Some of you may remember that some years ago, NVIDIA was rumoured to release a 16GB version of the RTX 3070 Ti, but that never became manifest and what we got instead was another 8GB card. Fast forward to today and, well, one modder isn’t content with the situation and built the card himself.
Brazilian YouTuber fmklab, also known by his name Fabian, literally constructed the RTX 3070 Ti 16GB himself. To do this, Fabian would, understandably, have to cannibalise and harvest parts from different GPUs, seeing that it technically doesn’t exist. Mercifully, however, he didn’t have to look far for a base.
By that, Fabian took the PCB of an old RTX 3070, the GPU core of an RTX 3070 Ti, and 16GB worth of Samsung GDDR6 memory chips. Some of you are probably wondering why they went with GDDR6 and not the GDDR6X memory used in the Ti version of the Ampere card.
The reason, as Fabian explains, is that 16 GB of GDDR6X would’ve been really expensive. So, they made a judgement call and decided to use the aforementioned Samsung GDDR6 chips, which in turn doubled the VRAM capacity from 8GB to 16GB. Of course, they also needed to configure the memory straps of the PCB before the Frankenstein card would be able to utilise the whole shebang of memory.
Skipping ahead a little, Fabian successfully got the card working, and even tested his Frankenstein RTX 3070 Ti 16GB initially by running a local LLM, to which it gobbled up nearly the entire 16GB pool. As for gaming, they put the card through its paces by running Call of Duty: Warzone, to which it consumed about 13GB of the memory pool. On a sidebar, it was paired with an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D and showed no signs of instability.
Suffice it to say, Fabian’s experiment was a huge success, albeit in a less timely fashion: the current Blackwell equivalent, the RTX 5070 Ti, will utterly blow the RTX 3070 Ti 16GB out of the water, as would the current RTX 5060 Ti 16GB.
(Source: Tom’s Hardware, fmklab via YouTube)
