Modder Beats NVIDIA To Making A GeForce RTX 2060 With 12GB Of GDDR6 Memory
If you're a hardware enthusiast of a certain age, you may recall a time when upgradeable memory on graphics cards was commonplace. This writer himself recalls carefully installing SDRAM packages in DIP sockets to upgrade his ATI Rage from 2MB to 4MB so he could run Windows 95 in 1280×1024 resolution on his fancy new (terrible) LCD monitor.
As a rule, video cards these days don't have upgradeable memory. Modern memory hardware simply requires a level of signal integrity beyond what typical socketed packages can provide, and while it's possible to create sockets that can supply the required signal insulation, doing so would add a lot of price and complexity to the whole GPU production process.
That doesn't mean it's completely impossible to upgrade the memory on a modern GPU, though. If you have the tools, the time, the patience, and a very steady hand, it's possible to remove the memory packages from a graphics card and then solder down higher-density models. That is, in fact, exactly what Russian YouTuber (and experienced hardware modder) VIK-on has done once again, this time with a GeForce RTX 2060. If you speak Russian, you can check out the video for yourself:
If you don't speak Russian, well, you're in the same boat we are. We were able to glean some details from the video anyway, thanks to our eyeballs—and YouTube's auto-translate feature. It seems VIK-on was given one or more junk laptops with non-removable GPUs, and he removed the 2GB GDDR6 packages from that or those systems and placed them on this clearly well-used RTX 2060.
Still, he doesn't expect much, and we don't either—just as we said when we first heard about this hare-brained scheme from NVIDIA. Indeed, scuttlebutt has been saying for awhile that Nvidia will re-release the RTX 2060, this time with 12GB of memory. Why? Well, probably because Mean Green can sell every single one of them at almost whatever price it wants to ask. Adding on 12GB of memory probably just helps to make it look like they're not actively ripping people off.
The last we've heard about the official 12GB RTX 2060 was a filing with the Eurasian Economic Commission by Gigabyte about two weeks ago. That would seem to indicate that this product is actually headed to market, but there's been no official word from anyone. We'll let you know if we hear anything, so keep an eye on HotHardware.
