Modders have managed to unlock the full 256-bit bus on a Radeon RX 5600 XT allowing them to upgrade the four years old GPU with 16GB of VRAM. The performance saw a notable bump, especially when putting in some manual overclocking.
Paulo Gomes is at it once again with a new mod, this time for a Radeon RX 5600 XT. Today’s exercise saw the team swap the RX 5600 XT’s original 6GB of VRAM for 16GB of Samsung’s GDDR6. If you are wondering, how is it possible to have 16GB instead of the usual VRAM doubling, the reason is simple. Out of the box, the card only runs a 192-bit bus, but the modders managed to unlock the entire 256 bits.
The card was fitted with eight 2GB GDDR6 chips taken from a defective 6800 XT. But unlike previous VRAM mods, this was a bit harder to pull off as it required a modification of the BIOS code. The team had to modify the bits of the hexadecimal code that enables the remaining bus width. This is possible since the RX 5600 XT uses a Navi 10 GPU, which is also found on the RX 5700, plus a custom-design PCB supporting a 256-bit wide bus.
At first, things didn’t go as planned with the card delivering half the performance of its original state. This issue was resolved by using a different BIOS from Gigabyte, allowing the card to gain 11% more performance compared to stock. This performance uplift is probably due to the larger bus width since both 8GB and 16GB mods netted the same increase.
But that’s not all. The team continued experimenting with this 2020 mid-range card through some overclocking. After pushing all the sliders to the max, the card achieved 5,115 points in the Unigine Superposition benchmark. In other words, the combination of a wider memory bus and overclocking improved performance by a whopping 29%. Funnily enough, the card was tested on a Ryzen 5 5600G system with only 8GB of system RAM.
Unfortunately, this type of mod doesn’t come cheap. Aside from the specialised machinery and skills, you still need replacement chips all while risking permanent damage in the process. Nevertheless, it shows how the modding community manages to find solutions and improve products beyond their original state. Congratulations to Paulo Gomes and his team for this exploit.
