It’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

It’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.