Video Ram Transplant doubles RTX 3070 memory up to 16 GB

To make unavailable graphics cards even more unavailable, [VIK-on] swapped the RAM chips on an Nvidia RTX 3070. This makes it the only 3070 in the world that works with 16 GB.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because he tried the same trick with the RTX 2070 in January, but could not make it work. When he first released the video showing the 3070 Hynix 1 GB 3070 memory chips being debugged and replaced with eight Samsung 2 GB chips, he hit the same wall – the card would start detecting the increased memory, but was unstable and would eventually crash. Helpful hints from his viewers led him to use an EVGA configuration GUI to close the operating frequency that solved the problem. Further troubleshooting (YouTube comment in Russian and its machine translation) showed that the “maximum performance” setting in the Nvidia tool is also a solution to stabilize the performance.

The new memory chips do not report their specifications themselves to the configuration tool. Instead, a set of three resistors is used to electronically identify which hardware is present. The problem was that [VIK-on] had no idea what resistors and what the different configurations achieved. It sounds like you can just start changing zero Ohm resistance to see the effect in the GUI because it sets the memory and the available size. The fact that this board is not currently sold with a 16 GB option, but that the setting tool has settings for it if the resistance is set correctly, is kismet.

So did it make a big difference? That’s hard to say. He has some benchmarks in the video, both Unigine 2 SuperPosition and 3DMark Time Spy results are shown. However, we did not see any tests before the chip exchange. This would have been the key to characterizing the real impact of the hack. That said, processing it with a manual air station and working through the resistance configuration is impressive no matter what the performance bump ultimately is.