I recently bought a used 3070 for half of its market price because it's limited to 6GB of vRAM. It also has a 160ish Watts power limit, where it had a 270W limit originally. The seller is not the one who did this to the card and doesn't know anything about its story.
Both the images I uploaded are in that configuration. I used it for more than 30 minutes under load without any problem.
Here is what I was able to understand after some testing:
- The card is an MSI SUPRIM X and comes with dual BIOS. The "Gaming" one has been modified/flashed because the card has one or two faulty memory modules. I confirmed this by switching to the silent BIOS, which has not been altered and lets the card draw up to 270W. The card still has 8 memory modules physically.
- The card can run for a couple of minutes with the silent BIOS, but there are artifacts on screen even at idle. The GPU can clock to its boost clock and run Furmark 2 for a bit, after that, it blacks out.
- GPU-Z, 3D Mark, and HWInfo still read it as a 3070, with all the cores, but with only 6GB of memory and a 192-bit bus. When under load, both HWInfo and GPU-Z show that the throttling is due to the power limit. With HWinfo, I can see that "Total GPU power [% of TDP]" is the original one, and it's never more than 61%, but "Total GPU power (normalized) [% of TDP]" goes to 100% when it's using 160ish Watts.
- I know that with Ampere, you can't modify the BIOS, but you can flash a different one. I don't know how this could be possible, but the 6GB + 160W combination makes it really look like someone flashed a 2060 BIOS and used it to prevent the card from using the defective module(s). The 160W limit is most probably just an unwanted but inevitable consequence.
Overall, given the price I paid, I can't complain; it's an awesome custom too. I knew about the memory issue, but the power limit is very stringent: the card could perform 30/40% better, according to the benchmarks I did.
So, I'm here asking if there's something I can do to bring it back to the original 270W limit, or at least to the basic 220W of the RTX 3070, without removing the 6GB limitation. Even a different 2060 BIOS with a higher power limit could bring it over 215W, when paired with a power increase via the NVIDIA App.
With this BIOS, the power slider in the NVIDIA App and MSI Afterburner doesn't go beyond 100%.
I can't do a shunt mod.