Refurbished GeForce RTX 2080 Ti with as much as 44 gigabytes of memory

The GeForce RTX 2080 Ti was once one of the best graphics cards around. Unfortunately, the glory days of this five-year-old graphics card have long since faded. Nevertheless, there was a devotee who wanted to revive the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and, through an ingenious intervention, increase the amount of memory of this Turing (the name of the architecture) masterpiece.

Admittedly, Nvidia has neglected the Titan series for the past few generations. The last model of the Titan series was released when the market was dominated by the Turing architecture. At that time, the Titan RTX graphics card was finally released. Why is this important, you might ask? The Titan RTX uses the same basic circuit board (PCB) as the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, which is the key reason why it was possible to increase the amount of memory from 11 GB to 44 GB.

The basic circuit allows for the installation of 24 GDDR6 memory modules, 12 on each side. The GeForce RTX 2080 Ti only uses 11 of the 12 front slots with 1GB GDDR6 memory chips. Even the Titan RTX doesn't use all 24 memory slots. The graphics card uses only 12 front slots with 2 GB GDDR6 chips. In the case of the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, the addict performed a replacement procedure according to school rules.

He replaced the existing 1GB memory modules with 2GB Samsung variants and filled the remaining slot on the front and all 12 slots on the back of the PCB. 48 GB of memory is available, but due to the design of the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and the narrower memory interface, we can only access 22 memory slots. The result is a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti with 44 GB of GDDR6 memory. GDDR6 prices have improved significantly, making it easier to finance such projects. A few years ago, a single 2GB Samsung GDDR6 memory module was selling for over $200 on Chinese platforms like AliExpress.

According to the GPU-Z and DirectX screenshot, the system detected all 44GB of memory.

Unfortunately, this remarkable modification is more or less superficial without much practical value. The refurbished GeForce RTX 2080 Ti boots successfully into the OS, but does not run in benchmarks or games. This is a known issue. In the past, we've seen similar graphics cards that have been remade by users, such as the GeForce RTX 2070 16GB or more recently the GeForce RTX 3070 16GB. Such projects are usually a lottery, as remanufactured graphics cards often do not support the proper vBIOS and drivers.