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Video RAM Transplant Doubles RTX3070 Memory to 16GB
- baybal2 6y agoI'm very surprised that Nvidia chips don't have memory size locked in hardware.
- Nextgrid 6y agoThey kind of did - there are resistors on the card's PCB to inform the firmware of how much memory is installed and this operation modified them to match the new amount of memory installed. But beyond that, what would be the reason of spending effort locking this down even more?
- baybal2 6y agoPrevent market segmentation bypass.
- Nextgrid 6y agoThe effort & equipment required to perform such an upgrade is significant and is very unlikely to be used at scale for defeating market segmentation.
- baybal2 6y agoWell, there is a precedent of graphic cards with modded bios being sold.
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y agoShhh.
- selfhoster11 6y agoI can see that happen as an upgrade service on ebay. It just needs to be priced competitively.
- gruez 6y agoI don't see the economics working out. You're going to be competing against the 3090, which has 24GB of memory and costs 3x as much as a 3070 (MSRP), but also 78% more shaders. Just to match the 3090's compute capacity is going to cost you $1000 (or $891 if you amortize over multiple cards). That leaves you $500 for the memory chips, labor, and equipment. According to [1], the memory chips cost $12/GB. You won't be able to reuse the existing memory chips, so that means you'll need to buy 16GB of chips for each of the cards, which works out to $384. At this point there's only $116 left, and I doubt anyone would go for this considering that the 3090 only costs $116 more, but has more memory (24 GB), and has full warranty. [1] https://www.hardwaretimes.com/doubling-graphics-memory-will-cost-nvidia-and-amd-less-than-12-gb-its-very-likely/ https://www.hardwaretimes.com/doubling-graphics-memory-will-...
- baybal2 6y ago3090 is largely sold out despite the ludicrous pricetag
- bserge 6y agoThe cost is still going to be high and you risk killing your card. Even if someone offered this kind of service, it would only be taken by a very small number of enthusiasts. So nVidia doesn't care.
- selfhoster11 6y agoIf someone is skilled enough to work on surface-mount/BGA components, they likely already know what they are doing. Board level repair vs board level upgrade is a very similar process (to the untrained eye such as mine, at least).
- _verandaguy 6y agoEconomic reasons aside — there's historical precedent for Nvidia creating arbitrary limitations in software (and sometimes in dedicated hardware) for their cards. Famously, many discrete GeForce cards don't play well with virtualized OSes, and there have been some hacky ways to bypass that. This is done because only Quadro cards are blessed by Nvidia to run in "enterprise" environments. Besides this soft lock, there's usually no architectural limitation preventing GeForce cards from working with virtualized OSes if the hypervisor can provide passthrough. All that to say, it wouldn't be the most shocking news in the world if it turned out they prevent this kind of VRAM modding.
- babypuncher 6y agoI'm having trouble imagining a world where the cost of this operation is less than the cost difference between a 3070 and an equivalent 16GB card. Buying the ridiculously overpriced 3090 is still going to be cheaper and not come with any of the associated risk (invalid warranty, potential future driver/bios compatibility problems).
- _verandaguy 6y agoIn this specific case, I think it's more about if you can do it rather than if it makes sense. It's a fun challenge, and if you can spare the cash, it does inform the community a bit more about how modern Nvidia cards react to this kind of mod. A big fraction of Hackaday's content is this kind of fun modding that might not make immediate economic sense.
- PragmaticPulp 6y agoIt’s likely that nVidia planned for more RAM on these cards early in the development process. Early rumors pointed to 16GB models of the 3070 and 20GB models of the 3080. Due to chip shortages, most likely, we got the smaller amount of RAM on production models. This leads to weird situations where the 3060 has more RAM (12GB) than the 3070 (8GB) and 3080 (10GB). nVidia must use RAM in multiples of the bus width, so the only other option was 16GB for the 3070, which is what this person enabled by swapping chips. nVidia doesn’t care about modders swapping memory chips because it’s not a threat to their sales. I say this as someone who has all of the hot air rework equipment and experience to do this swap: It’s not going to become a common mod. It’s likely not even feasible for someone to offer as a service due to the risk involved in shipping expensive GPUs two ways and then reworking the PCB with hard to source chips that can’t necessarily be guaranteed to work at the exact speeds expected by the drivers. It’s also possible that this mod will be rendered useless if a future driver update introduces different timing parameters, such as when nVidia releases official 16GB 3070 models.
