$4,000. That is what these modified 48 gigabyte
RTX 4090s from China are going for. Personally, I love how hot and loud they
get. They're great. And the best part, aside from the inflated price that I
paid that makes me feel like a big shot, is the fact that it loses in nearly
every benchmark against a regular 4090
gaming card. In case it wasn't obvious by this point, yes, this thing makes
absolutely no sense for gamings, but
there are tons of listings for them online and even positive reviews. Maybe
they're great for productivity. Nope. Oh, of course, large language
models love VRAM. The more the better.
And not only are 5090s hard to get your hands on, but they have just 32 gigs of
memory, which pales in comparison to this monster. But demonstrating what
makes these cards so desirable that they're worth dismantling and then
remanufacturing an already expensive card is tricky. See, if we run our
regular AI benchmarks, our regular 4090
here actually wins again. But under the
right conditions, this thing should crush not only a regular old 24 gig
4090, but even beat a 5090. And I'm
going to show you after I generate a segue to our sponsor,
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Before we get into our live drag race, I need to figure out what the heck it is
we actually bought here. Because the closer I look at this thing, the more
questions it raises. See, on the surface, it's pretty straightforward. I
mean, it's an RTX 4090, and they probably desoldered the 24 gigs of DDDR
6X and replaced it with 48 gigs of DDDR 6X, except for one small problem. See,
it's got a blower style two slot cooler, which allegedly NVIDIA does not allow
its gaming partners to build because they're worried that cards like this,
which can be packed into workstations or servers, would cannibalize their ability
to sell enterprise and workstation cards. But it also doesn't seem to be
one of NVIDIA's authorized professional card designs. All the imagery that I can
find of the RTX A6000 ADA has the same
cutout PCB at the back so that it can pull air both from the front and the
back before exhausting it out the back of the case. So, this seems to be a
unique cooler and PCB combination that some Chinese manufacturer or
manufacturers, probably without any authorization from NVIDIA, has created
in order to turn RTX 4090 and 4090ds
into AI compute cards. And by turn them into, I really do mean like full
Frankenstein's monster. We found this article on Techbot that appears to show
cards that look an awful lot like these ones being validated on test benches
next to pallets of regular gaming cards that appear to be headed for
disassembly. And actually we can see here that yeah the initial hypothesis of
desoldering the memory and then resoldering memory with double the
capacity was obviously wrong because unlike any gaming RTX490 design we see
ah yes memory packages on the back of
the board. So to achieve the doubling of capacity they're using double the number
of packages just like one of NVIDIA's professional cards would. It really goes
to show how much NVIDIA charges their enterprise customers for their GPUs that
it's more economical to buy gaming cards, disassemble them, discard the
PCBs, and then go and source additional memory and remanufacture the card. Not
that they discard the PCBs. I mean, if you've ever wondered where the heck all
of those uh chipless 4090s and stuff that you see on eBay come from, yo,
those are funky thermal pads. They look so dry. really clean layout and massive
power delivery. This is key because not only does NVIDIA charge their enterprise
customers an arm and a leg for the privilege of using their products, but
they typically deliver them with lower power profiles. This does improve
thermals and longevity, but it also
harms performance. So, these remanufactured cards will be more
affordable and also more performant in some cases than the official NVIDIA
solution. That assumes, of course, though, that we can keep the thermals
under control with this wimpy dual slot cooler. To be clear, I'm not attacking
the quality. That appears to be a fat vapor chamber, which is going to help a
lot. It's just not a lot of metal to cool 450 watts of GPU. Hey, this
explains the observation that you guys made about the performance being
crappier, though. If you've got twice as many memory chips, we're just eating up
some of our limited power profile for the whole board. So, yeah. Cool. Mystery
solved. All right, let's fire up GPUZ. Have a look at what the heck this thing
is. RTX 4090. So, it's not a D. It's too
bad. I love the D. I don't actually love the D. It's smaller and less powerful.
