This Upgraded GTX 980 Has 8GB VRAM

[@jonnyc429]

Interesting idea, I wonder what else the seller has worked on over the years. Obviously quite a techically competent person

[@RandomGaminginHD]

Yeah the custom bios installed is what baffles me.

[@TheTryingDutchman]

@@RandomGaminginHD yeah thats what i thought as well, i didnt expect '8 gb' to show up in gpu-Z!

[@czbrat]

@@RandomGaminginHD Custom BIOS might be required for the GPU to recognize that it has 8GB of VRAM

[@olnnn]

@ianvisser7899 more likely they looked at the quadro M5000 bios since that one has an identical setup to the 980 other than clocks and 8gb of vram. 1080 would differ a lot more. The 3gb gtx 1060 differs a bit more than just vram from the 6 gb version, they also have some shading and compute units disabled so even with memory upgraded it wouldn't exactly match but might possible to make them work with 6gb still I guess. There is also a weird chinese 5 gb variant, and gddr5x variants of the 6gb one.

[@adammarcinkowski-ko3el]

When corona hit I was stuck with my 1gb gpu r7 250x not nest gpu out there , but that 1gb was limiting factor in many games , I could play them, but in lower setting if I had 2gb games would look better (GTAV/Fallout 4) , I was so despred to look for option to just expand memory , and I found video where some guy changed ram from GTX 1060 3gb for 6gb as those where compatible and bios would not do any issue , in my case tho that was just not worth it as whole set tools/parts would cost 150$ , and for that money I could get used 1050ti with 4gb ram , so I have give up , but I bet there was out there some crafty bustards that "upgrated" 3gb 1060 and sell those as 6gb ones . (BTW yes I know that GTX1060 3gb & 6 gb are "diffent" cards and 3gb is much weaker)

[@bronsondog1000]

It'd be cool to see this and the standard 4gb card compared in games with the textures turned up.

[@TBG021xDDDDgtwzshget]

overglocking with this example of gpu would be nice too :) :D

[@shaneeslick]

Yeah running High or Ultra for better Visual Quality instead of Medium or Low is where more VRAM helps not increasing Avg fps, In the past people wanted games to look better but apparently more people have believed Marketing that "Frames Win Games" so nVIDIA can use AI to fake performance increases rather than actually increase Raster & VRAM 3060Ti-4060Ti, so these people now think that fps is the only thing that matters not Visual Quality which means people like me who care more about Visual Quality at 40-60fps in non competative games rather than Big fps numbers but looks crap get told they are wrong.

[@colestowing8695]

I came down to say the same thing. Memory doent make a huge difference-until you run out. Then frametimes drop off a cliff. Would be neat to see things pushed to the point the 4g version starts struggling then try the 8g and see how it does

[@Davix-tt9sh]

​@@shaneeslicknot to mention that when the card becomes older, going with high/ultra textures + medium settings will still look good while keeping an higher framerate. With more Vram the gpu becomes more futureproof and "resolution" proof

[@nothin1456]

@@colestowing8695yes yes yes! I want to see 1440p and or higher resolution textures on this gpu!

[@3r3cut]

Has a 8GB Card for 1080p and uses low or Medium Textures. Would have been fascinating with High and/or Ultra Textures and everything other option @ low or medium.

[@josephdias5859]

yeah it would have been much better comparison like the difference between the 480/580 4/8gb models is night and day with high textures

[@hartsickdisciple]

GTX 980 is roughly on par with an RX 580 in terms of GPU horsepower. That means it will most definitely benefit from 8GB of VRAM in some games at some resolutions. There were 4 and 8GB versions of the RX 480 and 580, and the 8GB versions have definitely aged better. I would like to have seen some 1440p tests so the extra VRAM would be utilized.

[@Rabbit_AF]

There's 16 GB versions of the RX 580, but it's the sadly the 2048sp version.

[@HanSolo__]

@@Rabbit_AF 4GB from Nvidia and up to 16 GB from AMD - some things seem never change.

[@Rabbit_AF]

@@HanSolo__ To be fair, I must say that they are the invention of Chinese crypto miners. Still tempted to get one.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

One of the reasons why the GCN cards aged so much better than Kepler, they had more memory. But the 4 GB version of the GTX 680/770 also aged better than the 2 GB model. Or the 3 GB version of the GTX 580 over the 1.5 GB model. Makes me wonder how the GTX 1060 3GB and GTX 1050 Ti 4 GB compare nowadays.

[@ironhead2008]

@@Rabbit_AF That's basically a 570. With some judicious tuning you can get practically the same performance out of it as a stock 580, so not a horrible trade.