- CivBase 6y ago> It’s not going to become a common mod. It’s likely not even feasible for someone to offer as a service due to the risk involved in shipping expensive GPUs two ways and then reworking the PCB with hard to source chips that can’t necessarily be guaranteed to work at the exact speeds expected by the drivers. That's too bad. I prefer to buy a top-end graphics card once every 3 or 4 generations. I was up for a refresh with the 20-series, but the value was pretty bad so I waited. Now the 30-series looks great except for one glaring issue (aside from availability): VRAM capacity. With the imminent release of the direct storage API for Windows, I expect the 30-series cards will show their age much faster than previous generations thanks to their relatively small VRAM capacity compared to Radeon and game consoles.
- szczys 6y agoDoesn't that add manufacturing complexity? If you have multiple firmwares it's possible to flash the wrong one at the factory leading to a lot of pain if they get out to the market before this is discovered (your news 16 GB card is only using 8 GB of memory). This current scheme means there is one firmware to rule them all and the configuration of the hardware itself acts as the selector.
- bserge 6y agoProbably because people don't do this at scale. Fermi and Kepler also used laser cuts near the die to disable cores, some people enabled them with a bit of soldering (not always successful because the cores are often actually non-functional). Not sure about newer ones. Maxwell cards could also be upgraded from 4-6GB to 8GB. This has actually been a cool mod for a long time, earliest I can remember are the ATi Radeon 9x00 and nVidia GeForce 4 Ti cards, people used to double the RAM for fun and profit.
- markus92 6y agoDeep learning's going to love this.
- dheera 6y ago16GB is pretty meh though. I have a 32GB Titan V from 3 years ago which I got for free in a raffle. I'm surprised they're still even doing 8GB cards.
- Tenoke 6y agoYeah I have the 3070 and I hate that it has the same amount of ram as a 1080 from 2016 while costing more than a 1080 did at the time.
- SketchySeaBeast 6y agoThat sort of feels like complaining your ferrari has the same size gas tank as a Civic. It's not why the car was made.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dheera 6y agoI was posting in the context of deep learning specifically, per top level comment.
- HappyTypist 6y agoWell yeah, the comment still applies. GeForce is made for gaming, so the bill of materials goes to what improves gaming performance.
- SketchySeaBeast 6y agoIt should still do deep learning activities much faster than the 1080 though, doesn't it?
- tmm 6y agoWhere do you even get video cards right now? I’ve become oddly paranoid that mine is going to die and I won’t be able to find a (reasonably priced) replacement. And two year old RX 590s are selling on eBay right now for more than I paid for mine. Never imagined that one day video cards would be an appreciating asset.
- MR4D 6y agoI bought my son a used 3060 Ti at the beginning of February from Micro Center for $512 + tax. It had been in their display machine before that, and never out of the store. From a timing perspective, I got totally lucky. I happened to be there twice in one day, and just got lucky that he had dissembled the machine a few minutes before I walked in (he was still putting it together with updated parts when I was at the counter). Prior to that, I had looked everywhere for weeks (it was supposed to be for Christmas!) without any luck. Patience and luck in my case. And the Micro Center has earned me as a loyal customer.
- ganoushoreilly 6y agoI really wish I had a micro center near me. I miss them. I also miss the Frys of (late 90's early 2000's). It's cool though that microcenter is doing the opposite of other vendors and doing an in store only thing for cards.
- rchowe 6y agoI wish MicroCenter would work on their customer experience. I go to one in Cambridge, MA to buy IoT supplies and it's never organized (despite signs saying "this area stocked by XYZ"), popular products are behind the service counter and not even in the main area (so you have to ask) and associates rush to stick their associate ID barcode on your merchandise and usually at check out another associate takes it off and puts theirs on. Perverse incentives for sales staff and poor customer experience. But they often do loss-leaders on popular things to get folks in the store, so...
