Hardware modding is not what an average gamer or end-user might be doing on a daily basis, but that has never stopped anyone to experiment with it, since some people have the knack for it. It now appears that Russian hardware enthusiast VIK-on has once again modded a GPU to support higher quantity VRAM than what the card officially supports.
This time VIK-on has memory modded the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 GPU. The user has also shared some videos in which he showcased how the modding process was done, and the results obtained during the tests.
He modded the GeForce RTX 3070 GPU to support 16GB VRAM, which is double the official specs (8GB GDDR6 VRAM).
The custom GPU model used by VIK-on was a PALIT Gaming OC SKU. He has also shared a second video in which he shows how to fix instability issues which occurred during the upgrade and testing process.
After removing the cooler off the RTX 3070, he applied a heat gun to the card’s VRAM modules, and once a certain temperature threshold was reached, he could easily pull off the modules from the card.
The modder started with replacing the 1GB GDDR6 memory modules (K4Z803256C-HC14) manufactured by Samsung with 2GB GDDR6 (K4ZAF3258M-HC14) modules, once again from Samsung. Since the RTX 3070 has 8 modules, so the total VRAM capacity was increased to 16GB.
He swapped the GPU’s 8GB of 14 Gbps GDDR6 memory with 16GB of it, using eight replacement 16 Gbit chips. Stock 8Gbit memory chips were physically replaced with 16Gbit ones.
After upgrading the VRAM the system, BIOS and card needs to be tricked to support a higher amount of memory, and this is where the GPU “strap” alignment settings come into play, as shown in the diagram below.
This configuration informs the BIOS how to configure the amount of supported video memory of any GPU.
Basically, these straps are little resistors that need to be replaced, and/or even re-soldered depending on the memory module, whether that is an 8Gb or a 16Gb chip, or a memory chip from the likes of Hynix, Samsung, or Micron.
For context, Samsung 8Gb (1GB) module has strap set to 00000 bits, and Micron has 00001. After several attempts, the modder figured out that the configuration that supports 16Gb module is 00110.
So basically shorting certain straps on the PCB allowed it to recognize the desired memory chip brand and the module density.
After the modding process was over, the graphics card was correctly recognized by the GPU-Z software and the user also ran Furmark, 3DMark, and even mining tests on the GPU. Booting into Windows OS and the POST process was also seamless. The GPU-Z screenshot reveals a full-fat 16GB of memory.
However, the card was unstable during the test and full load, which lead to black screen issues. There appears to be a driver limitation with the RTX 3070, as the card was very unstable at start.
According to the modder if we simultaneously run two tests, then the instability issue can be slightly overcome, however, some YouTube members/subscribers have noted that locking the clock speeds using the “EVGA Precision-X” tool stabilizes the card.
The VRAM upgrade appears to have been successful as the user also ran some benchmarks. These are the results.
The card scored 13783 points in 3DMark Time Spy and 4914 points in Unigine Superposition 8K Optimized test, without any other test running in the background.
The scores are also better than the Founders Edition RTX 3070 GPU, and this surely is an impressive feat in itself. The warranty of the GPU is obviously “void” now after this modification.
Stay tuned for more tech news!
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The amount of vram this card should have been sold with
Yeah of course, 16GB would have been the sweet spot, but adding more VRAM will also increase the GPU’s pricing as well, and it will cost even more than it’s current MSRP.
GDDR6 modules don’t come cheap as well, as many fail to understand this. There is also a shortage of these chips currently in the market, if I’m not mistaken. Though, many claim that Nvidia is just MILKING its customers, by releasing different VRAM configurations of the same GPU model.
We can’t disagree on this one though, as the company wants release as many SKUs as possible, and reserve the higher quantity vram for future cards.
Interetsing stuff man. Kudos to the modder.
Doing anything to a card that would void the warranty is enough to scare me off from even trying something like this. 3070 cards are going for well over $1,000 on Ebay right now and then there’s the additional cost of the VRAM.
Still, it is pretty cool that the modder was able to do this.
Does VRAM affect anything more than texture quality?
If you curious, watch the effect of VRAM on GTA V setting, some setting (besides Textures quality) that have effect on VRAM is amount of post processing effect, resolution (obviously), and Anti Aliasing method we choose
There are people here who can answer this better than me but yes it does affect how many textures and how large the textures are that get loaded into VRAM between levels and whether or not you are using ray tracing.
The TPU review of Cyberpunk says that at 1440p the game is using 6 GB of VRAM. With ray tracing turned on the VRAM being used is 7.93 GB.
One thing is certain that if you don’t have enough VRAM then performance will suffer because at that point the GPU will start using System RAM which is much slower than VRAM.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/4b1ab2373e748b65dedf5cd339479bdc1417235667c6c4bb552b76bfc75a95a3.jpg
If he can get the card to stabilize and permanently work then well done. If not… then damn that blows
A middle-finger to Huang, I’m liking this trend, hope it gains more traction.
Take something as simple as installing custom vBIOS, there’s no risk to it whatsoever unless you do something incredibly stupid, yet it’s just a teeny tiny % of people who do it.
Here we’re talking about hardware modding, soldering your own memory chips onto the GPU.
Literal handful of people will do this.
The card was quite possibly unstable because the memory VRMs were not up to task with larger memory. There is a reason why NVIDIA has 8 gigs of ram on that particular model …