Hello.
I have a question.
Almost every graphic card (in middle price range) comes in two versions (for example, with 4gb or 8gb vram), of course the 4gb versions are just stripped of the half vram chips, PCB, graphic processor and power section is the same as 8gb version (half of the vram slots is just empty in 4gb version). My question is: Can I solder in more vram in some way? Do I need BGA soldering station for it? Can I add/replace the vram with other manufacturer chip?
I cant find any information about it on the internet so I thought I will ask here.
Sorry for my poor English.

 

You can solder it on. But it is waste of time and money.

In the old days (ISA, PCI, AGP) cards, you might have a card where memory chips were either in the plastic sockets or some chips were soldered on the card and there would be a couple empty plastic sockets. So people would go and buy chips and put them into the plastic sockets to get more vram.

Now. To get back to modern cards. The midrange cards you are talking about almost never use their full vram. The 4 and 8 GB version are gimmicks. These days the chips cost so little (particularly bought in large volume) that sticking a few extra chips on the board cost almost nothing, then they tell us that we have this huge amount of vram, but any person who buys midrange card will never use that much vram.
The other thing about midrange cards is how they access that vram. All those cards are purposefully castrated to use 128-bit memory access, for comparison the gamer cards use 192 and 256-bit access.

From personal experience.
1. I have GTX460 2GB vram. Back then gtx460, 470 and 480 were gamer cards. I have never had to use the 2GB my card has. At most I have seen 1 GB used.
2. I have GTX750Ti SC 2GB. This is midrange card, 128-bit memory access. Again, I have not seen where I came even close to reaching the limit of the 2 GB that my card has.

If you want to save money, I would suggest getting refurbished cards from EVGA, they have 1 year warranty. You save a nice chunk of change or you use the saved money toward a better card and don't waste the money on stupid vram that you never use.
http://www.evga.com/Products/ProductList.aspx?type=8

 

Thank you for your reply.
The gimmick with the amount of vram you are talking about is of course true, in most cases.
BUT, there are exceptions. For example, my card which is Asus R9 270x 2gb (256bit) don't have enough vram for 1080p/2016, there are more and more games that uses way more than 2gb, the vram usage is even beyond 4gb in some cases. Because of the lack of memory card gets hiccups, throttling etc (when using more vram than it has). There was 4gb version of this card also so I thought that maybe there is a way to cheaply upgrade it.
Thanks for advice of buying refurbished evega cards, the prices look very nice but unfortunately I live in Europe (taxes etc).
And still, out of sheer curiosity, I would like to know if adding vram chips would work on modern gpu's.

 

Ok i know already, if anyone is interested: Yes you can do it!

33:30

 

Yeah, the first thing I said is that it can be done.

On my GTX750Ti SC 2GB I run two SETI@Home tasks and play EVE Online at the same time, I used 1.2 GB when I did that yesterday. Each SETI task takes about 256MB of vram. If I turn off SETI tasks and set the game to highest quality, I will likely use 1 GB of vram so the 2 GB that my card has is more than enough for my needs.

I have not bought ATI/AMD video cards in the past 10 years because they just have too many software issues for me to deal with. I am lazy, I am not interested in buying a product that requires a lot of additional investment of my time to get it to run the way I want it to run, this little rant mostly applies to getting the cards to run SETI@Home, that is why I now run NVIDIA cards, much better software support for the product.

However. If the AMD card does things you want, the way you want them, then, obviously, you have selected the right product for your needs and I have no desire to convince you to switch to a different product.

From the benchmark I just looked real quick, your R9 270X is comparable to GTX760. So your card is not really midrange, it is more starter gamer card, that also explains 256 bit memory access. It is step up from my GTX750. I am not sure what problems you have with 1080p, you should have enough "horsepower" for it, but it might be software or hardware optimization. I don't know what games you play, but have you actually run gpu-z during your game play to see how much vram you are using?

 

http://www.tweaktown.com/tweakipedia/90/much-vram-need-1080p-1440p-4k-aa-enabled/index.html
I don't have problems with it per se, my gpu is just pretty weak and I wanted to know if moding it is possible and if it would be reasonable way to extend its usability in future time.
In the link I gave you you can see how much vram can modern games eat in 1080p.

 

http://www.tweaktown.com/tweakipedia/90/much-vram-need-1080p-1440p-4k-aa-enabled/index.html
I don't have problems with it per se, my gpu is just pretty weak and I wanted to know if moding it is possible and if it would be reasonable way to extend its usability in future time.
In the link I gave you you can see how much vram can modern games eat in 1080p.

Ok. I see your point.

Interestingly. I actually use 4k 40" monitor at 60 Hz using DisplayPort connection. I loaded the EVE Online that I play, at high quality with AA disabled I got 0.8 GB vram being used when I docked in station. With AA enabled I got 1.2 GB being used when docked in station. Like I said before, I don't play FarCry, etc., so I never felt the need for that much vram. However, the numbers they show for 4k resolution in the article are huge and I can see that if you are playing those games at 4k, then you would want to explore how you could mod a lower tire card to run with the higher tire card for a little investment in parts and your time. If you succeed, you might even make a small business out of it.