Youtuber expands Radeon RX 5600 XT memory to 12GB
Not long ago, Paulo Gomes and his team replaced the 8GB GDDR6 video memory on an MSI GeForce RTX 3070 graphics card with larger capacity chips, effectively doubling the capacity to 16GB. This modification yielded significant improvements, notably in the 1% and 0.1% low frame rates within games, such as an 8.9-times and 4.7-times increase, respectively, in “Resident Evil 4: Remastered” compared to before the alteration.
Recently, Paulo Gomes and his team undertook another graphics card expansion, this time targeting AMD’s Radeon RX 5600 XT graphics card.
Launched in early 2020 for the mid-range market, this graphics card features a Navi 10 XLE GPU with 2,304 stream processors and is equipped with 6GB of GDDR6 video memory and a 192-bit memory bus. AMD’s partners have subsequently released over 60 custom products, with the expansion-selected card hailing from PowerColor’s Red Dragon series.
On this occasion, Paulo Gomes and his team utilized Samsung’s 2GB 16 Gbps chips to replace the original 1GB 14 Gbps chips on the card. As the Radeon RX 5600 XT only has a 6GB video memory BIOS, which cannot directly support 12GB of video memory, they had to modify the BIOS using a specialized method, ultimately achieving success. The expanded Radeon RX 5600 XT graphics card is correctly recognized by the Windows operating system and supports official driver software, indicating that the card functions normally and can run any game or benchmarking software.
As many smartphones and laptops now have memory and storage soldered to the PCB, there are instances where the device’s performance is sufficient, but memory or storage capacity is lacking. This has led to a growing market for expansion services, which replace chips with larger capacity components. Given the current developmental trajectory, it is plausible that an increasing number of users will opt to expand their graphics card’s video memory capacity in the future.