- akhilcacharya 6y ago
- Scene_Cast2 6y agoSo something I've been wondering about for some time. All a GPU really is, is a couple of parts. The GPU chip, memory, PCIE, voltage regulation, and display outputs. Now, the voltage regulation is pretty darn standard. You can chop up up half of an AMD GPU (the voltagey parts) and Frankenstein them to an NVidia GPU and have that still work [0]. The power transistors and the controllers (responsible for # of phases) are the exact same as in motherboards (they supply the CPU there). Would it make sense to move the power delivery stuff to a separate, longer-lived part? Perhaps as part of the motherboard, or maybe have the GPU+memory+display stuff be socketable. Making a cheap 400A connector might be somewhat difficult, but not impossible. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4frYxrXD5Gc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4frYxrXD5Gc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewkVNoMbcCc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewkVNoMbcCc
- bserge 6y agoIntel tried to do the exact opposite, move the VRM to the processor die itself, in Haswell. It did not go well because of the extra heat, but those chips make for great overclock testbeds haha. Other than that, why would you move it to a separate part? Where? Either you push that extra cost onto the motherboard manufacturers or you need a whole new standard and slot for the VRM? What's the advantage? These days, everything is moving towards tighter integration (fuck soldered CPUs, RAM and SSDs), so no one is going to do that.
- sp332 6y agoThe advantage is being able to replace the GPU, RAM, etc without having to throw away the VRMs.
- zbrozek 6y agoThose VRMs are not that expensive, and you can't realistically move them far away from the load without constantly under- or over-voltaging the transistors you're trying to power. Your power company does not deliver 5 volts to your house for your phone charger, nor does it transport 240 VAC more than a few parcels.
- causality0 6y agoThe stand-out thing to me is that the RTX 3070 only comes with 8GB of RAM. The GTX 1070 I bought five years ago with an MSRP $100 less than the 3070 (and that I was able to purchase at MSRP) has 8GB of RAM. The GPU I bought five years before that only had 1.28GB and before that 256MB. What the hell has the industry been doing for the last half decade?
- arnaudsm 6y agoLimiting the RAM so AI researchers buy Quadro/Titan cards. Just like Canon that downgraded their DSLRs to protect their cinema cameras, NVIDIA will loose shares with enthusiasts while AMD (which got solid TF/PyTorch support recently) can finally catch up.
- scottlamb 6y ago> Just like Canon that downgraded their DSLRs to protect their cinema cameras, NVIDIA will loose shares with enthusiasts while AMD (which got solid TF/PyTorch support recently) can finally catch up. Is this for real? As in: I'm thinking about starting to do model training with TensorFlow. I can buy an AMD GPU to use for this and not regret it later?
- arnaudsm 6y agoHere's a tutorial : https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/install-tensorflow-2-for-amd-gpus-87e8d7aeb812 https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/install-tensorflow-2-for... I haven't tested myself, but since I have PTSD from Linux CUDA installations I'm glad competition is finally here.
- dnautics 6y agowhether or not the drivers work for quick demos/benchmarks is not really what I care about with AMD, tbh, their ML pipeline sw QA is bad, historically the major problem was long-term stability. Segfaulting 12 hours into a run is not good for an ML practitioner's sanity.
- dnautics 6y ago> So did it make a huge difference? That’s difficult to say. This absolutely would make a difference for many deep learning tasks.
- tyingq 6y agoLooks like the VRAM uses a BGA package with quite a lot of contacts. I'm surprised they got 8 of these done well enough, by hand with a heat gun, to work.
- hinkley 6y agoI saw someone do a similar act a year or two ago, slightly bigger contact pads. I guess if you get the circuit board fairly level, and you have dead solid hands, you can get the old chip off and leave a little puddle of solder on the contacts (which doesn't spread due to surface tension + the protective coating on the circuit board?). If you get the new chip straight (and it looks like he added more flux?) then it can bond again. But if you're over caffeinated or the chip otherwise twists, or you use the heat gun too long, then you have an expensive problem.
- tyingq 6y agoGives me anxiety looking at it and the cost/scarcity of an RTX3070 :) I'd want some kind of jig for lowering it.
- varispeed 6y agoIt's fairly easy. Heat the board, drown it in flux, heat the part and surface tension will do the rest.
- airhead969 6y agoSpeaking of chip transplants: There are chip-level flash capacity upgrades for some iPhones that can offer storage amounts that weren't available.
- helsinki 6y agoWTB this hack for 3090s!