RTX 2080 Ti now gets a 22GB upgrade in Japan: the mod costs $282

A repair shop in Saitama, Japan, has started offering a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti 22GB upgrade, a mod that takes NVIDIA’s 11GB card and doubles its VRAM.

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The going price is reportedly ¥45,000, or about $282. That comes out to roughly $25 for each extra gigabyte of VRAM. And if you don’t already have a card to bring in, the same shop is also said to be selling pre-modded 22GB units for under $500. Reports also say the shop recently got hold of enough 2GB Samsung GDDR6 modules to convert 36 cards. That tracks with the market right now: high-VRAM GPUs are still pricey, DRAM costs are climbing, and older cards are getting another look from people running memory-heavy workloads.

The RTX 2080 Ti is a common candidate for this because its memory layout makes higher-capacity chip swaps more workable. Still, if you’re after cheap hardware with a lot of memory, this only really makes sense if you’re fine with advanced soldering, a modified BIOS, a voided warranty, the risk of damage, possible instability, extra heat, weaker long-term reliability, and the fact that gaming performance usually won’t move much anyway since the GPU core itself hasn’t changed.

You can get the service in Japan, and similar 22GB RTX 2080 Ti mods have also been reported in China and the UAE. Hong Kong-based eBay sellers are listing the cards at around $500.

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