[@ZaneofAustin]

You know i think there could be a salvage market out there for some of this taking old memory chips (with the same layout but higher capacity) and fixing cards (i mean it'd make more sense to fix a broken card than a working one) but just upgrading the modules and giving the card another chance at life. I really like the idea of upgrading the chips on a card. It's green, and nerdy i like it

[@MidWitPride]

More of a passion project than a business idea, though. Equipment needed to do this reliably aren't cheap, and the profit margins won't be worth it, as the benchmarks showed that the overall performance increase will be negligible. But as a funny little hobby for yourself it's fine. Maybe there's some very niche way to utilize a relatively slow GPU with extra VRAM. Maybe for AI stuff it would be worth it, if you want to run massive models, but don't care about the speed that much, but even then just running the model with your CPU and regular RAM would probably be a better idea. Just pulling ideas out of my ass.

[@R3TR0J4N]

Totally, as someone suggest on previous upload, also help reduce e-waste

[@ZaneofAustin]

That depends on the market. We can only make so much silicone before we (and lets be honest we already have) ravaged the planet beyond a point of no return. This isn't a hard job, it does require special equipment, that already exists. But lets be honest this is probably how nvidia will make the 4050s*

[@ZaneofAustin]

@@MidWitPride i'd buy a modded 2060 super over a 4060 ti, and probably save money doing it cause dlss isn't real rendering

[@MidWitPride]

@@ZaneofAustin But how much extra would you pay for a 2060 super with extra VRAM? Pretty quickly the profit margins for whoever's doing them will evaporate, as people can just buy a one tier higher GPU and get better results for the same price.

[@JaredKaiser24]

they say if youre early RandomgaminginHD replies to your comment

[@RandomGaminginHD]

Some say…

[@FieryWings01]

Duh duh duuuuuun 🎉😂

[@christophermboya]

​@@RandomGaminginHDhe views reality at 60fps and thinks DLSS is a cooking technique.... But all we know he's called the Stig

[@Ðogecoin]

@@RandomGaminginHDDoes it work on replies?

[@CyanRooper]

Imagine a world where people can easily add more VRAM to their GPU to make it last a little longer.

[@wertywerrtyson5529]

The world is called the 1990s😅 I’ve seen some cards that had slots where you could pop in extra memory and go from like 2 to 4MB or 4 to 8MB.

[@shaneeslick]

It could be done but then nVIDIA couldn't force their FanBois to upgrade every generation.

[@Ghost-km6oj]

@@shaneeslick It's not possible with high frequency memory, which modern GPUs use.

[@shaneeslick]

@@Ghost-km6oj anything is possible you are only limited by your imagination, it was not long ago that many other current technologies were thought to be impossible like Chiplets because transfer speeds would be hampered to much but here we are.

[@Ghost-km6oj]

@@shaneeslick I really don't see it being possible due to signal integrity being vital for these vram chips.

[@caffeine6370]

Please do one more video with larger textures so we can see the memory in use. 😊

[@drakomus7409]

low settings, max textures, 4k resolution(including any optional 4k texture packs some games have). that would be great

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

Shadow of Morder used to be a big VRAM game. But the hq textures DLC might qualify as well. That is needlessly large.

[@bodek]

this is really a very interesting card. i know that polaris cards can have extra memory soldered on, but you'd need to flash the bios to that of the 8gb variant. the 980 doesnt have an 8gb model, so you cant flash it with a bios of the 8gb variant, so i'm guessing the bios had to be modified manually. but i cant imagine how

[@Insky_]

binary editor perhaps

[@RandomGaminginHD]

Yeah I can’t find anything that matches the bios installed so it must be custom

[@olnnn]

There is a quadro and tesla variant with the same die which probably helps.

[@nickschmitz841]

It makes me wonder if you could do something similar with a 3070ti or 3080 ? Can you imagine one of those with 16GB of VRAM and, perhaps, a custom bios to allow that ? It would certainly help with RT performance and high quality texture packs. Perhaps a bios from one of the Quadro cards with a similar chipset, might help ?

[@bret3925]

​@nickschmitz841 yes I did that I have the mem chips sku wrote down at home still. It is unstable tho flashes the screen black sometimes

[@raized943]

In Brazil, these kinds of upgrades although not common, do appear from time to time. There are some hardware technicians out here that have order lists for these modifications. Can you imagine a RTX 4070Ti with 24gb VRAM instead of the puny (for it's price point and performance) 12gb? I'd love to see more from these kind of unique and even modified hardware.

[@diablorojo3887]

BRASIL PORRA, NÚMERO 1 DO MUNDO CARALHO

[@SHGames97]

That is just a wicked collectors item. I’d keep it on my shelf with a nice plaque next to it.

[@RandomGaminginHD]

That’s exactly where it’s going 😁

[@kasuraga]

A card like this would probably show more performance gains at 1440p vs 1080p I would think. Really interesting card though. Wonder what all is different besides the vram capacity to make it work.

