As a manufacturing hub, China sees plenty of unique hardware projects—like this gaming Megazord. But there’s plenty of innovation to be found beyond one-and-done projects like this.
For instance, back when the US Department of Commerce restricted the export of Nvidia’s RTX 4090 cards, Chinese manufacturers got creative. The so-called RTX 4080M card was one result of that, featuring laptop GPU silicon on top of a custom desktop PCIe board (via Videocardz). To be clear, this is not an unofficial Nvidia product and therefore doesn’t enjoy official driver support or warranties.
In fact, Nvidia addressed the gap in the China market the 4080M attempted to fill with the export-only RTX 4090 D model back in 2023. However, testing by Bilibili user 杰某 (Jie Mou) suggests this curio is at least worth a closer look.
The Bilibili user carried out testing on a machine with an Intel Core Ultra 270K Plus CPU mounted on a Maxsun Z890-A motherboard, plus 32 GB of DDR5 RAM. The 4080M achieved a graphics score of 18,614 in 3DMark Time Spy. Though that’s not unimpressive in itself, what’s perhaps more interesting is that it did this by pulling a fraction of the power required by a traditional RTX 4080.