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r7 260x/360 memory question

kokodin

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Joined
Aug 29, 2023
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Hello, i have a very stupid idea, as an adult with disposable income i can try to realise. it concerns breaking 3 old graphic cards just to make one wird one , that likely wouldn't even work.
I always wondered how much of a bottleneck weak gcn 2 graphic card might have besed on how much vram it has, and if it is possible to bios mod ram controller like it was once done on those rx 460 or 470 with 4gb bioses and 8gb of memory soldered on. and radeon r7 260x or 360 seems to be perfect giena pig.
Obviously there is no pcb out there that would support more chips of the same density, and only cards with the same core, probably different variant, that had 4gb were those workstation w5100 and w4300 cards , but those has cut down core and power compared to r7's sharing the core package . workstation cards also came with 8 dram chips while pedestrian model has only 4.
Getting pretty good memory of double density is probably the simplest thing, there is currently a sale on used r5 430 with 2 8Gb chips each in the same gddr5 package. I tested them to 1500mhz on that oland untill it started artifacting at 1550 , but i mostly did that to prove one kid that gt 710 is not a graphic card. My slightly overclocked oland r5, had 1000mhz on the core and 1500 on the memory, slight undervolt and increased power limit, but it did twice the framerate than gt710 with similar vram, but double the price on used market around where i live.
Getting used or memory broken r7 260/360 wouldn't be mucz of a problem either .

The only question is, can Tobago pro, Bonaire pro or Bonaire xtx handle such chips.
Since i couldn't google any boardviews for 260/360 cards i can't even confirm pcb has all connections required.
but i am really curious how a 4gb version of that gpu stack against rx 460/560, given the gpu is direct replacement with just newer shaders , video encoders and more ram (on a smaller node too)

There are obviously some screenshots floating around with 4gb 360's but that most likely effect of nime drivers changing firepro cards into radeons.

So what do you think is this completly drunk talk or is there any merit in it? Memory controller technically can handle 4gb of vram , why not give it to it?

This is not a question about econoics or workmanship, because i can handle almost anything other than bios moding myself, it wouldn't be the firstbga job, and you have to have a hobby.

Well i was able to find 260x boardview and datasheet for the r5 430 memory chips.
and there is no missing traces or extra bits, Both memory chips 4manabit used on 260x and 8 megabit used on oem 430 have exact the same pinout, the only difference is a12 and a13 address pin, instead of a12 only? but memory controller can handle both 4gb and should be able to talk with this ram in kind of reversed chinese gpu ram scam way. i can't find any bios editor that allow you to change ram size for this generation of gpu's
 
Well since i still can't make head or tails with how to read memory tables i did 2nd best thing i could do in situation like this, i found a bios with exact memory setup i want to make.
i was also able to find AtomTool on the internet so swaping memory region seems to be quite easy, even if i don't understand a bit of it.
Well the AtomBiosReader seems to at least identyfi the memoty table version as being the same, and both cards use the same bus width, and 4 chips so thanks to work of ASUS who released r7 240 with 4gb (my 2gb r5 430 dells came with the same exact memory) of gddr5 in 2017/2018 i might have my unicorn bonaire r7 260x with 4gb of vram, which would be a total waste of effort and time but an unicorn non the less.
i almost want to mod hd 7790 instead just because , but i go with the same bios the catd came with for now
 
I was doing some tests prior to moving vram between donor cards, and it seems multiple ods might be stacked against me.
What was i expecting to happen was similarly to taking one gigabyte bios let's say for only samsung 2gb configuration, swaping memory region from 1gb elpida only card, and fixing the checksums, and that should be it since both memory regions are 733 hex bytes long it just work. card boot up windows see only 1gb and games runs ok (plus 5% oc on top)
But in a scenario when i take memory region from different gpu core. even if vram-info patch is the same revision, memory type, and bus width are the same, card halts execution with no debug info, basically ghosting me in the system. and remind bticked untilli give it one of working bioses back.
it is a bit rustrating to work with a card that crashes without crash report, because you can't tell if the memory patch itself was bad or was it caused by missaligned rest of the bios.
i will try to find some asus bios that would work on this gigabyte gpu, because atomtool refuses to open gigabyte bioses for r7 and it seems it is particularly picky about 260x series anyway, but works with asus bioses. so if i find one working 1gb asus bios, i can at least rule out ram patch length being an issue because unless gigabyte asus put multiple ram chip variants in theyre bioses so the patch itself is longer and swaping it back to shorter specyfic one might show if the offset is the problem (with or without bios resising by atomtool) or oland ram patch on bonaire gpu itself .

it would be nice to be able to find decoding tips on revision 02:01 VRAM_Info patches so i could edit density of the memory by itself
 
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