[@HornetTechTrail]

man you have to test we need part 2 about 1440p plzz

[@longnamedude3947]

What I want to know is how did they modify the VBIOS? Because unless you used custom modified drivers that Graphics Card must be doing some crazy trickery to work with the Official Nvidia GPU Drivers.

[@cieuxlux9617]

Maxwell is really open to BIOS modding, it's not anywhere near as locked down as current GPUs. I run a 980 in my spare system, but it's using a GTX 680 BIOS to unlock the power limit.

[@GregoryShtevensh]

That was my thoughts! I want to know if this means this will become more common in the future if VBIOS can be created or modded

[@b0ne91]

Maxwell BIOS mods aren't really locked out. But I don't think you need to. People have done this to 3070s and even a 2080 Ti with 44GB ov RAM

[@DanStarTheFirst]

@@cieuxlux9617 It is really easy to mod I have my 980 with 140% powerlimit I couldn't hit instability with it my only drawback was I couldn't cool it enough and called it quits at 130c lol

[@czbrat]

You're not on a console, you don't have to strictly stick to graphical presets. Medium preset with textures turned to high or ultra would have been useful to see. Better textures do look, well, better at the cost of almost to no performance loss whatsoever.

[@yousefz7788]

It also would have taxed the VRAM more with higher textures. It's safe to say, given it's 1650 Super-like performance, 45+ fps for AAA games at the cost of higher textures is fair and now possible. I made the same trade offs when using my 390

[@get-in-2-get-out774]

Hope he get to read your comment. I rly do. using low preset + low textures, or something along those lines, for this kind of test is just... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[@jesusbarrera6916]

I think he stuck to those textures to compare it to a normal 980 he used to have.... But I agree, he also should've tried games with higher textures

[@BenState]

Yep, 1440p wouldve meant that hes not testing CPU performance, and the GPU VRAM wouldve been tested.

[@samarkand1585]

@@BenState I agree with the previous comments above, but yours make no sense, high textures or not, at no point in these tests the CPU was the limiting factor

[@joeykeilholz925]

Modern $400 gpu that came out a decade later: NO, IT'S TOO POWERFUL 40shittyTi

[@CorneliusLT]

"Hello everyone and welcome 🤗" that always brightens my day!! Keep up the great videos

[@SanHydronoid]

Honestly you should've turned all textures to ultra. As this would've shown the main highlight of this card and whether that advantage was worth it for the fps drop that comes with, if it even dropped much at all. Titanfall 2 is a good example since it uses 6Gb+ textures but still gives good fps

[@brucelez1]

It would be great if you could swap out V-RAM sticks on a GPU. I honestly cannot see why they wouldn't make them modular, as in buy a GPU then buy whatever GDDR RAM you want to stick in there.

[@RunfisherRS]

I have respect for these type of mad engineers.

[@RandomGaminginHD]

Same haha

[@GoldSrc_]

Dude, you have to redo this video and use at least 1440p and/or 2160p, and the highest textures in order to see any reasonable improvement with that card. Also, even if it was a en engineering sample, you wouldn't get into any legal trouble, specially with an old 900 series card.

[@dionelr]

Nice. I love little hacky projects like this. I have a reference model GTX 980 in a second PC that I’ve had for a long time. Good little card.

[@e.d.v.8202]

I had a MSI Laptop with a 4Gb 780m GTX MXM format and I upgraded the graphic card to a 980m GTX 8Gb , these were not rare in MXM format from what i saw on eBay

[@JamesSmith-sw3nk]

Nice. A 12gb 980ti would be interesting.

[@metalheaddw05]

That would be a Titan X Maxwell.

[@shaneeslick]

or Quadro M6000

[@pengu6335]

I wish you tested higher texture quality settings with the 8gb GTX 980 and then compared the performance results to the 4gb version as well. I doubted that there would be any difference when you're not VRAM limited.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

Oh right, not just a run to see if there is a difference, but also go through each texture preset to see at which point a difference will show up, if at all.

[@pengu6335]

@@HappyBeezerStudios Yeah. I love this channel, don't get me wrong. I just don't really see why he didn't do that. Otherwise, what really would be the point in the test if you're not going to try higher quality textures or higher resolutions as well.

[@shaneeslick]

@@pengu6335 Yeah I love the randomness of Steve's content & usually he is very thorough but like you I think he missed the point in this one, it's not about more fps it is about better Visual Quality, being able to used Higher Texture & Detail settings.

[@pengu6335]

@@shaneeslick Hopefully he makes a follow up video & does this. There was a similar test done awhile ago with an RTX 3070. I'm sure you might've seen the videos here on KZbin. The modified 3070 with 16gb of VRAM installed resulted in alot less hitching with higher quality textures. I'm pretty sure it closed the gap between it and the RTX 2080ti in 4k, since it felt a little short of the 2080ti at 4k because of the lower VRAM.

