It has been an exercise in deep frustration trying 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 has recently returned to stock – our audio editor James Archer managed to get one – but that card is incredibly expensive.
But an enterprising YouTuber has found a way to upgrade a GPU without the frustration of hunting for devices that are rarer than unicorn tears. VIK-on uploaded a video showing how he managed to upgrade a Palit GeForce RTX 2070 with 16 GB of video RAM.
Our colleagues at Tom̵
This is interesting, since there had been leaks that suggested that Nvidia could release a 16 GB version of GeForce RTX 2080 and RTX 2070 a couple of years ago. VIK-on’s DIY upgrade showed that dual VRAM support must have been baked into the previous generation GeForce graphics card.
16 GB of VRAM is more than the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080s 10 GB, although the 3080 uses faster GDDR6X memory. But the current RTX 3070 has 8 GB of GDDR6, so VIK-ons modified RTX 2070 beats its successor in terms of memory volume.
However, the RTX 3070 uses the new Ampere architecture, which gives a boost in performance over the RTX 2070’s Turing architecture. As such, a boost in VRAM will not suddenly help the RTX 2070 take on the RTX 3070.
Still, it’s an interesting upgrade to a graphics card that is already quite powerful, considering that the RTX 2070 comes with beam tracking and deep learning supersampling capabilities. However, there is a catch: the YouTuber upgrade is far from stable when under full load.
It is also a difficult upgrade to do unless you have experience disassembling graphics cards. Tom’s Hardware goes into more detail on how VIK-on did its upgrade, but we recommend that you do not try this on your own RTX 2070, unless you feel very safe or very bored (or both).
In theory, dual RAM should definitely help the RTX 2070 handle games with many complicated graphics assets. But it must be stable under heavy loads to be effective. Still, this homemade upgrade is a promising sign that there is potential for making a 16GB RTX 2070, and that we may see the GeForce RTX 3070 get such an upgrade later on the line.
If you are looking for a more powerful gaming machine without the risk of DIY disaster, then check out our selections for the best gaming PCs.
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