Chinese NVIDIA RTX 4090 ‘AI’ blower-style cards are not new, but now they are becoming a problem
While the RTX 4090 AI cards are not new, they are expected to have an impact on the Chinese GPU market, as some companies are now taking apart fully working gaming GPUs to make them.
Newly released images from I_Leak_VN, revealing these RTX 4090 turned AI GPUs on Chinese secondhand retail platforms, indicate a continued supply of these designs in the market. It has been reported that the cost of these cards has increased by a factor of two compared to their previous value. Even though these cards have been around for a long time, problems with them have only come up recently.
The first RTX 4090 models with a blower-style design were spotted as early as November 2022, so more than a year ago. One could have assumed that NVIDIA has changed its approach to these designs and the company was no longer preventing board partners from launching these designs. As we remember, NVIDIA was strongly opposing such cards from appearing with RTX 3090 GPU.
RTX 4090 AI cards, Source: Goofish
The first card to appear was actually of MANLI’s, one of the official board partners of NVIDIA. The company has rejected the claim that this was their design, although the product marketing slides were clearly from this company. The first blower-style 4090 hit the market just a few weeks later in December. Through January and February, many of these new RTX 4090 cards started to hit the market, some of which were carrying symbols Gigabyte, others were looking just as simple as the cards we are seeing on the market right now.
In June, AFOX announced their first RTX 4090 design, which happened to be one of these blower-style models. A month later, we stumbled upon the very first MSI RTX 4090 AERO model with one of those blower-style layouts. The card even shipped in official MSI wrapped packaging, clearly confirming its origin.
So the problem of AI/blower cards is not new, but at that time it wasn’t really the problem. However, that could have been the catalyst that caused the US government to start treating these powerful AD102-based GPUs as something more than just gaming models. Clearly, the photos revealed recently show that the scale of blower-style RTX 4090 production is large.
The primary issue at the moment is the fact that these companies are utilizing existing stock of AD102 GPUs by disassembling perfectly functioning gaming cards, more on that in this story. Given the restricted availability of stock in China, it can be assumed that this issue poses a significant challenge for the local market. However, its impact on the global market remains uncertain. Right now, the price of RTX 4090 GPUs is steadily above $2,000, which is the level we did not expect to see for this card’s first anniversary.
Source: I_Leak_VN
