The GeForce RTX 2080 Ti is one of the best graphics cards money can buy. Sadly, the glory days of five-year-old graphics cards are long gone. Nonetheless, one avid user wanted to revive the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, quadrupling his Turing flagship’s memory through clever modding.
Indeed, Nvidia has been ignoring the Titan series for the last few generations. The last Titan SKU from this chipmaker is from the Turing era and actually takes the form of the Titan RTX. Why is this important? The Titan RTX utilizes the same reference PCB as the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, which is the main reason why it was able to increase the memory from 11GB to 44GB.
The reference PCB has room for 24 GDDR6 memory modules, 12 on each side. The GeForce RTX 2080 Ti only occupies 11 of the 12 front-side slots with 1GB GDDR6 chips. Even Titan RTX doesn’t use all 24 memory slots. The graphics card will only feature 2GB GDDR6 chips in the 12 front-side slots.
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With GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, Mods (via) wxnod) I ran the textbook replacement MOD. This person replaced his existing 1GB memory modules with his 2GB Samsung memory modules and populated the remaining slots on the front of the PCB and all 12 of his slots on the back. Onboard he has 48 GB, but due to the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti’s design and narrow memory interface, only his 22 memory slots are accessible. The result is his GeForce RTX 2080 Ti with 44 GB of his GDDR6 memory. The price of GDDR6 has improved significantly, helping such a user to finance his project. A few years ago, a single Samsung 2GB GDDR6 memory module sold for over $200 on Chinese platforms such as AliExpress.
According to GPU-Z and DirectX screenshots, the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti effectively detects all 44GB. The sample is from Leadtek and adopts Nvidia reference PCB. Logically, the memory swap had no effect on the memory bandwidth of the graphics card. The GeForce RTX 2080 Ti features a 352-bit memory interface, delivering 616 GB/s with a 14 Gbps GDDR6 memory module, regardless of chip capacity.
Unfortunately, this awesome mod is just for show. A GeForce RTX 2080 Ti with 44 GB of his GDDR6 memory boots fine in the operating system but fails in benchmarks and games. It’s a known issue. In the past there have been similar user-modified graphics cards such as the 16GB GeForce RTX 2070 and more recently the 16GB GeForce RTX 3070. Projects are usually hit or miss, as modified graphics cards lack proper vBIOS and driver support.