[@shaneeslick]

@@pengu6335 Yeah I saw that with the 3070 & Hub Steve did one for the 4060Ti 16GB yesterday, hopefully Random Steve will do one here for the 980 too

[@JeffWaynee]

There was a company at Computex this year selling custom RTX 3070 16GB. I can't remember the name of the company though.

[@shaneeslick]

G'day JeffWaynee, KZbinr Paulo Gomes has a video of an RTX3070 he modded

[@kakkoishonen]

It's easy to replace GPU Vrams if you have the skills and the right equipement to do it. As a GPU / console repair tech I've done it so many times...

[@BReal-10EC]

Imagine if video cards were made with stick ram- like normal system ram sticks on a normal motherboard (not the soldered on stuff). That would allow for easy replacement is you have bad ram- and you could upgrade your ram later if needed. I realize that's a pipe dream and I am sure the GDDR ram needs a much better/closer connection than a slot would allow to get the speeds needed, and the card makers would not add cost to make the cards more viable longer versus you needing to just buy another card.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

Bandwith will be a limitation. normal DDR RAM runs on 64 bit per channel. The big difference is that GDDR4+ runs QDR, so twice the bandwith than DDR RAM. And graphics cards run on more than two channels. As example: to get the 224 GB/s of the GTX 980 you would need DDR-14000 in dual channel, or DDR5-6000 in 5-channel. Now try to figure out how to get all those modules on a card. Oh, and for the 4090 it's either DDR-6300 or DDR5-6000 in 20-channel. Yes, 20 RAM slots on a graphics card. Or in other words, just to meed the bandwith we'd need around 3-20 slots on a card.

[@oxfordsparky]

This was a thing 20 years ago, they can’t do it now because the increase to latency and reduction in speed would have a big effect on the performance.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

Your Excel skills will increase once you use it more. Like having a big sheet with all your benchmark results done. And putting all the stuff in a nice graph. I must admit I've done that with some of your previous results just to get those graphics. The difference is about a plus of 7.7% in the 0.1% lows. The strongest in TloU, but in Hogwarts the 0.1% lows are about 11.4% worse.

[@Alexandru1996_]

I've had done the same with my rtx 3080 10gb card. To put 2gb chips instead of the 1gb chips, so to have 20gb in total. Probably it wouldn't do much difference in most games, but it could help in games like the last of us.

[@ldjg-wb4mt]

Actually, i think that would be quite a good idea, i dumped my 3080 when i saw the way the wind was blowing regarding ram usage, the 3080 certianly has the power to carry on for a few years, at high settings.

[@Unizuka]

can you make a video guide on how to do that, I am not super bad with the solder, but I still reluctant to tinker with my 2080 ti 11gb, but I saw lots of 22gb 2080ti cards on aliexpress.

[@jacobsabian4386]

good vid, ive always thought these types of mods could bring back old tech but to do this you need some coding skill and soldering experience because i know you need to hack the bios most likely to utilize all 8gb properly

[@RandomGaminginHD]

Yeah I’d try it myself but my shaky hands and eyesight wouldn’t agree haha

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

@@RandomGaminginHD can always try with something less tiny. Like through hole capacitors to revive a dead monitor. Or some stuff with the good old LM317 to put your fans at exactly 8.3v to reduce noise, stuff like that. Putting a resistor in an unregulated fan cable to, again, reduce noise.

[@bhume7535]

I wish I could do this for my R9 Nano so it could actually be useful as a SFF GPU, but uuuh... there are a few key _differences_ with HBM that make that impossible lmao.

[@thingnumbertwo2]

This is an interesting look at an interesting card; I always love seeing custom jobs like this. In this particular case, it doesn't seem like the 980 has the raw power to take advantage of the increased vram (at least in more recent games), which is kind of a shame. It's probably a great card for maxing out settings on games from several years back though.

[@SHGames97]

I would **** for one of these cards. Absolutely amazing

[@SSJfraz]

Why would somebody go to the hassle of doing this when it barely makes any difference at all? I always found it hilarious that there was an 8GB version of the RX 580.

[@TheGreenReaper]

It makes a difference if you pass the limit, but if you hold textures down to Medium, it won't. Another commenter also suggested that Ethereum mining may have required >4GB.

[@eddyboicollins]

Bad power at the previous house I was at killed my msi gtx 980 less than a month ago. If I go back to older videos of yours, I would find myself commenting and speaking about how happy I was with my 980! RIP. There's a shop now in the capital city but that's relatively far from me. I plan to take it there to get repaired probably, it was a true legend. Friend of mine sold it to me for sixty bucks and it was a good deal one year ago for me. Good video by the way!

[@RandomGaminginHD]

What a great deal. Sorry to hear about your card! Hopefully you can get it fixed!

[@LordmonkeyTRM]

Will be good to see how these older cards hold up against the crop of new games coming in the autumn. 1060 vs Forza Motorsport 8 anyone?

