Two things before we start—one, the video above uses an AI voiceover and it's rubbish, so be prepared for the RTX 4090 to be referred to as the RTX four-thousand-and-ninety a whole lot. And two, you're about to see how that card can be outfitted with an astonishing 48 GB of VRAM and come out of the experience working correctly, a process I only thought possible with dark arts, witchcraft, and a sacrifice made to the silicon gods.
But whaddaya know, it turns out it's actually reasonably achievable, as demonstrated by our host, Vik-on (via Videocardz). While plenty of modders have strapped more memory modules to graphics cards in the past, it's usually been a technical exercise, rather than creating a genuinely useable GPU at the end of it.
Vik-on, however, looks to have been able to double the VRAM capacity of their RTX 4090 successfully with relative ease. Key to this achievement is a leaked Nvidia BIOS, which gives our modder the ability to force support for different capacities and amounts of memory modules using Ada-generation chips.
Making the graphics chip itself play nicely with more memory, though, is only half the battle. The new modules also need to physically connect with the chip, but luckily, Chinese manufacturers have apparently been modifying replacement PCBs and coolers suitable for this purpose.
Here's where things get a little murky, as Vik-on suggests that these modified PCBs are already available in RTX 5090 form for conversion into RTX 6000 Pro cards, potentially to beat current export restrictions. Anyway, according to Vik-on they exist, and the RTX 4090 versions can be used (in conjunction with the chip from an existing MSI RTX 4090 Suprim, in this case) with cheap GDDR6X memory modules to create a monster of a graphics card.
Oh sure, you'd need to get handy with a heat gun, a temperature-soldering station, a fair bit of flux and dielectric grease, some stencils, etc, plus you'd need some excellent hand eye co-ordination, the components themselves in the first place, and...
Look, I said it was easier than I thought, not that it was easy in general. I'm used to seeing dime-a-dozen "we added more VRAM to XXX GPU" stories, and they almost all end the same way. The card doesn't work, or at least, not in the way you might have hoped.
This particular GPU, though, looks like it survived the modding process quite nicely. In terms of money spent, Vik-on says that they bought the donor card for 180,000 rubles, the replacement PCB and cooler for 15,000, and while they used their own spare GDDR6X for the memory modules (everyone's got some lying round, haven't they?), the equivalent amount costs 24,000 rubles in total.
Which, converted into freedom bucks, would be about $2,583. Hmm. That's significantly more expensive than many RTX 5090s, all for the sake of creating a last-generation card with mega amounts of VRAM strapped to it.
If you're still crypto mining for some godforsaken reason, or experimenting with local LLMs for some godfor... I mean, for research purposes, then perhaps it would make sense. For us gamers, though, it's a pretty cool thing to see from a technical perspective, but probably something still best left to the experts. The more you know, ey?
1. Best overall: AMD Radeon RX 9070
2. Best value: AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT 16 GB
3. Best budget: Intel Arc B570
4. Best mid-range: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti
5. Best high-end: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090
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