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Watch On The card was stripped down to its PCB, and the RTX 3070 GPU was removed and replaced with a 3070 Ti chip. The reason for the swap is that the RTX 3070 uses GDDR6 instead of the GDDR6X the retail version of the RTX 3070 Ti is equipped with, which presented an interesting challenge.
Fabian could've put all 16GB of GDDR6X memory on a 3070 Ti card, but it would've been far too expensive, so he swapped the Samsung-made HC14 (8Gb) GDDR6 chips that were already on the board with HC16 (16Gb) chips. That changed the VRAM capacity from 8GB to 16GB, but when the card booted, GPU-Z only recognized 8GB. The PCB's memory straps needed to be reconfigured in order for it to use the entire memory pool.
Using the Nvidia BIOS Reader tool , Fabian figured out exactly what straps to adjust and went ahead with the soldering process. Afterward, MATS properly recognized the full 16GB VRAM capacity with no errors. GPU-Z also showed the RTX 3070 Ti equipped with 16GB of GDDR6 memory, similar to the prototype that popped up years ago. But verifying that the card recognized the additional VRAM was just the first step.
To actually test his creation's performance, Fabian ran a local LLM on the GPU to see if it would allocate more than 8GB and found that it used nearly the entire 16GB pool. Call of Duty: Warzone ate more than 13GB of VRAM while paired with a Ryzen 7 9800X3D, exhibiting no signs of instability.
GPU repair service will upgrade the 11GB VRAM on an RTX 2080 Ti to 22GB with a new, stable BIOS
Japanese repair shop sells GPU VRAM upgrades for $25 per GB during memory crisis
Pre-modded RTX 2080 Ti cards with 22 GB of VRAM surface on eBay for $500
Key considerations
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Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/nvidias-unreleased-rtx-3070-ti-16gb-comes-to-life-thanks-to-a-modders-crazy-gddr6-swap-frankenstein-card-combines-rtx-3070-pcb-and-new-vram-with-rtx-3070-ti-gpu#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com/membership
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