[@LordManhattan]

That Excel segment is just pure 😂 Keep doing your thing, like seriously

[@yousefz7788]

similarly, there is an example of someone creating a 16gb 3070. Needless to say, it slaps. Also would be neat to revisit with some 1440p+ gameplay as my similar era 390 really did keep up at 2560x1080 ultrawide with games regularly pulling 5-6gb. As higher textures and upscaling tech like Spiderman Remastered IGTI really do chew through VRAM this seems like a genuinely powerful card as raw performance is traded with upscaling given it's rise in implementation.

[@kiri101]

I'm still using an 8GB R9 390 with Amernime drivers and it's still dependable at 1440p, 5-6GB VRAM usage is common, on rare occasion it gets maxed

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

Nice to see that custom drivers are still a thing. Been a long time since the Omega drivers.

[@CraigDavison101]

It probably has 8gb of vram to keep up with the size of the Ethereum DAG size a couple of years back. The file was loaded into vram and passed the 4gb mark, making mining cards with less usless for eth

[@drakomus7409]

200IQ

[@jasonwicks7604]

Nvidia cards can swap memory types/sizes/straps with resistors on the card. Not super well documented for every board type but a lot of them have documentation on forums. Also 8gb GTX 980s did exist. It might just be using a straight bios from one of those ES cards. They did exist despite what Nvidia is telling you lol. Seen them on forums and tested for years. Pretty sure TPU even has bios rips of them.

[@andreagarau2918]

Hi man, there is a way that we cant talk by some internet chat, perhaps you can give me some more information about those memory straps and resistors change. I read something similar and would be cool to have some more information even to find other information.

[@Reknilador]

Steve push the textures to the max next time in all games. It has a 0 performance impact and the point was to see the card's performance, crank up the settings too, medium doesn't demonstrate much of anything. All the best and definitely an interesting find!

[@Garrettdx1988]

It's pretty impressive the kind of performance this thing still puts out

[@sergtrav]

What's the point to test this 8gb vram videocard with the medium textures?

[@gvii]

Changing out the memory packages themselves isn't too difficult, if you've had some experience with that kind of thing. Not to say it's easy, but if you have the right equipment and a general idea of what you're doing, it isn't a super difficult job. What's really interesting is fudging the BIOS to get the expanded memory to work. In the past I've made custom BIOS files for motherboards to update various modules using parts from a newer model motherboard BIOS. I have to imagine it's done in a somewhat similar way. Very neat though.

[@Ferzin400]

back when i had my 980ti in my pc i thought i had about limitless vram on my card, like just way overkill. look at the technology now^^ right now rocking a 16gb 6900xt and absolutely happy with it =)

[@scout6068]

Should try more vram usage titles as most of these are not going to show the vram increase.

[@Kelekona_808]

Nice find! Another rare bird to add to the flock.

[@randy206]

This is very interesting. I always appreciate your videos. I do think you could have done something a little different to compare and control more for the 8 gb variable. Textures and or resolutions could have been cranked to ultra and or 1440p. Also using something like msi afterburner to adjust the clocks of both cards to be as close to equal as possible. And possibly testing the memory over clocking differences between the 2 cards. Image comparisons would be useful too. I know that in "the last of us" in particular, you can set graphics settings to much higher than what the system has vram to handle. The card will play the game smoothly, but it is constantly loading in textures and you can clearly watch textures pop in and out of the scene as you walk around. Something like this to purposefully stress the vram and memory bus would be very interesting.

[@Beokabatuka]

Maybe this lends credence to the idea that, by the time certain cards' VRAM becomes a limitation, their GPU core will probably be out of date anyway. Or stated differently, some cards aren't powerful enough to make consistent use of additional VRAM. I remember this idea being thrown around years ago. Of course, it still depends on which game you play and what settings you use.

[@MLWJ1993]

In the rare instance where it's just heaps of assets & not a lot of shaders being used it might help. In most instances those conditions won't apply & the VRAM would be wasted. This might however be more useful for those doing 3D renders that won't necessarily need high real time framerates, but do benefit from more memory.

[@WSS_the_OG]

That's really neat. It's really hard to desolder and resolder BGA packages so this person really put some risky effort in. Someone tried this with the 3070, doubling the RAM to 16 GB, but it had stability issues unfortunately. It's interesting to see that the 980 was completely stable with its doubled VRAM.

[@ReTex504]

Did the seller provide any documentation regarding this mod? I plan on doing the same thing to the 980 I have laying here and it would be extremely helpful to have further information(vBios modification, resistors/jumpers on the PCB etc.)

[@WhosDnisify]

mmmm that's the content i love to see at RandomGaminginHD. I'm never disappointed.

[@Matt-oq4jq]

even asking NVidia is way too much dude, it's an old card, they can pound sand. if they messed with you, you'd have an entire community behind you!