Micron memory. That's consistent with what I saw when I was taking apart the
card. We have no way of knowing if it's new or if it was, you know, pulled off
of gaming cards. If anything, I would expect that it was. But hey, it's
Micron. This is interesting. They obviously had to develop their own VIOs
for these cards. So, they just set the sub vendor to NVIDIA, unless NVIDIA is
complicit in the creation of these, but man, do I ever doubt that. And yeah,
realistically, other than having double the memory, it looks like a pretty
normal 4090. Do we have firm mark on here? Like, can we just kind of see what
happens when we load it? Hi, buddy.
Yeah, I I see you there. You don't got to yell about it. Right. in firmark GPU
is getting less than 400 watts because we have so much memory on this thing.
PCIe is operating at Gen 4 by6, so that's operating normally. Not something
I would necessarily take for granted. Wow, is that ever loud. 5,000
RPM.
Woo! Do we have afterurner on here? Oh, Norton 360 for gamers. Yeah, comes with
afterurners for overclocking. For overclocking my antivirus. MSI, you
already sold me a GPU. You don't have to bundle it with Norton. Well, that was
anticlimactic. No power level adjustment, so we're stuck with what we
got. But hey, at least it's a nice GPU temperature that should stay under
control even in a closed chassis. But
barely, especially if you have these packed next to each other like they
appear to be designed to do. Dude, you can even see the PF cap reason the
entire time was power. If we could increase the power limit of this card,
it could go a little better. For our benchmark, we've set up Olama, our
locally deployed AI model runner to model Gemma 3.27B-IT-Q4_0.
Right now, all we got to do is add our prompts and go. This is on our regular
4090, and this is the Q4. The percentage
of this stuff that's just outright wrong is wild. Lionus is known for his
energetic, enthusiastic, and often self-deprecating personality. He's
transparent about mistakes and isn't afraid to admit when things go wrong,
which they often do in their experimental builds. He's become a
trusted voice in the tech community due to his honesty and accessibility. That's
all wrong. How tall his line is so 6' 3
in. Why does it think you're so tall?
Well, it's thinking horizontal, but it knows that my height is noticeable
compared to other people on camera. It also pulled this from Wikipedia. My
height is correct on Wikipedia. Let's see what the sources. I don't get this.
It cites Wikipedia as a source, but Wikipedia has my height right. Does it
though? Yeah, I'm pretty sure. I don't see a height. I swear my height used to
be here. Well, now we know why it's getting it wrong then because that's not on here. A son and two daughters. Yeah,
that's correct. It does not list your height. So now we
know why it is wrong. The first time you run it, it can be a little bit slow. So
I'll ask it something. Um,
let's see if it knows. I It might They know. Yes, Nicholas, known online as
Nicholas Plof Visuals, does own and operate a display at the Mall of America
in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Yeah, that's not my I don't have a website called
Nicholasplof.com/chromatic. Yes, Nick from Lionus Tech Tips does
co-own a display at the Mall of America. It's the same one mentioned previous and
that clarifies which Nick PL we're talking about. You're his son. This just
completely made this up. Yeah, I love AI. It's great. So, the answer is yes.
Both Nicholas Plof senior and Nick Plof from LT are owners of the chromatic I
got to get, you know, whatever dividends I'm owed from owning this chromatic
motion display. This is a video about the display, so we should probably click
it. not available anymore. I think you made all of this up. You're absolutely
right to question me. My apologize. I seem to have completely fabricated that
information. I'm still under development. There is no evidence that
either Nicholas Blof, the artist, or Nick Bl from LT, owns or operates a
display at the Mall of America. Why is it so hung up on the Mall of America?
Okay, but I still want to know if Nick Blof owns a display. You are absolutely
right to push back and clarify. I got completely sidetracked by the display
meaning an art installation. Nicholas PL
frequently shows off his display wall. That's not true. What are you talking
about? I got I do own several displays, but I don't have an entire All of this
is besides the point. We're supposed to be benchmarking these. Okay, so we'll
write the same prompt. These are kind of hot and ready now. So, uh, how do I
build a computer? Three, two, one.
