GeForce RTX 3080 20GB GPUs appear on the Chinese second-hand trading platform

Recently, netizens discovered on a renowned Chinese second-hand trading platform that sellers were offering 20GB versions of the GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card, which appear to be refurbished from old cards. The majority of these RTX 3080 20GB graphics cards feature a blower design, specifically targeting AI productivity users, and some are advertised as conventional gaming cards with modified memory. The sellers claim these graphics cards are not driver-locked and are generally priced at around $916.

In the past, the GeForce RTX 3080 was only available in 10GB and 12GB versions. There were rumors of NVIDIA producing a 20GB version of the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, which we reported earlier. However, NVIDIA later canceled this model for unspecified reasons, though it’s not implausible that some manufacturers had already mass-produced a batch and either destroyed them or sold them to certain buyers. According to GPU-Z screenshots provided by sellers, these RTX 3080 20GB graphics cards have 8,704 CUDA cores and core base and boost frequencies identical to the RTX 3080 10GB reference model, at 1440MHz and 1710MHz, respectively. Despite the increased memory capacity, the memory bus width and bandwidth remain unchanged at 320bit and 760.3GB/s.

Additionally, the RTX 3080 20GB is not the only graphics card suspected of being a modified memory refurbishment. The once-popular Radeon RX 580 also appeared in a 16GB high-capacity memory version. Compared to standard versions, these modified graphics cards may offer certain performance improvements in memory-intensive applications. However, their longevity and the assurance of after-sales support are matters of chance.