[@RandomGaminginHD]

Better safe than sorry I suppose. Wanted to be sure it wasn’t an engineering card that hadnt gone “missing” haha

[@Henricoptero]

This is actually a very interesting video to me given that I own a 980 ti and was wondering if I'd be vram limited on future games

[@Zenefor]

i remember a modder in yt comments once said that you first need to locate the mem adress bus and mem and bus width adress, after that just modify resistors along the size of vram increase or decrease

[@RandomGaminginHD]

Oh awesome

[@pokkita1343]

you should put textures to the max, textures doesnt affect fps as long as you have enough vram

[@itstheweirdguy]

Looking at your afterburner, it's clear this card has 6GB of operational VRAM. Like it's a 980 TI, like the card's firmware would be programmed so it would actually work.

[@dyslectische]

No 1080p and lower settings to run the game is lower memory. In the last of us you see 5Gb use. It do not need more on that moment. The card is to weak to use all 8G . Well onder games on 4k resolution will fill that memory

[@itstheweirdguy]

@@dyslectische I don't think that the card is too weak, the card's firmware has to be programmed to use the RAM. That's probably why it was using more than 4GB, but less than 8GB, it was always in the 5GB range....with overhead you wouldn't expect to see 100% usage of a GPU's VRAM.

[@MoswenMedia]

Old comment I know, but it would be silly to use a modded 980 ti firmware when the Quadro M5000 is quite literally an 8gb GTX 980, with lower power delivery.

[@hexadecimal973]

Man's slowly racking up 250 $ bounty in all 3 states. I hope you can survive for 3 days for that achievement

[@RandomGaminginHD]

😂

[@cosminmilitaru9920]

That moment when Cyberpunk is one of the best optimized games out of the newer singleplayer lot. I get that you had the excel spreadsheed for the previous 4GB model test, but, it would have been nice to see that VRAM used at 1440p instead of 1080p. :D

[@TheRoundCube]

This is very interesting indeed. So many things it makes me wonder. I'd love to see a retest it with higher settings for games to use more vram, and maybe run it through mem tests to see if its all available to utilize with the bios/firmware on it. I DID see TLOU using 5gb.. Second, you raised this point up yourself. I wonder how it compares to a 980ti and if the better raw computational power of that card still sets it apart or if theyre similar and the vram addition closes the gap some. I wonder if theres games that the 8gb card is better in due to textures. Nice find.

[@sgdude1337]

That would be interesting but I think the 980 Ti is so much more powerful than the 980 that I doubt the vram closes the gap. The Ti also has 6GB of vram so the difference in capacity isn't enormous between it and a 8GB 980. It would also be interesting to see a comparison of the 780 Ti vs the Titan Black in 2023. I would imagine that the gains would be huge even though they were miniscule 10 years ago.

[@CrocoDylianVT]

From upgrading VRAM on a 3070 Ti to unlock it's full potential to upgrading VRAM in an older card to give it a second life

[@telepop123]

You may as well have tested a 980 4gb against another 980 4gb, you didn't push the vram at all.

[@OpticWolf115]

Lovin' the videos, bud. ♥️🔥

[@Kiekerr]

Only upgraded from my GTX980 last year. Had it heavily OC'd and vBios modded. Outperformed the 1060 GB 6GB in raw performance but not when it came to VRAM. It was an Evga SC too, I miss her.

[@iamrubinot42]

I cant wait for 12gb 980 ti. It would be a little killer

[@IBims1Mark]

the power of the GPU is missing. so 6 GB should have been fine too.

[@Eidolon2003]

Titan Maxwell is essentially a 12GB 980 Ti

[@rjblitz5871]

You should have tested using higher resolutions. That is where you will see the most difference.

[@SimonBannow]

That's so cool, imagine being able to slap some extra vram on your card when needed. 🚀

[@RandomGaminginHD]

That would be cool!

[@mainy1984]

That thing should be a beast. I still run a 980Ti today it still smashes all new titles.

[@jedi9577]

It makes sense that this would work. The GTX Titan (Maxwell) has 12GB of VRAM on a 384-bit bus. Maxwell GPUs don't enforce BIOS signatures either so it's possible to mod the BIOS to add support for a new memory chip.

[@bigbenisdaman]

I remember another fella did similar i'm wantin to say with a 1070, powerful enough to need a little more vram on some games and especially with higher textures/settings that use vram and not actual gpu power.

