YouTuber equips GeForce RTX 3070 video card with 16GB vram

A modder has managed to provide an RTX 3070 video card with 16GB of vram. Before that, he replaced the eight memory chips of 1GB for copies with a capacity of 2GB. After various adjustments, the result was stable enough for a benchmark.

The crafts were done by Russian YouTuber VIK. In his latest videos, he takes care of a Palit GamingPro RTX 3070 and doubles the amount of it. This has been achieved by replacing the Samsung memory chips with copies with a capacity that is twice as high. Originally there are eight Gddr6 chips of 1GB on the card, with type number K4Z803256C-HC14. VIK replaced it with 2GB copies from the same manufacturer, with type number K4ZAF3258M-HC14.

Just soldering more memory to the pcb is not enough to get an RTX 3070 with more vram working. Software adjustments also have to be made. It is not possible to adjust the bios, but VIK discovered that it is possible to adjust a certain strap setting, which informs the bios about the available memory. Setting the value to 00110 resulted in recognizing the larger memory modules.

After the adjustment, the card worked, but the gpu was not stable. Only when running two benchmarks at the same time did it succeed in completing benchmarks. By applying clock locking with EVGA’s Precision software, the RTX 3070 16GB was able to work stably. After that, VIK achieved a score of 13783 points in 3DMark Time Spy, which is about equal to what a regular RTX 3070 with 8GB of vram achieves. In a second video, VIK discusses these problem solutions.

Previously, VIK also managed to upgrade an RTX 2070 8GB to 16GB vram, but that card was not stable enough to produce a benchmark result that is actually close to what an RTX 2080 should achieve. The fact that the experiments are successful means that Nvidia has also devised configurations of these video cards with 16GB of vram. Last year there were rumors about the arrival of an RTX 3070 with 16GB and an RTX 3080 with 20GB. However, those versions are reportedly scrapped before they were released.