Modders are breathing new life into the Nvidia GTX 970 with an 8GB upgrade

1 month ago 3

painted yellow nvidia gtx 970 graphics card

Summary

A unique mod upgrades an Nvidia GTX 970 from 4GB to 8GB VRAM, almost doubling benchmark scores.
Modder Paulo Gomes tweaks GPU resistors and memory modules to achieve the upgrade.
The modified GTX 970 outperforms a stock GTX 1060 with 6GB VRAM in benchmark tests.

Usually when we talk about GPU upgrades, we mean replacing one card with another. But what if you could take a card and modify it so that it had more VRAM? It's still the same card, just with a few modifications to help it keep up with the times.

It may seem impossible at first, but one modder has proven everyone wrong. They've taken an Nvidia GTX 970 (yes, the one that released back in 2014) and given it a VRAM upgrade from 4GB to 8GB, and it almost doubles the benchmarking scores of the stock build.

Someone performs a manual 8GB VRAM upgrade to an Nvidia GTX 970

As spotted by Tom's Hardware, this cool feat was performed by Brazilian modder Paulo Gomes. You can check out the video documenting the modification above; while the original video is in Portuguese, it does have automatic dubbing enabled, making it a lot easier to follow along with what's going on via the AI voiceover.

So, how does Paulo do it? To double the memory, they took out all of the original 512MB memory modules and replaced them with 1GB modules. However, the Nvidia GTX 970 was never designed with this upgrade in mind, so they had to tweak the GPU's resistor so that it could properly detect and handle the larger VRAM.

After a lot of soldering and some fascinating insight as to how GPUs work, they finally manage to get the card to recognise that it has 8192MB of VRAM to play with. Then came the real test: comparing the upgraded GPU's Superposition Benchmark score with its original one. Well, the 4GB stock version scored 866, and the upgraded variant brought in a score of 1576, meaning that the mod almost doubled the benchmark score alone.

What's even more impressive is that the modified GPU managed to beat out a stock Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 with 6GB of VRAM, which scored 1575 in the same test. Yes, that's right; the modified GTX 970 won by a single benchmark point over the GTX 1060. That's amazing stuff.

If you'd like to learn more about this card, it actually has a storied history of infamy among consumers. We listed it as one of Nvidia's biggest controversies of all time and one of the most controversial PC product designs after people didn't exactly get what the card advertised it had.

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