[@Wushu-viking]

My guess is, the seller has used the 1070 VRAM modules. Should be possible to put in the 980, since both use 8 modules (and same physical size chips). as well as a BIOS mod, but after that, it should be good to go. An advantage, is the 8GB used on the 1070 should be able to clock higher (8Gbps on the stock 1070 vs 7Gbps on the stock 980), a 980 @1500 MHz core with the 1070 memory clock, should be quite close in performance to the 1070. Since the 980 was a direct successor to the 680/770 (not the 780/780 Ti), that model was never meant to have 8 GB option. Back in late 2014, the 4 GB VRAM was more than plenty. And in 2015, the real successor to the 780/780Ti was the 980 Ti ..with 6GB VRAM, same as some rare 780 and Titan(Kepler) models had. Making the 980 with 8GB would have been dumb, and they probably would have had to build the 980 Ti with 6 and 12GB (and in that case, what was the point of the Titan X?)

[@RandomGaminginHD]

Ah very interesting, thanks :)

[@sandrocarletto9386]

Im sorry but what is the point of testing this graphics card if you dont turn up the settings enough for it to flow over 4 gigs? If you're testing the card only for higher vram capacity might aswell turn the settings up to actually showcase the help extra memory provides

[@RazielTheLost]

IF the card works properly with the vram edit then the real difference is that it can handle more things loaded and keep better detailed textures loaded, the slightly higher frames is a side benefit as well as them being more stable, but like i said the increase in vram is mostly going to keep textures loaded so they wont blur or downscale near you or when you're looking at them. there are people that add vram to different cards, this is a thing people have done for many years now, i've seen cards that people doubled the vram to 16GB from 8GB and even stupid ones with 24GB that should be 12GB or 8GB, they said it took a bit of work to do it and it has issues but it mostly works

[@neocaron87]

I would have expected that you would use ultra textures for all game to emphasis the gain. Cool mod for sure!

[@andrexskin]

This was indeed interesting, I'm not really sure why you tested some games on medium or low, I would've liked a bit more watching custom settings: For example you could use the medium preset but use the ultra quality textures for everything, the performance shouldn't take a big hit from textures but the quality just be very different. Other than that, nice video, it's interesting to see this 8GB model.

[@jb678901]

Still pinching myself after upgrading last week from 1080Ti to 2080Ti. The youngest teen got the 1080Ti as an upgrade from a 1080. Th RTX2080Ti Strix set me back ~$220. No regrets on this local-auction site purchase.

[@hartsickdisciple]

2080 Ti for $220 is a steal. That's still a very strong GPU.

[@LateNightFire]

1080 TI was phenomenal, 6 and a half years later and it's still holding up. nvidia won't make that mistake again haha. I recently found a 3090 at work for $10 and I'm gonna give my old card to either my sister or friend.

[@robertopazsoldan9641]

Imagine a 3070 with 11gb of vram yeah thats the 2080ti 👍

[@hartsickdisciple]

@@robertopazsoldan9641 Yes... although the 3070 does have advantages in power efficiency and ray tracing performance, until it runs out of VRAM.

[@baoquoc3710]

@@LateNightFire yo what, 10 freakin $ for a freaking 3090? You better have a capable rig at home man🤪🤪

[@nothing.mp3]

Aw man you should totally upload the VBIOS in case anyone else wants to do this themselves with new old stock memory chips

[@tom940]

Thats pretty cool, i hope someday to add swapping bga components to my list of skills

[@arranmc182]

BGA soldering gear for home use has gotten so cheap the last few year I'm seeing more and more of this type of thing being done, even seen old MBP's have CPU upgrades or swapped out graphics, im so happy this is happening as we get amazing stuff like this as the 980 & 980ti are still fantastic cards for 1080p budget gamers even in modern titles.

[@genethebean7597]

It was always strange to me that the desktop GTX 980 was limited to 4GB, while the laptop version _only_ came as an 8GB variant. It's even stranger considering the GTX 980M performed for like a GTX 970 desktop card.

[@WilliamTaylor-h4r]

my favorite eidoe of the office is where he falls face first into the company chilli cook off. He volunteered for the role, refused the 60,000 dollar bonus and said he would eat any chili that didn't burn his face, scalp, and neck. There's a secret trophy room with this very scene at the network.

[@PwnyPony]

This was a frustrating video to watch. You hardly even tried to use the extra VRAM available. Textures settings have almost no impact on performance in most games until they start hitting VRAM limits. You should have set textures to the MAX in these tests.

[@_lolucoca_9735]

Can you upload the BIOS of your card? I'd love to do that mod as I have a GTX 980 as well as the equipment to do it.

[@Bagel7723]

+1 for this, I don't have a 980 myself but I'm curious.

[@All_ice-g]

Please note that the comparison with ASUS's 980 4G is not representative as the graphics card is overclocked, which skews the results. It would be interesting to redo a comparison with cards at the same frequency but with higher-definition textures (with the help of FSR), which, in my opinion, would better demonstrate the difference. Additionally, it would be interesting to see a comparison between a GTX 980ti and a GTX 980 8GB with overclocking. I suggest this because my overclocked 980 is very close in raw power to the 980ti stock, so it would be interesting to see the comparison with more memory. Good night.

