in this unassuming USPS box that looks like somebody wiped their shoes on it there is
a highly unique RTX 3070. and in today's video we're going to do some stuff to it
[Music]
okay the person who sent this clearly lost the original packaging I feel you that's fine it
happens all the time [Music] oh it's a gain word card Phoenix now this RTX 3070 that was
very kindly sent over by a Discord member may look like a common Garden RTX 3070 with its
blow through cooler design and labels saying it is a normal RTX 3070 but no it's a whole
lot more than that the owner sent this card to a technician who desoldered the standard
8 gigs of gddr6 and replaced it with 16 gigs and apparently the card works I am so excited
to see how it runs but before I drop this in a system I just have to take the cooler off and
admire plugged slots 69's handiwork hmm thank you oh no they had to go through the warranty
void if removed sticker to get to the PCB and if that doesn't void your warranty I'm pretty
sure soldering an extra 8 gigs of video memory to the PCB would probably do the trick [Music]
just lift that off and then that is the back of the PCB which looks a lot
less Savaged than I was expecting clearly stuffed slots really knows their way around
a soldering iron [Music] oh I think we're gonna have to unscrew the i o Shield as well
[Music] oh yes that came loose very easily oh the little fan
connector is by Nemesis I'm gonna have to censor this process [Music]
oh there we go yeah I don't know to my untrained eye I am real impressed with what I'm looking at
here from the imager album it seemed like all of the memory slots were filled to start with
and then plugged slots 69 giggity desoldered all of them and replaced them with higher capacity
modules so every single one of these modules is new it was replaced after the fact it just looks
like it came like this from the factory this is real impressive stuff to me the only sign
of kerfuffle is an RGB connector that seems to have had a house fire I really want to see this
16 gig 3017 work so I'm gonna re-clothe it now and then drop it in a system and see how it runs
thank you [Music] now apparently the card is a little bit temperamental so we do have to be
nice to it today um I I think it should be fine on initial boot we just have to do things like four
score frequencies and stuff but before we get into that let's see what happens when we turn it on
the power supply is not plugged in okay if it doesn't turn on now then I should be worried
okay oh I like that RGB implementation like around the fan here it's flashing a little
it's continuing to have a seizure fixing the seizures was relatively straightforward all
I had to do was enable boost locking in evga's X1 Precision Tool and then it was just kind of
fine apparently the MacGyver car does not handle core frequency fluctuations well oh
and would you look at that the drivers have no problem identifying the 16 gigs of video
memory on our RTX 3070 so with the car just being fine I'm gonna test it in a couple of
phases starting off with the standard game gamut phase cool even GTA 5 recognizes it
although doesn't seem particularly interested in using any of it yay GTA 5 is running uh you can
see we're very much using the 16 gigs of memory in this old game at 1440p so I've even cranked
the advanced settings in GTA 5 and I think that's why we're hovering around 120 frames per second
wow we're actually getting less memory allocation than we did with GTA 5. that's
interesting now I am using 1440p High settings because those are the settings I would use for
Battlefield 5 with a 3017 normally they just make sense to me temperature wise this card
is doing very well uh with its 240-ish watts of usage we're just getting about 55c that's
good wait I quickly want to jump up to 4K to see what that does for the memory
allocation okay so 4K is added about two gigs of memory utilization and actually at
this resolution the 370 is still doing great uh we're getting about 100 frames per second
oh it didn't save with my fancy car that I stole okay well I guess what can you do
so with cyberpunk running at 1440p high settings at 1440p it's using the same
amount of video memory as Battlefield 5 did at 4K which makes me curious what happens
when we bump this up to 4K well the first thing that apparently happens is the frame rate drops
a lot the 3070 does not like 4k on cyberpunk at least at high settings and interestingly in terms
of video memory usage it's barely cracked up I then bravely cranked the preset up to Ray tracing
Ultra at 4K which finally made the graphics card realize it had more than eight gigs available
apparently but despite our colossal reserve of memory the game's still running like a sloth
on cough syrup at which point I decided to drop in a standard pathetic 8 gig version of the RTX
3070 as a point of comparison unfortunately the only version I have available is this
Dell RTX 3070 which may not be the finest example of one but we'll see how it goes
for the Dell 3070 I did also do the Boost lock mode thing in EVGA just to have more apples to
apples comparison and one thing to note is that the core frequency is lower it's not pegged at
two gigahertz like the other card is so hopefully that doesn't impact the performance too much and
with that reduction in core frequency you can see that our power drill is also a smidgen lower than
it was with the other card but apparently the core frequency difference didn't matter much because
the results were basically within the margin of error not only with GTA 5 but also Battlefield
5 and cyberpunk and with cyberpunk I had to crank it all the way up to 4K Ultra Ray tracing
settings which are frankly obscene settings for the additional video memory to make a difference
and it's not like it was playable on the 16 gig variant so it feels a bit like comparing degrees
of super cholera which I think means moving on to phase two of the testing finding a game which the
16 gig version can run well but curb Stomps the 8 gig variant okay the owner mentioned that escape
from tarkov is one of the few games they could get higher than 8 gigs of video memory utilization and
that's clearly Happening Here with 1440p medium settings tarkov is a thirsty boy now I do want
to try High texture settings at 4K but I can't change that in raid so let me go to an offline
raid with the higher settings and see what happens holy crap okay so with the the textures turned up
to high at 4K we're maxing out the video memory no that's pretty crazy I mean that is allocation but
still a very big number and it was easy to get to like the first game we looked for was the one that
did the thing this is streets which is the new map and it's it's known to give some pretty terrible
frame rates but this isn't too bad even at these settings that I definitely wouldn't use for escape
from tarkov even with a more powerful graphics card interestingly with escape from tarkov despite
wildly different memory allocation at these high settings the performance is basically
the same also with the 8 gig variant in the system there's significantly higher normal Ram allocation
interesting I then moved over to Microsoft flight simulator which in no way involved the learning
curve for me to figure out how to play again here using 4K High settings Microsoft flight simulator
didn't seem to care about the extra video memory either it seemed to be the same story using
control with 4K and irresponsibly high Ray tracing settings although on the 8 gig card the plant
did freak out a bit and on close inspection the textures weren't quite as crisp but in terms of
subjective performance they felt indistinguishably terrible crisis remastered at 4K very high
Ray tracing settings ran slightly better on the MacGyver card but in practice they felt and looked
the same at which point I felt like I had to up the ante with some truly unoptimized piles crap
okay that's interesting with The Last of Us running at 1440p ultra settings they're
running surprisingly similarly although the 8 gig version is noticeably more stuttery but I
was expecting the game to run like a jammed fax machine on the 8 gig card it seems like
they finally patched the game to a point of borderline usability and finally moving over to
Resident Evil 4 but again at 1440p 8 gig textures look at that the 8 gig card is struggling quite a
bit more than the MacGyver variant although it is definitely still playable with the standard card
which brings me to the end of my time with this insanely well done 16 gig mod of the RTX 3070.
thank you very much for sending it over and until the next video thank you for watching bye [Music]
thank you