RTX 2080 Ti Memory Upgrade to 22 GB | Hacker News Reader

RTX 2080 Ti Memory Upgrade to 22 GB

gpusolutions.net

155 pointswslh134 comments

HN crowd is treating this as some sort of sorcery.

Meanwhile it's just everyday business in China. People send their laptops or graphic cards with soldered RAM and get the device back with double RAM/vRAM. "Brother Zhang" is one of those who operate such a shop: https://youtu.be/TcRGBeOENLg

Had such services been more available in the US, I would not have needed to sell a laptop that had 8GM RAM and could no longer handle my workflows but was perfect otherwise.

HN crowd is treating this as some sort of sorcery, you can do it at home with a $60 hot air station.

The only thing approaching "secret sauce" is the BIOS modding, which varies in difficulty depending on the device. For many devices it's just a case of reconfiguring strap resistors.

I have watched more than a few videos where someone tries to upgrade soldered RAM at home, only ending up sending the laptop to the same repair shop they hoped to skip after a failed experiment.

Unless you can put money on your words and provide some sort of guarantee, nobody is going to take that.

The point is you can do it yourself, you don't need anyone else's guarantee.

If the untrained "you"'s failure rate is above about 25% with the failure result being a merely inoperable but repairable card, it's not an acceptable outcome for most people, who quite reasonably see it as an unacceptable risk.

In practice, it's more like a 75-90% failure rate if you're unfamiliar with ball-soldering techniques, which most are since it's been considered impractical to do soldering in the US since the through-hole days, and so there's not a professional tradesman class to teach kids. What does exist of soldering is stuck in the far past from an electronics manufacturing perspective.

Tl;dr: https://xkcd.com/2501/

Yeah a $60 hot air station may be enough, assuming you have all the consumables and chips. This isn't something even the average techie will risk trying.

The average techie is a coward.

My 2008 MBP had a motherboard failure due to bad factory solder, but you could sometimes fix it by taking the motherboard out and putting it in the oven for just the right amount of time to reflow it. I still remember how scary it was putting the logic board in the oven - but it wasn't really bravery, when the alternative was a non-functional laptop anyway. I did eventually give up on it after it had relapsed two or three times.

My MBP had the same issue and was eligible for a replacement but since the computer couldn’t boot due to a GPU issue they couldn’t run the GPU test to verify it was a GPU issue. Even though you could clearly read the logs and tell it was the GPU.

So good, did this 3 times, everytime it would fail faster haha. Another trick was to run a benchmark, disable sleep and wrap it in some blankets until for an hour or so until the gpu solder was reflowed, didnt try that haha

I've known about this trick earlier, but the people who do it caution that the chance of succeeding is like 50/50.

Sounds about right for success odds for a novice, definitely don't start out on an expensive card. Get some low-capacity DIMMs or obsolete GPUs to practice on.

I think I'll stick to my area of expertise - replacing "non-replaceable" batteries. Amazing ROI using a $14 soldering iron.

> coward

This can be a result of unexpected and costly if not worse, surprises.

More expensive than the alternative of buying another laptop? That seems like roughly the worst case anyways. Might as well try.

No, he's right. Techies are cowards. Those poor but educated people in the slums of Shenzhen are reverse engineering Nvidia GPUs to find out how to add more RAM, so what the fuck are we doing to have less results?

> so what the fuck are we doing in our cushy lives?

Racking in money printed out of thin air by banks using a sleight of hand then forcing people to give us things in exchange for said printed money under threat of being bombed, invaded, and sanctioned

This is true. And sitting back and not working and just expecting the money to roll in.

…well put, and their tools are basically beetlenut and long finger nails

Yep. We've broken lots of things. Expensive things. Some days, when I remember the (frequently dumb) things I did as a youngster, I am surprised that I still have all 10 fingers and both eyes.

No pain, no gain.

Yeah, it's gonna be more than that. You'll also need a hot plate, flux, solder wick. I'd double that price to 120, not to mention it takes quite a bit of practice to learn bga soldering.

You can definitely do it by yourself(after all, the tech worker is just a person like us). But it will definitely cost more than $60.