[@DaredeviIGR]

I still use my GTX980. Wanted to change the past year but yeah, you know. Got the entire rig upgraded, waiting on a good GPU option to come up.

[@AshtonCoolman]

I'd love to see this redone with settings that bump up closer to the 8GB VRAM limit and far exceed the 4GB card. That'll really show the benefits.

[@fattomandeibu]

Back in the day with a 2D game this would have been massive. Sadly, processing power is a lot more important these days. In fact, the Saturn console supported this type of behaviour. A Saturn only had 512kb of VRAM and fighters in 2D games like Street Fighter Alpha had around 1mb of sprites per character. This led to a lot of sprite frames being cut in Saturn(and PS1) ports to make it fit into VRAM. A Saturn however, had a cartridge slot like a Sega Mega Drive(it actually looked a lot like a MD cart), used by most for plugging in memory cards, but there was also a special card supplied with certain games that would expand the VRAM by 2mb and allowed those games to be played arcade perfect if the game supported it. It's why weirdos like me loved the Saturn, them PS1 2D fighters just played sub-par due to small sprites or missing frames.

[@Link3131a]

I would love a 4070 ti with 24gb vram so much, even 20gb vram would be amazing

[@nunofernandes4501]

Those Founders Edition coolers look so cool. 😅

[@MysticalWafflez]

NVIDIA has always been a control freak when it comes to their cards. That's why EVGA left the market a while back. Quite the card you've stumbled upon. I wonder how he coded the BIOS on it. Edit: You can make graphs in excel! It makes the data look 4000x better than just standard numbers, though they did the job! I believe the tool is under Insert > Chart type > Customize. :)

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

The moment I saw him go through the almost perfectly formatted sheet without putting everything into a graph I had to go out and make one myself. And yes, that is basically how I sorted it as well. But with a separate row for averages, 1% lows and 0.1% lows. So 6 rows in total (because there are 2 cards). From there all it takes is to select the entire thing and put in the graph.

[@oxfordsparky]

That’s not why evga stopped making graphics cards, that’s just what people want to believe, the reality is that the CEO wanted to wind down the company so he could semi retire and refused to let anyone else run it.

[@TheGreenReaper]

@@oxfordsparky I think it's fair to say that maybe this triggered the timing of that decision, though. This surely hasn't been a great release cycle for board partners.

[@adriandabrowski4990]

you should test these on 1440p to actually see the difference cause at those settings it seemed like the games did not need more than 4gb, maybe up to 5gb

[@Isaac-bu8hu]

Textures turned up, maybe with a 30fps target would show a greater difference, I think. Would be nice to see

[@zakerwashington5852]

This card is still a surprise to me😮

[@samuelrieder5480]

Really interesting maybe you should make more videos with vram restrictions.

[@bills6093]

Only a couple games actually used more than 4gb of vram though. None went over 5gb. Would like to see a "vram use" test. How much vram are games actually using? Would a modern 8gb card utilize more vram in a game than this modded card?

[@RandomGaminginHD]

Yeah good idea. Will push things a bit higher

[@namm_]

because most of the games in 1080p uses around 6 gigs or less,at 1440p you would see alot of games takes 7-8,the 980 has 4 and intended to used 4 gigs of vram

[@LateNightFire]

yeah, I wonder how it would play out where the games are regularly using 6gb+

[@someasianguy8493]

Good comparison between the custom 8GB and the 4GB card, under realistic conditions. We tend to forget with the current gen of 8GB cards (and maybe even 6GB cards) that managing the VRAM buffer is fairly easy as long as you don't max out everything like a twat. I know other channels have observed stuttering on the lower VRAM capacity cards and they do it for science reasons and for future proofing. But honestly, most GPU reviewers encourage us to play at high settings (or lower) anyway.

[@SebastianOliva]

That excel bit was really painful.

[@anthonyrizzo9043]

I think that gen is too early to need 8gb, because they just aren't that strong anymore. But there's many newer 8 gb cards that could benefit from 16gb.

[@shaneeslick]

Yeah like everything PC Gaming it is about Balance, you wouldn't pair a 13900K/7950X with 8GB RAM & GTX1650 for gaming

[@KimBoKastekniv47]

Mainstream 900 cards were notorious for having low VRAM compared to what PS4 offered at the time, funny enough this is happening again with 40 series and PS5.

[@andi346208]

Must have been a very technically skilled person. I'm surprised the card's firmware and the Windows drivers actually utilize the extra memory even though it's there. The 980 definitely should have had at least 6GB of VRAM and the TI 8GB but Nvidia hate putting enough on their cards - look at the 4000 series.

[@m_Stan]

Makes me think what a 12GB 980ti would perform like, if possible. Maybe modular RAM on GPUs should be a thing (Fixed RAM Conspiracy) ??? Very interesting video