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

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

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.

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.

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

they say if youre early RandomgaminginHD replies to your comment

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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!

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.

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...

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Nice. A 12gb 980ti would be interesting.

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I have respect for these type of mad engineers.

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 =)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Random has us watching a spreadsheet 😂 But you could read the phonebook and I'd be here 😂

Lovin' the videos, bud. ♥️🔥

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Praise the King! ;-)

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

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

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

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.

Well I never! Never have I ever seen anyone remove and replace the memory modules on a GPU with higher capacity memory modules! Surprised it even worked! Though yeah. 4GB VRAM is not enough anymore IMO especially with modern titles becoming VRAM intensive.

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.

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

Its weird to see an old 'peak' and watch how it deals with modern stuff.

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

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

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

Those Founders Edition coolers look so cool. 😅

Where this would really shine is digital effects and video editing, the increased Vram would have made a huge difference. I wonder how he did it? surely it can't be as simple as re-soldering chips.. imagine a 32GB 4080!

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!

Shoulda pushed the graphics settings higher too

My trusty Zotac PowerAmp! GTX 980 has been my trusty companion since 2015ish until 2022.. sadly early on 2023 it showed its age, keep getting crashed and gray screen error. So had to retire it and bought PowerColor Red Devil Edition RX 6700 XT :)

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?)

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.)

I think about the only thing these companies would ever care about regarding ES chips/cards is if you got a hold of something before release of a new product. You don't need to worry about modded cards or ES of 6-7 years old tech haha.

The 980M in my laptop has 8go. It's *definitely* a lifesaver !

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.

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.

What I would be able to do with 8 vram. Not that my 980 oc is bad, but man, the 4gb vram is really catching up with it these days. More VRAM for more rendering, yes please. Also, thanks for showing Forza Horizon 5, been wanting to get the game, but wasn't sure how well the 980 would perform.

Its so that most games safe vram with taking out minor details, so you wouldnt really see that much of a difference but there is one. I saw a video by a german KZfaqr who explained this.

That excel bit was really painful.

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

I'm confused as to what legal concern there was about posting this video. People can and do mod their hardware. It's not illegal.

Thinking about doing this to my 3080, got meme'd hard with this shit.

I'm surprised how low the listed power draw is, I'd have thought a former flagship with extra ram would consume closer to 300w then 130w.

I once met a guy who worked at Nvidia at the time and he had a GeForce 460 with 14GBs or Vram. I think it was for some specific autoCAD type thing.

Greetings from Texas! ⭐️

People have been doing this with the 2080 Ti, 3070 (to prove a point about why it should have had more VRAM) and other cards for the past few years now.

Why is your first instinct about the legality of owning it? That is something NVidia has very little control over in practice, except maybe making the release drivers incompatible with unknown memory configurations

or get Titan X (Maxwell) with 12GB VRAM, (doubled 980ti)... but pretty rare this one 8GB, nice catch