Hot air station, stencil, stencil frame. preheater, etc. Even board view sometime need to be purchased.

this bios modding, you just get a boar supported by coreboot or something similar if you want to make it easier. if you like to tinker its an option to avoid certain things. uefi firmware can be pain to extract and unpack i think and often its signed. u need to modify the firmware because anything after is already loaded into ram and from there u can not reinitialize ram controller

I wonder whether (without soldering) replaceable GDDR RAM on graphics cards would really result in such a large speed penalty. System memory often isn't soldered to the main board either, and this doesn't seem to have large performance penalties.

The RAM in your desktop could run at much higher frequencies if it were soldered. The RAM the M5 Macbooks use runs at 9600 mbps. The base spec for DDR5 is 4800, and I rarely see people running at much higher than 6000. There's probably someone who's gotten a 9600 mbps overclock running on their desktop, but it's unatainable for a normal consumer outside of machines with soldered RAM.

"base spec" is doing the heavy lifting here, not "soldered". DDR5 modules supporting 8000 MT/s CMP/EXPO profiles are available. 9000 is available with CUDIMM modules.

The problem isn't the RAM chips. The problem is their path to the CPU.

Good luck finding a motherboard which will run at those speeds reliably. Sure, you can find a board which says it will do it, and it will sometimes manage those speeds, if you also have a CPU with a memory controller that can handle all the interference. When you solder the chips and thus make the traces much shorter and less susceptible to interference, that problem largely goes away.

This doesn't explain why non-soldered RAM isn't okay for graphics cards when it is still considered perfectly acceptable for desktop computers.

Because GPUs have had it soldered since the beginning, while desktops have had it slotted since (close to) the beginning. There are some exceptions to that rule, but it mostly holds.

Not to mention that the bar of acceptibility is moving. We had RAM in slots in laptops for a long while, but it's (not so) slowly going away. You can still find laptops with SO-DIMMs, but it's not a given anymore.

A longer time ago, sound cards used to have expandable RAM too.

Go back far enough (486) and cache was off-chip on simms too!

That would be COAST as in 'cache on a stick', which wasn't that common.

They usally came in 8 to 16 discrete chips with pins on both of their sides, to be soldered on board, or plugged into sockets.

Plus one or two 'tag-rams' as chips of the same size.

All depending on the chipset, its cache-controller, and which capabilities the board-maker decided to use/expose/support. Which sometimes the BIOS would get wrong, still :-)

Yep. Soldered is just the best manufacturing process (besides on-package). Moving things close together simply delivers better outcomes and that will always trump openness concerns.

I would imagine that something like LPCAMM2 for GDDR is entirely possible and will never, ever be seen because people already accept replacing an entire $10000 GPU to get another 32GB VRAM on the next generation, so why give up that guaranteed revenue stream?

That the highest performing option also creates the most lock-in is a happy accident.

Because you can't sell more graphics cards if consumers get more use out of them.

Perhaps it impacts size, manufacturing (automation) and money considerations. I mean now you suddenly need a slot of golden plated pins, you suddenly need a module with said pins and a memory chip soldered. You're introducing so much steps and complexity (thus expense) there for net negative.

I know that people like to argue "but I can't upgrade RAM". Yes. But as we see here not impossible. Your car also needs some effort to change some parts and perhaps even more effort compared to resoldering some chips at a shop that knows how-to.

> Perhaps it impacts size, manufacturing (automation) and money considerations. I mean now you suddenly need a slot of golden plated pins, you suddenly need a module with said pins and a memory chip soldered. You're introducing so much steps and complexity (thus expense) there for net negative.

How is this relevant when the same point applies to system RAM?

Desktop DDR rarely exceedes 64bits(you have to combine more than one dimm). Since RAM is a parallel bus that means 64 conductors that have to be impedance and length controlled. GPUs use >192bit busses, with 512bit in the high performance GPUs. So that's now 512 conductors.

512 conductors that have to be exactly the same length. Make them longer you'll say- now you just lost your high memory clocks to propigation delay and parasitics.

Seeing the problem?

When trying to book an upgrade:

"Please note: All Upgrades have been put on hold due to the double cost of Memory Modules. The option to upgrade the supported GPUs has been disabled on the booking page."

Bummer. I have a box full of 2080s that are leftovers from a previous foray.

What would it cost to have you ship me one?

