It was 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 came back into stock recently – our audio editor James Archer got one – but that card it’s incredibly expensive.
But an enterprising YouTuber found a way to update a GPU without the frustration of hunting for devices that are rarer than unicorn tears. VIK-on uploaded a video showing how it managed to update a Palit GeForce RTX 2070 with 16 GB of video RAM.
Our colleagues at Tom’s Hardware noted that the YouTuber upgrade of the 8 GB RTX 2070 video memory from Micron GDDR6 to 16 GB from Samsung GDDR6 VRAM was based on a leaked diagram that VIK-on received. This illustration shows the RTX 2070 with a 16GB VRAM option.
This is interesting, as there were leaks suggesting that Nvidia could launch a 16 GB version of GeForce RTX 2080 and RTX 2070 a few years ago. The VIK-on DIY update demonstrated that support for dual VRAM must have been incorporated into the previous generation of GeForce graphics cards.
16 GB of VRAM is more than 10 GB of Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080, although the 3080 uses faster GDDR6X memory. But the current RTX 3070 has 8 GB of GDDR6, so the modified RTX 2070 from VIK-on beats its successor in terms of memory volume.
However, the RTX 3070 uses the new Ampere architecture, which offers a performance boost over the Turing architecture of the RTX 2070. As such, an increase in VRAM will not suddenly help the RTX 2070 to take over the RTX 3070.
Still, it is an interesting update for a video card that is already quite powerful, as the RTX 2070 comes with ray tracing and deep learning super-sampling features. However, there is a problem: the YouTuber update is far from stable when it is under full load.
It is also a complicated upgrade, unless you have experience disassembling video cards. Tom’s Hardware gives more details on how VIK-on did its update, but we recommend that you do not try to do this on your own RTX 2070, unless you are feeling very confident or bored (or both).
In theory, double the RAM would certainly help the RTX 2070 to handle games with a lot of complicated graphics. But it would need to remain stable under heavy loads to be effective. However, this homemade update is a promising sign that there is potential to create a 16GB RTX 2070, and that we could see GeForce RTX 3070 receive this update later.
If you are after a more powerful gaming machine without the risk of a DIY disaster, then check out our choices for the best gaming PCs.