It was a deep frustration exercise to try to find where to buy the Nvidia RTX 3080, as well as the GeForce RTX 3070 and GeForce RTX 3060 Ti. Only the GeForce RTX 3090 recently re-appeared in stock – our audio editor James Archer managed to get one – but the card is incredibly expensive.
But an enterprising YouTuber has found a way to upgrade a GPU without the frustration of looking for devices that are rarer than unicorn tears. VIK-on has uploaded a video showing how it manages to upgrade a Palit GeForce RTX 2070 with 16GB of video RAM.
Our colleagues at Tom’s Hardware noted that the upgrade of the YouTuber from the RTX 2070’s 8 GB Micron GDDR6 video memory to 16 GB Samsung GDDR6 VRAM was based on a leaked diagram that VIK-on received. This illustration showed the RTX 2070 with a 16 GB VRAM option.
This is interesting because there were leaks suggesting that Nvidia could release a 16GB version of the GeForce RTX 2080 and RTX 2070 a few years ago. VIK-on’s DIY upgrade showed that support for the dual VRAM had to be built into the previous generation GeForce graphics cards.
16 GB VRAM is more than the 10 GB of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080, although the 3080 uses faster GDDR6X memory. But the current RTX 3070 has 8 GB of GDDR6, so the modified RTX 2070 from VIK-on beats its successor in terms of memory volume.
However, the RTX 3070 uses the new Ampere architecture, which boosts performance on the Turing architecture of RTX 2070. As such, a boost in VRAM will not suddenly help the RTX 2070 to the RTX 3070 to pack.
This is still an interesting upgrade of a graphics card that is already quite powerful, as the RTX 2070 is led to supersampling capabilities with deep learning. However, there is a catch: the YouTuber upgrade is far from stable when it’s under full load.
This is also a tricky upgrade, unless you are experienced in disassembling graphics cards. Tom’s Hardware gives more details on how VIK-on did its upgrade, but we advise you not to tackle it on your own RTX 2070 unless you feel very confident or bored (or both).
In theory, dual RAM should definitely help handle RTX 2070 games with very complicated graphics assets. But it must remain stable under heavy loads to be effective. Nevertheless, this homemade upgrade is a promising sign that there is potential to create a 16GB RTX 2070, and that we may see later that the GeForce RTX 3070 gets such an upgrade.
If you are looking for a more powerful gaming machine without the risk of a DIY disaster, then take a look at our selection of the best gaming computers.