Question How does GDDR5 work?

[Spinningplates]

I recently purchased a generic RX 580 2048. It has 8gb GDDR5 memory, but how does the ram work? Is it several 8gb chips in parallel? Or is it supposed to be several 1gb chips? When I took it apart to apply thermal grease (temps was wonky) I noticed all the memory chips are 8gb Samsung modules and it looks like there are between 6 to 8 of them (memory's not so good (I think I need news chips in my brain lol)). If someone could please explain how the video memory works, I would appreciate it.

 

[hotaru.hino]

Memory is typically sold in bit capacity (my guess is it's more accurate, since a data "byte" may not mean the same thing depending on the application). 8Gb chips is 1GB. Memory in video cards also works essentially like RAID0. So you can also glean the memory interface width from how many chips there are.

Otherwise GDDR RAM works similarly to your bog standard DDR DRAM, just it's geared for higher throughput over latency.

 

[Spinningplates]

Memory is typically sold in bit capacity (my guess is it's more accurate, since a data "byte" may not mean the same thing depending on the application). 8Gb chips is 1GB. Memory in video cards also works essentially like RAID0. So you can also glean the memory interface width from how many chips there are.

Otherwise GDDR RAM works similarly to your bog standard DDR DRAM, just it's geared for higher throughput over latency.

Thanks for the explanation! It does have 8Gb 256Mx32 K4G80325FB-HC25. I was just a little bit confused. Now could you replace those with faster chips? Or would it even make a difference? In your opinion, I'm just curious.

 

[hotaru.hino]

Thanks for the explanation! It does have 8Gb 256Mx32 K4G80325FB-HC25. I was just a little bit confused. Now could you replace those with faster chips? Or would it even make a difference? In your opinion, I'm just curious.

I'm only guessing, but even if you could, it wouldn't operate faster since the memory controller wasn't designed to operate that fast.

 

[SkyNetRising]

Now could you replace those with faster chips? Or would it even make a difference?

Do you have equipment/knowledge/skills to replace bga chips?
That requires some serious equipment and micro surgery level skills.

 

[Bazzy 505]

if you're asking here, it means you are not qualified to do anything of the sort. Even disregarding the small issue of having the correct BGA stencil for the memory chip , or even sourcing the correct one and having decent enough hot air station, it takes more than soldering the chips in, there's a fair bit of other surface mount parts that need to be soldered in for the memory controller to be access the higher address space.

And that even presuming you have GPU firmware for this configuration is available to flash or you have the persistence and skills to spend weeks with in assembly to tweak custom FW.

This is not really the story like with 3060 8gb being modded to 3060 12gb by folks. Both configurations were regular SKUs and have low level firmware available, memory controller is the same and just needs a few resistors soldered to enable 2 more channels for the extra chips.