The recent U.S. government restrictions on AI hardware exports to China have significantly impacted several key semiconductor players, including NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel, restricting them from selling high-performance AI chips to Chinese land. This ban has notably affected NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4090 ga...
Anyone have any insight on why you would want to change PCBs and not just the coolers?
Compare 2nd picture replacement PCB with original PCB in 4th picture.
You’ll notice that the power connector of the replacement PCB has foot prints for two good old 8 pin power connectors on the side of the PCB instead of the troublesome new ones (a lot of RMA issues). :) The 4090 is already a tall card with the power connectors on top requiring even more height clearances for the cable and bend radius. Notice they have power connectors on the side of their PCB instead of the top in their stress test in 3rd picture. I would say those mods are nice.
everything ive read china is putting them onto inferior pcbs and worse cooling and its just gonna end up burning the chips out.
They deliberately put the consumer power connector on the top instead of the back so it doesn’t work in servers, since 4090 is much cheaper than L40 or RYX 6000 Ada
we’ve seen some people modding cards to clamshell mode, apparently there is nothing burned into the core itself that determines whether it’s a quadro or a 4090, or whether a 4090 should have 24GB or 48GB, just a resistor array on the PCB itself. So if you resolder it onto a new PCB with twice the RAM chips, you can make it a “4090 48GB”, or even make it into a quadro.
https://overclock3d.net/news/gpu-displays/gpu_modder_creates_crazy_44gb_nvidia_geforce_rtx_2080_ti_gpu/
https://www.guru3d.com/story/modded-nvidia-geforce-rtx-3070-with-double-vram-improved-gaming-performance/
this has been around for a while, I remember people doing this to turn 780s into titans/780 tis into titan black, but normally they weren’t adding more RAM capacity, just trying to get the ECC working and stuff, they’d just mod a couple resistors and boom it reports as quadro.