They're 2080 Supers, not 2080 Tis. And apparently, RAM upgrades just aren't cheap/easy/possible ATM either way. But if those RAM upgrades were a thing, then I think these cards might max out at 16GB instead of 22GB, as that represents a natural doubling.

For what they are, as they stand: You'd be safer and better-protected to buy one from eBay for ~$200 USD than to get one from some rando on the internet, like me.

I still would trust you if you had too many on your hands. I wouldn't reject a 2080 super.

what he's trying to say, it makes no sense to pay him above market rate for those cards to justify him bothering to send you one when you can buy cheaper on ebay with more guarantees and protections.

I'd take it for free then

Same here, have a desktop just sitting without a discrete gpu

I recognized the name of the company from the YouTube videos they have posted. It is likely a legitimate business, but as they are in a region I am not in, I can't speak to their actual performance or reliability. Here is their YouTube page:

https://youtube.com/@graphicscardrepairs-tk7ql?si=OIO98TbmAs...

This seems to be a company in the UAE. I've noticed in general that the far (and middle) East have far more miscellaneous repair services companies than the West, and also more information online about it (albeit not in English.)

Yeah. Even a smaller town will have a random repair shop where a guy will replace phone screens, solder in a replacement power supply, and he seemingly has some kind of connection that can get him all these parts from Shenzhen. A comparable sized town in America won't have anything comparable other than a Dollar General selling phone chargers.

A comparable town in the US would absolutely have a local or franchise repair business doing those things. What neither of them will have in abundance are shops replacing BGA modules as an upgrade. For that it'd be major cities only.

At least in Australia, anything outside common phone repairs goes in to the "not worth it" basket. I had a USB-C port snap of a microphone, PCB pads were still fine, just needs someone to use a hot air gun to attach a new port. Repair stores didn't want to touch it.

And I can see the logic. Wages are so high that anything that they can't exactly know the repair time and success rate can easily exceed the device value. While in lower income countries they can afford to mess around for quite a while on repairs since the replacement cost is relatively massive.

We say wages are high in the west, yet we are literally paying people to stand around in line for us.

https://www.investigatetv.com/2026/01/16/professional-line-s...

The skill gap between line stander and SMD soldering is fairly large

That's part of what I was thinking about, we have people with little/ low skills that we pay to do things that make no sense.

https://fortune.com/2025/05/18/gen-x-entrepreneur-line-sitti...

We can pay someone $20~60 an hour to stand in line for concert tickets and shoe drops but we can't get enough blue-collar workers to bring down housing prices.

NYC McDonald's pays $17~20 an hour...

Somewhere along the way, what we value for labor and what we work we are willing to do got very messed up.

You could do SMD while standing in line!

You know you've done it right when the entire untidy queue pops into an even straight line

I picture some rig you wear with a small ledge on ypur stomach, and a battery pack on your back, to power the soldering iron. I've wrapped a thin wire around my soldering tip to work on tiny pads, so I envision this plus magnifying eyewear too.

Sadly in the US the bomb squad would soon show and shoot your ass, but maybe you'd get a settlement out of it.

I had my lenovo laptop's last USB-C port bugger up. of course, lenovo themselves will repair this by replacing the mainboard (~1.5k+?).

so I did a search for anyone doing microsolder repairs nearby, picked the closest, and found someone who diagnosed, quoted, and then replaced both ports, and a chip that had vaporised itself along the way, for a couple hundred AUD.

I don't entirely understand why they "didn't want to touch it"? Surely they were capable of soldering a new port. I'm sure they'd have had to charge a lot. There's unlikely to be much difference in cost between the repair and a replacement microphone.

But why not offer that? All else being equal I'd rather fix something than put it in landfill and buy a new one. Am I the only one?

Tbh they didn’t even open it up. Just decided it was too hard and gave it back. I had to follow a YouTube tutorial to work out how to open it since stuff is designed to hide all visible entry points these days.

Had I handed it to them disassembled and asked them to just solder a port on they might have accepted.

> I don't entirely understand why they "didn't want to touch it"?

Customer: it’s just this specific solder job

“They”: that’s what you say, but there might be other issues, and we cannot tell without spending lots of time checking things

Customer: no, it’s just a solder job.

“They”: OK, we’ll solder that, but the risk is on you, and you’ll pay regardless of the outcome.

Some time later:

“They”: operation succeeded, patient still dead.

