We've seen a few unreleased Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti graphics cards with 20GB VRAM appear in the wild, with one engineering sample popping up just before the holidays last year. Another Redditor who just happens to have one in their repertoire of tech isn't treating this rare GPU with kid gloves, however. They've gone all-out by modding the card to "see what the actual limits of [its] design" are after initially replacing the thermal paste and heatsink pads on the GPU die earlier this month.
This is a bold and brave experiment, shared in full detail on Reddit, that explains both the rationale and the results. The user, ChintzyPC, explains in an earlier post that they'd acquired the card from a friend who had bought two identical engineering samples for $200 apiece, although their "friend" charged them $700 for the spare. Like earlier samples we've seen online, this GPU features the same Founders Edition shell, with a boost in VRAM from 12GB in the released model (which we reviewed back in 2021) to 20GB, although with a narrower 320-bit memory bus compared to the original model.
