolder the original memory chips and fit higher capacity ones.

Go at ebay and search for RTX 4090 48GBs. There's plenty of them with prices around $3.5k

I've seen a guy who sells modded 2080 Ti with 22gb for $500

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/chinese-work...

There's also unreleased Nvidia engineering samples of cards with doubled VRAM like this - https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/1rczghu/update_unre...

And how much do you trust Chinese hardware?

When there's no one left to trust, maybe you need to re-evaluate your criteria.

I wouldn't say that's true or even likely. It's completely possible to be in a pit of vipers where every single snake is venomous, and that is pretty much what we are seeing: With technological advances, there is a certain subset of people that will use them primarily to solidify their power and control over others. There is no utopian society right now whose government doesn't look to spy through technology, which of course is best set up at time of manufacture.

Agreed. Unless you have full control over the production chain to fully produce a device, you are subject to the whims and desires of those who preside over such technological feats that we take for granted in our daily lives.

To the original point, it's safe to say that highlighting a nationality with regards to trust is baseless and without merit, as would be for any other topic (men/women from x are y, z food is better here, etc..). Real life is much more complicated and nuanced past nationalities. Some might call it FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) but there's always a deeper rationale at the individual level as well.

Rather than people being wary of Chinese in general, it's more that there is a high degree of government control exercised in China and they are known to be very strategic with long-term planning in regards to technology control both for spying and actual remote control of devices. We are all just looking for the least bad option. It's not like devices from other countries are immune, but they are often less organized so there is a better chance of avoiding the Chinese level of planned access.

It does seem like pretty low risk in this specific case so I agree OP's comment was bit over the top, but I would have no way to make anything resembling even an educated guess as to how far their programs go.

Yes, this is really what I was referring to. And the fact that the original comment I was replying to mentioned "modded Chinese hardware" from some unspecified, unvetted 3rd party which doesn't exactly fill me with confidence.

Give that most of mine, and probably yours, and probably most of the world's computers are in fact made in China one way or another, some higher percentage than others, I'm guessing most of us trust our hardware enough to continue using it.

True. I was specifically referring to "modded Chinese hardware" from some unknown, unvetted third party versus say through a well-known brand that hopefully has its own rigorous QA and security processes in place.

The Mac is also chinese hardware

It would be hilarious if you are using a Lenovo device right now.

I mean it's pretty funny that probably 90% of the things in our homes are made in China.

At this point I trust them more than US or Israeli tech

Which of your devices weren't made in China?

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