What do you think happens next?

A: customer thanks “them” for their effort, pays and leaves

B: customer starts bickering that “they” destroyed their phone, leaves negative reviews online, etc.

I expect a significant percentage for option B. Even if that’s rare, it requires only a few negative reviews to not be worth it.

I can see people wanting to avoid that, even if it effectively leaves money on the table.

Liability, and hassle. They have a few repairs they do regularly. Anything else is a risk and they don't need the money that badly. And they can't be 90% confident they'll get it right, since they don't do it regularly.

They also can’t charge if they can’t fix it. And they don’t know the extent of the damage beforehand. So they could waste an hour of labor before finding its unfixable.

In that time they could have done 3 iPhone battery replacements.

Replacing components like a phone screen, yeah - but not the kind of thing the OP is talking about. More like replacing a worn USB-C port on a random motherboard using a soldering iron, hot air station, and microscope, or tracking down an unknown failed component on a circuit board, or swapping a random surface-mount Motorola chip in the ECU of your early-2000s car. Sometimes there’s a whole market square where every shop specializes in one of these things.

And it's not that expensive.

After getting sucked into "I bought this to repair it" YouTube I started looking for things on eBay. I was amazed to find that things like PlayStations with declared faults which made them completely unusable were selling at 70-80% the price as things which were sold as working.

The only thing I can imagine is that there is an underground repair business buying broken items to repair them and resell them that was efficient enough to keep the margin between non-working and working that low.

The price of repair is calculated into the asking price.

If it is obvious that it only needs an HDMI port then the listing will cost what a regular PlayStation will cost minus HDMI repair and minus ~15% for risk. So about 70% of a regular PlayStation.

Buying for repair only makes sense if you buy undiagnosed in bulk for 30% of the value after repair. You can then also scavenge some for repairs of others.

I don’t think that is true. Ubiquitous access to free or low cost education is what makes this possible, and I certainly don’t see those kinds of businesses in towns of 50-100k people in the USA. There are people that are capable of that kind of work, of course, but they are employed by x corp or do contract work, and they are not competing with the cost of replacement consumers devices, since their rates would have to be > 150 an hour to stay in business.

You can get basically any part from Shenzhen with an Alibaba account, if you know what you're looking for.

For reaching out to a seller/merchant, I found it helps significantly if you google translate into Chinese, and just communicate in Chinese.

Yeha, it's the "know what you're looking for" part that a random guy in a near-warzone in Ukraine will know.

> know what you're looking for

A modern cellphones have only about 10 replaceable assemblies[1] - repairers aren't typically replacing individual broken chips, an entire assembly/part. "[knowing] what you're looking for" is easy of you know what broke the device, or following basic troubleshooting steps.

Getting into repairs these days is easy; YouTube, Alibaba, Forums/File-sharing sites, USB-C and Open Source firmware-flashing tools have conspired to lower the bar of entry. If you have an old phone in your device drawer with a damaged screen or unusable battery, you probably can fix it yourself, with the right tools and some patience.

1. Cover, chassis, screen, digitizer, mainboard, speaker, mic, daughter-boards, variously cables/ribbons

And the person at the repair shop typically has a Masters degree in electrical engineering or similar.

I have a guy which can fix almost anything. But well, he has high paying job, and has 600k EUR apartment.

You can't expect him to waste weekend fixing something for pennies.

Unlike a guy living in shed, driving 20+ yo Daewoo Lanos.

Well and also parts are far more available and way cheaper. Had to replace 2 capacitors and a thermistor in an power supply not long ago. Cheapest price I could find for those 3 parts? $40. The highest unit price of those components individually was like $1.25, but I didn't need 20+ of each and everywhere else had crazy shipping costs on top of 20x markup. And there was no place within 300 miles that sold anything like that if I didn't want to wait 2 weeks for it to arrive.

A chinese guy could get those parts for way less, have them shipped way faster, or probably just buy them from a physical store not that far away. The chat, diagnosing, and repair took me less than an hour overall so with cheap parts I could have charged someone $40 and made $35 an hour if I had cheap and available parts while saving them $250. But dealing with parts issues nearly triples my minimum price for a business operation because I either have to spend a bunch of time finding the best deal for parts and have this thing sit on my bench for two weeks+ as they ship, or get ripped off paying 80 dollars to get it within a week. And by time they are spending $120 on a repair, they are already nearly half the price of buying something brand new that can be shipped to their door in 2 days with a 2 year manufacturers warranty, so they wouldn't want to attempt to pay someone to repair it at all.