Whoa. Oh wow. Whoa. You're getting crushed,
brother. This will So Q4 isn't even the bad one. So this is still using less
than 24 gigs of VRAM. Like actually, let's open the hardware information. Or
you hear my GPU going? I do. I do. She's going, bud. Like I'm using not fully 24
gigs. I'm using Yeah. 20.2 out of 24 gigs. What's your VRAM usage at? 21
gigs. So yours is just faster right now. You know what? I think yours might have
just kind of hiccuped at the beginning, though. So we both got slightly
different answers which we would expect even running the same model and asking
the same question that is typical. They do contain a lot of the same tips. What
we want to know is the performance. So we need to know how many tokens per
second. You got slightly more. You got 40.43 response tokens per second. I got
40.06. Okay. Realistically it was about the same then other than that little
hiccup at the beginning while his spooled up. Let's try one more time just
for loss. One more time. Sure. Write a short story, no more than500 words,
about Nicholas Plof discovering his love
of displays. We should specify Nicholas Plof from LT. Okay. Not from the Mall of
America. 1 2 3 go.
The gradient of wonder. The ghost in the pixels. Oh, I like your title better.
That's way cooler than the gradient of wonder. He wasn't born chasing perfect
blacks or pixel densities.
He wasn't even particularly good with electronics.
You've really taken to this, haven't you? Lionus said, walking in on Nicholas
painstakingly adjusting the gamma curve on her particularly finicky monitor.
It's fascinating, surprised by some
enthusiasm. He wasn't just reviewing a monitor. He was sharing his love of
displays with the world. And in that moment, he knew he was exactly where he
was meant to be. Wow. He was simply a man captivated by the wonder of light.
It's actually pretty good Okay, but how many per second? 40.1. I'm at
39.68. Okay, so I actually get a little bit more performance because a little
bit. We're about to ratchet this up a notch by switching over to uh Q8_0.
This theoretically will not fit in
Plof's VRAM, which doesn't mean he can't run it. It just means that it's going to
spill out into system memory which should result in marketkedly different
performance. Yeah. Test prompt. Really? Yes. I want to see what it does. Fine.
He smiled. He still loved wood. Still enjoyed the satisfaction of creating
something tangible. It's true. Yours is done though. My Look at how my even the
test prompt. Wa. This is a much larger model though.
So theoretically the quality of its responses should be greater. I can't
believe how much faster that ran on mine. Right. Your system memory usage is
gig huge. So total 40 gigs and I'm using
a total of about 45, but most of that 33
gigs of it is my GPU. So this model
simply wouldn't fit in any consumer GPU, including the 5090. Okay, that was a
test prompt. Let's try one more actual prompt. Let's Should we try one of our
previous prompts just to see if the quality is a little bit better? Sure. Let's I want to know if it knows who the
Nicholas Plof is and whether he owns a display or not. 3 2 1 go.
Yeah, yours is spitting out like lines while mine is going word by word. Some
of this Where is it getting the woodworking stuff from? I don't know. I
do know some woodworking, but that's like a high school skill. That is not
I've never owned a woodworking shop. Okay, here's Nicholas's display wall. It
has an actual reference list. It's not available. It's just making they're making fake links. It's done, but it's
like tiny by comparison. Let's see your prompt. So, yours is way more detailed
than mine, too. Like, I have like a little bit. It's similar.
And it specifically, he upgraded to a Samsung Odyssey Neo G9. I did not do
that. No, but that was an actual thing. We made a video about it. It was. Yeah.
Do you want to see if that YouTube link is an actual video this time? No, it's
not. No. Response tokens per second 26 and a 4.76. Literally five times the
performance. It's still AI gobbledegook,
but it's doing it way faster. Way faster. Kayla, you want to try image
generation? What do you want to start with? YouTube host owning or fixing a
computer. Oh, there goes your card. All right, she's going. So, what do you do
with this after? Do you keep it? This is That's what you can use to upgrade from
your 3080. You don't need a 5090. You
can use a 48 gig 4090. you'll have even
more VRAM. I don't need more VRAM. We'll talk about
that in a little bit more detail later, but more VRAM is not necessarily more
better for especially certain workloads. Yours is going faster. I'll tell you
that much. Not that much faster. No, that thing screams though. Okay. How's
my VR use though? Wow. I am using 33
gigs of VRAM though. You're at I'm not Wow. Like 12. It's not even using
everything you have. Yeah. What's interesting is mine is using the same
amount of system memory as you too though. Yeah, I'm using a little bit
more. I'm using like Yeah, hold on. Maybe I left some Lama stuff open in the
back. This is weird. Our performance is about the same cuz and which makes sense
cuz our parameters are all the same and we shouldn't be using more than the
amount of memory that we both have, but my RAM use is way higher than his.
