A Brazilian modder going by fmklab has built a working RTX 3070 Ti with 16 GB of memory, a configuration NVIDIA reportedly planned years ago but never brought to market. Instead of bolting bigger memory chips onto a retail 3070 Ti board, Fabio, aka fmklab, started with an ASUS TUF RTX 3070 PCB, which already runs on regular GDDR6 rather than the GDDR6X found on the real 3070 Ti. The RTX 3070 GPU was pulled and replaced with an actual 3070 Ti chip, and the original Samsung HC14 (8 Gb) memory modules were swapped for HC16 (16 Gb) units to double capacity. GPU-Z still reported 8 GB after the swap, so fmklab used NVIDIA's BIOS Reader tool to work out which memory straps needed rewiring. A few tweaks later, the full 16 GB buffer was showing up.
Once that was sorted, MATS testing came back clean, and the card ran a local LLM using nearly the full 16 GB pool. Moreover, Call of Duty: Warzone paired with a Ryzen 7 9800X3D was pulling over 13 GB with no signs of instability. NVIDIA had reportedly explored a 16 GB RTX 3070 Ti as far back as 2020, and the idea resurfaced through leaked engineering samples before NVIDIA reportedly shelved it. Fabio's Superposition score landed a bit below typical retail 3070 Ti runs, likely because GDDR6 is slower than GDDR6X, a fair tradeoff for doubling the memory this way. The base RTX 3070 has seen similar VRAM mods before, but this looks like the first working recreation of this specific 16 GB 3070 Ti variant.