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  • Is this like Runescape free armour trimming? You send your gpu, and get it back with 2x memory?
    by XCSme
  • 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.
    by drnick1
  • You can also get 3080 with 20G from China.
    by suprjami
  • 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.
    by Baeocystin
  • 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.
    by aliljet
  • Here I am still rocking my 980 TI with 6GB :)
    by squigz
  • The procedure:

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

    by amelius
  • 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.

    by Nursie
  • 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.

    by karim79
  • 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?

    by MayeulC
  • They specify that the BIOS needs to be patched.
    by rjh29
  • 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.)
    by userbinator
  • 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.
    by pjmlp
  • 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.

    by Retr0id
  • 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.

    by inigyou
  • 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.
    by trollbridge
  • 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...

    by chironjit
  • 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."

    by MYEUHD
  • Bummer. I have a box full of 2080s that are leftovers from a previous foray.
    by ssl-3
  • 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.

    by fg137
  • 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.
    by cubefox
  • 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.

    by Retr0id