Well, these are fun. Sure, that monitor looks like Apple
designed it. And it's backwards for like the stand is going into the screen. I
love AI. It's so good. I like how devious this guy looks. Look at him go.
This one's not bad. Other than that mouse would not fit any human hand. It
might fit this guy's hand. His fingers though. He's got an extra finger. Oh,
yeah. Yeah. I like how I got a cartoon. Oh, that's cool. You didn't? Yeah.
What's up with that? Look at this guy's keyboard. I want that keyboard. And a
wireless microphone. What? He's even got the flip down mic on the side. Dude, it
even has a YouTube logo in the background. That's wild. I don't like
it. Okay, let's try doing a higher batch
size though, cuz maybe when you know we're doing the same batch size, it's fine. But let's do let's go up to like
16. Hold on. I want to see if there's a good one. This one's pretty good. That
one's not bad. I could believe that there's a funky display that has like
the power supply coming off the back like this or something like I His
fingers are crossed weirdly. Yeah, he's
missing one, I think. Yeah. But overall,
if you just like threw this in the marketing collateral for something, not
many people would notice right away. No. That's pretty wild. And this headset
looks pretty sick. Yeah. The nice like pink purple. Yeah. I like it. Oh, he's
missing a watch strap. Yeah, it's his skin. It's That's the new wearable. His
finger is coming out of the computer and it's backwards. I don't know why the
displays are backwards. I don't like it. I'm going to hit Okay, let's Your
machine is still like really upset at you. Yeah, I think I I think I might
just restart real quick. Did you hit run again or something? No, cuz your case
sampler is still going. I bet you hit run again by accident.
What' you do? I clicked it a few times. Oh my god. So, this is interesting
though because I managed to output
at the same time as you. Here we go. We've got Comfy UI with a stable
diffusion checkpoint loaded up. Let's uh give it a simple prompt. YouTube host
fixing a computer. Why don't we start with two in our batch size? Wait, wait,
wait. Let's also put a couple of negative notes. I'm going to assume it's
something you don't want. So, blonde hair. I'm going to say blonde. Blonde hair. Okay. No blonde hair. Okay. And
we're just doing two. Yeah. Let's do two. Okay. And run. Only click it once.
I only clicked it once. Dude, my memory is at 26 gigs. Mine started way before
yours, too. Uh, yeah. Mine is Why is your memory
usage so low? I don't know. We're getting about the same performance.
Yeah. I'm going to check uh task manager instead of just GPUZ. Oh, wait. Yeah, it
says 24 gigs now. Oh, it does. Okay, maybe it just had to spool up, I guess.
Hey, how did we end up with the same dude? It totally is. Dude, mine is
actually pretty convincing. I think yours is better. His we his fingers look
wonky on the left hand. Yeah, they're like long. Um, but otherwise, it's like
pretty convincing. It's a better mic than mine. This guy is psyched to have
the world's skinniest display. I want
that. What? It's like a tiny little bar. That's actually super cool. But we
weren't expecting there to be a difference generating just two images. Let's increase our batch size to 16 cats
destroying a supermarket. Black cats. No
black cats. No black cats. Bad luck. I am using 42 gigs of VRAM. And you simply
do not have 42 gigs of VRAM. So your
system memory usage is way higher. Yeah. How much is yours? Oh yeah. You're
barely using it. Yeah. That's like normal system usage um for what we're
doing normally. Yeah. That's about 8 gig. It's all just running on the GPU,
which is what you want. And you can actually see in the progress bar. Oh,
yeah. You actually have progress. I don't even have a progress bar yet.
Okay, I promise you I hit run. I'm not going to press it again. Yeah, it's
still at like 23.5 gigs out of 24. And 3D is like fully busy. So, it's trying.
