Modding an 10GB 3080 to an 12GB 3080, possible or bs?

[Sanedish]

While opening up my zotac rtx 3080 trinity oc 10gb I noticed there are exactly 10 RAM chips, but 12 pads with solder already pre applied,

Wich made me wonder: could I just buy another 2 2HT77 D8BWW chips and solder them on there with a heat gun/plate? I mean, I'm sure there's someway of figuring plus and minus out...

 

 

Spoiler

 

[Hinjima]

8 minutes ago, Sanedish said:

While opening up my zotac rtx 3080 trinity oc 10gb I noticed there are exactly 10 RAM chips, but 12 pads with solder already pre applied,

Wich made me wonder: could I just buy another 2 2HT77 D8BWW chips and solder them on there with a heat gun/plate? I mean, I'm sure there's someway of figuring plus and minus out...

 

 

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Plenty of people have modded more VRAM to cards.

So its definitely possible

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/geforce-rtx-2080-ti-gets-44gb-vram-through-user-mod

https://www.tweaktown.com/news/96377/nvidia-geforce-rtx-2080-modded-from-8gb-to-16gb-of-vram/index.html

https://www.techpowerup.com/307724/modded-nvidia-geforce-rtx-3070-with-16-gb-of-vram-shows-impressive-performance-uplift

[Hinjima]

15 minutes ago, Sanedish said:

While opening up my zotac rtx 3080 trinity oc 10gb I noticed there are exactly 10 RAM chips, but 12 pads with solder already pre applied,

Wich made me wonder: could I just buy another 2 2HT77 D8BWW chips and solder them on there with a heat gun/plate? I mean, I'm sure there's someway of figuring plus and minus out...

 

 

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That being said. If its as simple as soldering two chips onto the card, I dont know. Thats out of my field of expertise

[RONOTHAN##]

1 minute ago, Hinjima said:

So its definitely possible

Not necessarily. All of those cards have replaced all the VRAM, ignoring any extra pads that are in place. AFAIK Nvidia does disable those two pads on the silicon itself, they're only there because companies like Zotac, ASUS, EVGA (RIP), etc. want to reuse the PCB from the 3090 on the 3080. 

 

Look at the 2080 Ti 44GB edition, that does have an extra pad, but it wasn't used to make the card a 48GB version. 

 

 

OP, if you're willing to replace all the VRAM on the card, sure you can probably end up with a 3080 20GB, but using those extra two pads to end up as a 12GB is not likely to be possible. Also, just to point out, doing BGA soldering on for things like memory chips is pretty difficult, especially on GPUs where the PCB is designed to withstand 300-400W of heat regularly. 

[Hinjima]

1 minute ago, RONOTHAN## said:

Not necessarily. All of those cards have replaced all the VRAM, ignoring any extra pads that are in place. AFAIK Nvidia does disable those two pads on the silicon itself, they're only there because companies like Zotac, ASUS, EVGA (RIP), etc. want to reuse the PCB from the 3090 on the 3080. 

 

Look at the 2080 Ti 44GB edition, that does have an extra pad, but it wasn't used to make the card a 48GB version. 

 

 

OP, if you're willing to replace all the VRAM on the card, sure you can probably end up with a 3080 20GB, but using those extra two pads to end up as a 12GB is not likely to be possible. Also, just to point out, doing BGA soldering on for things like memory chips is pretty difficult, especially on GPUs where the PCB is designed to withstand 300-400W of heat regularly. 

I said its possible to do, not that soldering two more memory chips on the empty spots is the way to do it.

Sorry if that didn't come across accurately.

[Sanedish]

4 minutes ago, RONOTHAN## said:

OP, if you're willing to replace all the VRAM on the card, sure you can probably end up with a 3080 20GB, but using those extra two pads to end up as a 12GB is not likely to be possible.

Soo OK, then where can I buy ram chips? I never needed to do that before

 

5 minutes ago, RONOTHAN## said:

Also, just to point out, doing BGA soldering on for things like memory chips is pretty difficult, especially on GPUs where the PCB is designed to withstand 300-400W of heat regularly. 

Yeah that's gonna be an issue 

[RONOTHAN##]

5 minutes ago, Sanedish said:

Soo OK, then where can I buy ram chips? I never needed to do that before

 

Yeah that's gonna be an issue 

If you don't have the necessary tools to do this, odds are it'll be cheaper overall to just flip the 3080 and buy a 3090 than it would be to try and upgrade the 3080 to a 20GB model, and you won't have to deal with all the headache that comes from trying to do this. There's a reason why you only find a handful of people trying to do this: it's just not practical. 

 

If you're dead set on trying to do this, there are specialty shops that sell VRAM ICs as well as the usual suspects like eBay and AliExpress. That said, don't start out doing this on a 3080, go on eBay and buy some crap GPU for $10 and learn how to do it on a card like that instead. Maybe buy two and transplant the memory from one to the other. This way when you inevitably do something wrong the first time, you aren't out $400 from ripping a trace out. 

[Tetras]

41 minutes ago, Sanedish said:

While opening up my zotac rtx 3080 trinity oc 10gb I noticed there are exactly 10 RAM chips, but 12 pads with solder already pre applied,

Wich made me wonder: could I just buy another 2 2HT77 D8BWW chips and solder them on there with a heat gun/plate? I mean, I'm sure there's someway of figuring plus and minus out...

Most of these mods just use a memory module that doubles each chip, taking advantage of the increased memory density (e.g. replace 1GB with 2GB).

 

GA102 does have 12x 32-bit memory controllers, but 2 of them are disabled in the 10GB version of the 3080, hence the 320-bit bus.

[porina]

Do we know if it is disabled in silicon (blown fuses or similar) or if it is a vbios thing? Adding chips and flashing the 12GB vbios on it is not impossible, but if it is hard disabled in silicon it will get you nowhere. I would caution that it is possible those channels may be defective so wouldn't work anyway.