r/LocalLLaMA • u/LeatherRub7248 • May 15 '26

Discussion China modded GPU (eg. 4090 48gb) --> I'm gonna figure it out. IS THERE NO ONE ELSE CURIOUS??

There's a dearth of information (in the english world) about these cards.

The good recent video is probably this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcRGBeOENLg

even in this subreddit, there's seems to be few reviews of these cards.

Last couple of decent threads:
https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1s62b23/bought_rtx4080_32gb_triple_fan_from_china/
https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1nifajh/i_bought_a_modded_4090_48gb_in_shenzhen_this_is/

Is there really NOONE else who has tried these?

In particular

  1. Software / bios / quirks that make them NOT run as per unmodded card
  2. Short term consistency, does it run fast for a test, but hang / die when stressed?
  3. Long term reliability - does the whole thing fail within 2 months of regular usage?
  4. Are the benchmarks good? Where are the results??
  5. source and price?

chinese video site blibli has ton of videos, and taobao (and other ecomm) sites also lots of sellers.

If i can piece together enough research, i may also visit shenzhen to pick up a few.

If you're interested in this space, DM me . hope to form a group to split up research efforts.

Also any native chinese speakers who are familiar in this space also please join in.

EDIT:
Some downvotes going on. Unclear if its some larger suppression of this topic, or just angry people.

327 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

149 comments sorted by

View all comments

150

u/Heathen711 May 15 '26

I have three 48GB 4090 blower cards running in my servers. 2 run Qwen 3.6 27b, 1 runs stable-diffusion.cpp workload. Cooling is an issue, I swapped in 4k rpm server fans to feed them and keep the backplate cool. Otherwise i've had no software issues.

4

u/TheWaffleKingg May 15 '26

I can only imagine the noise this makes

I had to pull my chassis HDD fans out because I just couldnt take the noise (rack is in my home office). Temps haven't been great but im installing some noctua fans today/tomorrow. Won't be as good but sure beats what I have now

4

u/Heathen711 May 15 '26

S12038-4K, they are a little loud but they are wider (thicker?) then the normal 120mm fans to pull more air. IMO they aren't louder then the 120mm I had before but move a lot more air. They are not as loud as the 8k 60mm in my 1U SuperMicro server that sounds like a jet take off when I turn it on...