> A chinese guy could get those parts for way less, have them shipped way faster, or probably just buy them from a physical store not that far away.

Or from a previous customer who had to replace a whole power supply module, and those parts happened to be perfectly fine on the otherwise broken subassembly they left behind for disposal.

That's how repair efficiency enabled by scale looks like when you zoom in. They'll replace your broken screen in 5 minutes and for 10x less than the price of the replacement screen (!), as long as you let them take the damaged one, because someone will actually fix that damaged part and use it as replacement for the next customer, etc. There is enough volume they can decouple and time-shift actual repair and replacement.

(And of course should they not have a freshly repaired part of a kind, there's probably a booth selling those very parts within 50 meters of where they sit, that's also a direct line to some factory in Shenzhen. You know, the kind of booth where they look at you funny if your answer to "how many pieces" has less than three zeros in it.)

I think it's a bit less about being extremely skillful and more about the number of people who go into hardware combined with the cost of living and renting office space.

There are a far larger number of people capable of re-soldering RAM on a GPU than there are high-paid professionals so it's not exactly a labour shortage problem.

You shouldn't have to live in a shed in order to run a small business and we know something about our present situation is anomalous because small businesses like this were much more prevalent within living memory and currently exist in other countries.

If I were on the hook for €600k and only had an apartment I'd be pretty jealous of my time too.

We're all too busy running in circles trying to pay rent and not get sued, while they're doing productive stuff.

It helps that most chip documentation is written in Chinese now. For obvious reasons.

As far as I can tell, it's mostly just cost of labour vs cost of buying a new device.

Watching professional repair shop youtube channels is one way to get a feel for the economics of it - it's usually only worth their time if it's a quick fix on an expensive product or a complex data-recovery attempt where the customer is paying much more than the cost of the device itself, because they value the data on it.

What if we automated it? Obviously, fully bespoke diagnosis and repair can't be automated (that's what bespoke means), but surely we can have a flying-probe machine that you put a MacBook circuit board into and it runs down the common failure tree by detecting the circuit board model and testing voltages at different points?

They have devices pretty close to that, in China. Not fully automated diagnosis, but test jigs that hook up the things that need hooking up, and monitor the things that need monitoring. Search "iPhone test fixture" on aliexpress.

This used to be a common thing even in Portugal, until we started going down the throw away working electronics mindset, and yes we're to blame as well, consumers drive the market.

How do they handle the signature requirement for the VBIOS? I could perform such a mod, but the requirement for a signed VBIOS puts me off.

What if timings are wrong, such as with this attempt: https://www.computerbase.de/forum/threads/projekt-rtx3070-um...

I guess that's not what they do, as they do not warn of a specific software configuration. Maybe this is why it is only compatible with 2080Ti GPUs?

They specify that the BIOS needs to be patched.

Damn I have one of these and it is still good shit. It's the best one I think, the Asus ROG OC edition sitting in a razer core x external GPU. I want this but does it make sense? I'm guessing it doesn't make sense as I'd have to send it there.

I'd prefer some instructions on how to do this myself.

This seems to have been going on for a while, Toms Hardware have articles on these cards going back a couple of years -

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/chinese-work...

It looks like for a while this was a way to work around the US tech bans in China. And cards with this mod pre-applied seem to be on ebay for about $500, which is cheaper than used 3090s from what I can see.

The procedure:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dWSWDOj6Ag

Here I am still rocking my 980 TI with 6GB :)

Honestly, I have a 2080ti that I use to play and I can tell you the math isn't there to upgrade it. It's much easier to just find a 3090/4090/5090 and keep pace with the software and hardware simultaneously.

The 2080 is really getting long in the tooth. You're probably better off buying a 3090/3090Ti with 24GB, if you can find one.

I have a 3090Ti, And it is still plenty performant for all the stuff I do. Especially considering modern pricing, I don't see me swapping for anything newer for a long time to come.

You can also get 3080 with 20G from China.

Is this like Runescape free armour trimming? You send your gpu, and get it back with 2x memory?

