Hong Kong Customs seized 70 smuggled NVIDIA Quadro GPUs

Recently, Hong Kong Customs announced that they had conducted an anti-smuggling operation at the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge. They cracked down on a case involving the suspected use of private vehicles for smuggling. Approximately 280 kilograms of undeclared live lobsters and 70 undeclared computer display cards were found in the trunk of the car, with an estimated market value of approximately HKD 600,000. A 37-year-old male driver and a 51-year-old male passenger, both under suspicion, were arrested during the operation.

Hong Kong Customs emphasizes that smuggling is a grave offense. Under the Import and Export Ordinance, anyone importing or exporting undeclared goods can be convicted and sentenced to a maximum fine of HKD 2 million and imprisonment for up to 7 years.

From the images released by Hong Kong Customs, it appears that the computer graphics cards in question are NVIDIA Quadro K2200 workstation graphics cards. They are single-slot cards, based on the classic Maxwell architecture, and manufactured using a 28nm process. With 640 CUDA cores and 4GB of GDDR5 memory, a 128-bit memory interface, two DP ports, and one DVI port, the card has a power consumption of 68W and does not require external power. As a product launched in 2014, it is considered rather outdated, with performance roughly equivalent to the consumer-grade GeForce GTX 750 Ti.

Smuggling graphics cards between mainland China and Hong Kong is not a new phenomenon. During the surge in cryptocurrency markets in previous years, Hong Kong Customs seized numerous large-scale graphics card smuggling operations. What is difficult to comprehend is that the value of the implicated Quadro K2200 workstation graphics cards is not high, with the domestic second-hand market price ranging from three to four hundred per card. Some speculate that the cards may be stolen goods or scrapped products that were resold as a side business. Recently, CPUs and SSDs have been popular items for smuggling computer components, particularly the former, due to their small size and high value. Similar smuggling cases have occurred in the past.

Via: The Register