Brazilian Tech Enthusiast Successfully Upgrades EVGA GeForce RTX 2080 Graphics Card to 16 GB

Paulo Gomes, along with Jefferson Silva and Ygor Mota, managed to modify an EVGA GeForce RTX 2080 "Turing" graphics card to have 16 GB of memory. This was achieved by swapping out the original 8 Gbit GDDR6 memory chips with higher density 16 Gbit chips. With eight of these chips connected to the GPU's 256-bit wide memory bus, the total memory capacity reached 16 GB. The memory speed and GPU clocks remained the same at 14 Gbps and default levels, respectively.

The modification process involved removing the original 8 Gbit chips, cleaning the memory pads, using a GDDR6 stencil to place new solder balls, and soldering the 16 Gbit chips onto the pads. Additionally, adjustments to a series of SMD jumpers near the BIOS ROM chip were necessary to ensure the GPU recognized the increased memory size. The TU104 silicon used in the GPU inherently supports higher density memory, as seen in NVIDIA's professional graphics cards like the Quadro RTX 5000.

After the upgrade, TechPowerUp GPU-Z confirmed the new 16 GB memory size. A benchmark test of "Resident Evil 4" with a performance overlay revealed that the game was utilizing nearly 9.8 GB of video memory, compared to 7.7 GB on the original card. This resulted in a 7.82% performance boost, increasing the average FPS from 64 to 69. The performance improvement was greater than the typical difference between 8 GB and 16 GB variants of the RTX 4060 Ti. In addition to gaming enhancements, the increased memory capacity is expected to significantly enhance the generative AI performance of the RTX 2080.