In Japan, these 22GB 2080 Tis have been showing up on flea-market apps for months now, and I suspect many of them may be coming from China. I’ve been wondering whether buyers realize they’re modified cards, not factory models.

There is an unusual number of nvidia GPUs being sold on ebay from china that has higher than usual memory.

One can only assume its modified cards, using the same technique mentioned by other commentators here.

Hopping on VastAI or Runpod (GPU renting websites) it is easy to spot a bunch of these cards. In terms of AI performance though it doesn't seem to be that good.

Ohhhh wow thats my card! The upgraded ones seem so be around 300 usd on Chinese apps. Is that worth it?

I wonder what the benchmarks are after the upgrade for that beast of a GPU.

I mean you could just use this, right?

https://downloadmoreram.com

When I was a kid software that would "double your RAM" was a thing. I remember thinking it was awesome, and at the same time feeling a huge sense of doubt that you could do that.

SoftRam. Raymond Chen wrote a great technical analysis on what it actually did: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20211111-00/?p=10...

MacOS does memory compression as standard since 2013. Linux has it, and iirc even Windows has it since 10.

Didn't DOS have it too?

Definitely not. DOS had disk compression utilities, but not RAM - there was no reasonable way to accomplish that at the time.

You may be thinking of "memory manager" utilities like QEMM and EMM386 which tried to maximize the amount of conventional memory available to programs (i.e. below the 640KB boundary). These programs worked primarily by causing drivers and TSRs to run in upper memory - they didn't actually provide more memory.

So that was what 13yr old me was doing modifying himem.sys to get some stupid game to launch. :-)

Oh right! I got disk compression and QEMM and EMM386 all mixed together in my now decades old memory (pun kind of intended) of DOS to produce that false recollection.

AI has kinda already gone through that phase, with quantisation you can effectively double your ram with almost no negative effects by going from fp16 to int8.

I’m surprised the concept of drivespace/double space died off. Maybe most files self-compress well from their native app, but I’m sure it’s not universal. OSs don’t seem to offer a prompt to compress relatively unused files and transparently uncompressed them on-demand.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DriveSpace

It did not, for example my /home is a btfrs mounted with compress=zstd:3

And some machines I’ve used, had swap on zram…

Similar idea to the "turbo" button in some old pentiums?

This exists for LLMs it is quantization.

Is there such a mod for RTX 3080 TI 12GB?

Even RTX 3060 12GB to 24GB would be interesting.

Can't wait for someone to realize there's a market for low-power/mid-spec 32GB GPU/TPU.

Local, tuned open weights is going to quickly become a thing.

If you reverse engineer it deep enough.

You can get 3080 20G from China.

What is the price for this upgrade?

Not sure but full card is around 300usd it seems…

Considering the price is listed at $0, it doesn’t inspire confidence to do business with this enterprise.

The 2080ti is what, 8 years old at this point? Upgrading the RAM is throwing good money after bad.

Depends on the price, surely?

A 2080Ti is approximately on a level with a 5060Ti (from a quick search), though obvs does not support the newer DLSS features etc. So to get a good upgrade you’re looking at a 5070 or better.

If this gives you a performance boost for less $$$ …

Huh. On my device it shows up as 0 AED. I wish it could be in $, I don't know how to exchange all that money

Sometimes this happens when someone uses a webshop platform to sell something with an unsteady or unknown price - it's $0 to put in the order (the webshop does not make you pay before forwarding you to the next step) and then you talk to a human about your requirements and price.

You simply add 3.67, multiply by .27, and then subtract 1.0. Easy.

Can I reverse that to get back to Fahrenheit, or does it only work in one direction?

0 AED = $0

No, the dollar is not an SI unit. 0 AED == -32 USD.

"The final cost depends on the availability of high-capacity memory modules."

It's childish behavior to hide the price of your services.

It does clearly state that the price is variable depending on what it costs them to source the memory modules.

And other pages give the costs for repairs & diagnostics, which are probably in line (it's effectively a type of 'repair').

(Although prices are in emirati dirhams, given they're based in Dubai)

You still need to know the price before you order. The price being "variable" is no excuse not to mention it.

Lucky they aren't actually taking orders anymore, then (due to the current elevated prices of RAM modules)

It's just as bad that they do not clearly indicate this on their website.

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