Last month, we reported that the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card was banned from sale in China because it is a very powerful graphics card that can be used for various computing purposes other than gaming.
Before the sales ban went into effect, NVIDIA was seen to be shipping a large number of these graphics cards to China, because whether they like it or not, that country is one of their biggest markets in terms of the consumer sector as well as the industry.
Apart from the news that the price of an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card has increased to $2000, there is another interesting news about these graphics cards in China is that several specialized factories have been developed to disassemble these gaming graphics cards to use components- its components (specifically GPU and memory) as a dedicated graphics card for the purpose of artificial intelligence.
As said, the GPU and memory components are removed from the existing motherboard, and installed on a new motherboard specially developed for the purpose of artificial intelligence. Such a transfer of components is seen as a bit risky, but these factories also test these "new" graphics cards with a number of graphics benchmarking software and artificial intelligence to ensure that they operate as intended.
In fact, the cooling system of this graphics card is also changed from a two to three fan cooling system to one blower fan like many NVIDIA RTX A6000 class graphics cards for example. This is done so that it is more efficient in terms of size (two slots compared to the previous 3-4 slots) and a cooling system that focuses on cooling the GPU and VRAM components only.
This is seen to cause the original circuit board and cooling system of these graphics cards to be widely sold at a cheaper price tag. So far it is still unknown how many of these graphics cards are reused for this purpose of artificial intelligence, and how many of these graphics cards are sold in the market as gaming graphics cards.