It's just taking a hot minute. It can't. It's not even progressing yet. So
imagine if you had like eight of these 48 gig 4090s set up in a giant like
mining rig essentially. Yeah. And then was just like make me images of this
stuff or generate a prompter. Write me write me stories so I can sell romance
novels on Amazon and then generate the covers for them. Wow, look at my
progress bar. There's like nothing. Yeah, you're getting crushed. Yours is
like done already and I've got like 10% not even. To be clear, we're both
running the same model. So, the actual quality of the output is going to be the
same. Yeah, mine's just taking way longer. It's just the timing. Yeah, I
can see why people are after these things, right? And with how little it
actually costs to buy memory. Yes. Right. Like you can see on DM Exchange,
we don't actually have spot pricing for DDDR 6X. Yeah. But DDDR6 is like what, a
buck 80 per gigabyte or something? 290. 290 per gigabyte. So, even if it's
double that, we're talking a few hundred bucks worth of additional memory when
they remanufacture these cards. Yeah. Plus the PCD and power delivery and all
that. I'm like stuck. Yours is going to finish and mine's
going to be nowhere close. And the fact that this is so accessible that just like like you can literally just buy one
of these and throw it in your computer. This didn't need it didn't need
proprietary connections. It didn't have a special power specs. It's just a 450 W
4090. I mean, just like mining, anyone can start like tooling around with AI.
Yeah. You know what? Not just anyone can do though. What? Take their AI generated
images and turn them into a real product. I am now teasing officially for
the first time our leather jacket, which we're thinking
we're going to call the Jensen. Matthew chucked this in an AI prompt. It
was like, "Generate me a leather jacket." Dude, it is full of useless
clips and buckles, pockets that aren't actually real. You may not have noticed
this. two zippers. But there are actually two zippers in the front. We
did have to make some tweaks to make it actually wearable. But this is as close
to an AI generated jacket as you will actually be able to buy in person. You
look like one of the anime characters that's got like six belts on. I know,
right? Legitimately actually looks pretty cool. It looks pretty cool. It
looks good. The only thing I would change is the dumb middles. No, no, no,
no. It's a feature. See, look. You lose some weight.
Suddenly it fits better. Boom. Slim fit. The Jensen coming soon to ltstore.com.
Man, yours is done and mine is nowhere close. I don't think this one's finishing. But that definitely made cats
destroying supermarket with no black cats. But what if you're not crazy about
AI? In theory, cards like this with a ton of VRAM offer benefits in other
workloads as well. So, why don't we see if it can outperform our regular 4090 in
something like this massive Adobe Premiere project for how to build a PC,
the last guide you'll ever need. As it turns out, even a huge featurelength
project like this one with three terabytes of footage on the timeline,
still only using about 16 gigs of VRAM. So, that's good news for me because it
means I don't have to shell out for another dozen or so of these to chuck
into our editing stations at the office. With that said, if you're working with a
ton of layers, heavy VFX, or especially a lot of After Effects, it is possible
that you could benefit from a card like this. What about Blender? What's the
deal with this donut? It's really high poly. I asked a friend for a donut. Oh,
okay. 2.1 gigs. Most files that you're going to get on Blender for free are
like 300 megs at most. Oh, I see. So, we, you know, it was going to be really
hard for us to actually max out the VRAM. Uh, but even with the 2.1 gig
donut, copying it, multiplying it a bunch, we kind of the same on both
systems. It might be a different story if we had like a bunch of shaders
running and texture packs and stuff. Um, but at least just with polies, even in
Blender, you're probably better off just doubling your actual system memory. Oh,
that makes sense. Yeah. Okay, thanks.
Finally, games. I guess we kind of spoiled this before, but I didn't
actually get to play on it when we recorded those benchmarks, so I want to
see how much VRAM this will actually use. Worst case scenario. Okay, frame
gen rate tracing. Here we go.
Maximum memory used about 14 14 12 gigs.
So, in conclusion, benchmarks are like
onions. Rather, they're like hips. They don't lie. So, don't buy one of these
for gaming, but maybe consider one if
you're looking for a bit of extra oomph in your productivity tasks that benefit
from it or especially AI. I can't guarantee that it'll make a difference
for every workload you have. And I can't even guarantee that it'll be reliable.
Who knows? You know, these labbotomized 4090s that then get reassembled and
shipped to you. Uh, good luck everybody.
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