16GB of VRAM on a 6 Year Old GPU? AMD RX 580 16GB

You can now buy a modded version of the AMD RX 580 2048SP with 16GB of VRAM. Not really sure why they would make this or think it's a good idea as the GPU is mostly too old for 4K.

Test bench specs (affiliated links):

In this video:

Check out the written version of this article:

Timestamps:
0:00 - Intro
1:05 - Unboxing
1:41 - Similar to Sapphire Nitro Card
2:14 - Disassembly
2:50 - Specs
3:08 - Fixing and plugging in
3:19 - In windows
3:30 - Utilizing 16GB
3:57 - GTA V
4:29 - RDR2
5:29 - RE3
5:59 - Forza Horizon 5 1080p
6:37 - Forza Horizon 5 1440p
6:52 - Forza Horizon 5 4K
7:00 - Flight Simulator
7:56 - Star Wars Jedi Survivor
8:27 - 3DMark TimeSpy
8:46 - Kinda useless card

[Reddison]

"Can't handle game at high settings"... running everything at 4K.

[aleksazunjic]

Laugh all you want, but these cards were going up to $1000 in the era of ETH craze. Especially when DAG went over 4GB and 8 GB cards could not support 2 DAGs.

[peterlarkin]

"All solid state design" Wowsers! No vacuum tubes or tape machines? Amazing.

[lemagreengreen]

Those crazy Chinese.

I looked into these weird cards, along with the 16GB RX580 2048SP's I found mentions of an Frankenstein RTX 3080M with 16GB of VRAM! I made a few enquiries to the various Aliexpress/Alibaba sellers and yeah it does exist, the price was crazy though.

I still kinda want one. Supposedly there is a 16GB 3070M 16GB version too but I couldn't ever find one. What I do know is that there is something called the Frankendriver project which makes these weird frankenstein high VRAM mobile Nvidia cards actually usable.

[cmdr_stretchedguy]

Use it for AI models, llama via ROCm setup, they typically use more VRAM and rely less on the raw speed of the GPU itself.

[RANDOMNATION]

Now this is my kind of content. subbed.

imo, it's wrong to call that an RX 580, when it is clearly an RX 570

[TheVanillatech]

Before Covid hit, but after the crazy Etherium mining boom, there was an eBay seller in Manchester UK selling Sapphire branded RX580's with 1 year warranty and refurbished by Sapphire themselves (new shrouds, fans + thermal paste) in a plain brown box for £65 each, £62 each if you bought more than 3.

I actually bought 3, because I needed a card for my kids PC and figured I'd have two spare decent cards to put into builds or just as backups.

A year or so later, the Covid price hike happened, and I sold those two spare cards for £300 each.

When I originally bought those three cards, I had around £40k in my savings account. Imagine if I'd have dumped the entire lot on every singe RX580, RX570, RX480 and RX470 those guys were selling! I'd be a millionaire.

[Fighter]

Use Lossless scaling, because if you got bottleneck form vram the upscales can't help you because it takes from vram so 8 GB won't help you in Forza horizon, Flight simulator nor Star Wars Jedi Survivors.

[gamingmeanslife]

2048sp is such a let down for an 16gbvram the original 2304sp is much better and i think this is a mining card that just refurbished to modified chips and boards and just putting some low quality heatsinks

[abesmissioncontrol]

Borderlands 3 launched with the parameter -notexturestreaming eliminates the game's notorious stutter by loading all the textures at once. Uses ~12GB of vram at 1440p and load times are longer (but stutter is almost completely gone).

Another older game with high vram usage is Far Cry 5 with the HD texture pack enabled. ~11GB at 1440p

[ThomasWinders]

The 580 was (still is) a 1080p card, absolutely not suitable for 2k or 4k gaming. When games like GTA V or rdr2 came out, 8gb of vram were almost overkill for 1080p gaming. I still have a 480 from Zotac, rocking on my daughter's rig.

[piberry]

could you test Stable Diffusion or any LLM, these kind of applications need that vram

[andipajeroking]

Rx 580 is a legend, still going strong ❤

[makouille]

for VRAM test you need proper workloads focussing VRAM directly while being less impacted by unified core counts or speed, Blender 3D can be rly good for that on some 3D scenes, OCCT also have a VRAM stress test, generative AI workload of all kind can also be rly good to test out VRAM with models that would not fit into 8GB

[imhafdhom]

These cards would be perfect for localised AI workload which must be the sole reason for their creation

[nalo]

this would sell like hotcakes back in 2017 when eth mining was booming

[Russell]

you should have tested EFT (Streets of Tarkov map) or Gray Zone Warfare, both use up to 24GB of VRAM at higher settings and resolution, maybe in another video you can test that?

[zkrned]

You could have also used frame scaling in GTA 5 to push the VRAM usage even further, like much further absurdly further even

[milescarter]

Large Language Models ('AI') sometimes need more RAM. To the point where a hacked APU BIOS to give the iGPU more framebuffer is a valid way to run larger language models.

[morsine]

tbh I think this just makes it useful in stable diffusion as the 16gb vram will be actually used