Wouldn’t it be cool to upgrade your graphics card with more VRAM? While the average person might not do it, YouTuber VIK-on published a video showcasing his journey to upgrading a Palit-branded GeForce RTX 2070 from 8GB of Micron GDDR6 to 16GB of Samsung GDDR6 memory.
VIK-on first got the idea of upgrading the RTX 2070 to 16GB when he was sent a leaked diagram for the RTX 2070 with a 16GB VRAM option. The leaked diagram shows that the RTX 2070 can support both 1GB and 2GB GDDR6 chips from Samsung (the 2GB chips are used to make 16GB of total VRAM capacity)
Remember those leaks on a potential 16GB RTX 2070 and RTX 2080 a few years ago? Well, this leaked diagram, if real, suggests that Nvidia was at least working on the idea behind closed doors.
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To start the upgrade process, VIK-on used a heatgun to detach the current Micron GDDR6 chips equipped on the RTX 2070. Next, he moved some resistors on the back of the PCB (behind the GDDR6 chips), which allow the Samsung chips to be hardware compatible with the RTX 2070. Finally, he grabbed eight 2GB Samsung GDDR6 modules and installed them onto the board. He was able to purchase these Samsung chips off of aliexpress.com for 15,000 rubles – or $202 USD.
Next, VIC-on was able to start the bootup process and the RTX 2070 posted perfectly with the Samsung chips installed. In the GPU-Z photo, you can clearly see all 16GB of the Samsung VRAM registered by the RTX 2070. Unfortunately, though, the card was not stable under full load; it exhibited strange clock speed behavior which ended with the card crashing and posting a black screen. This could be due to a poor soldering job or bugs between the Samsung chips and the firmware.
Either way, it was cool to see that upgrade an RTX 2070 to 16GB does actually work. Hopefully one day we’ll see an RTX 2070 that is fully functional with 16GB of GDDR6 to see if adding an additional 8GB of VRAM would have been worth it for Nvidia.