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I modded an RTX 3050 8GB card from x8 lanes to x16 lanes!

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1.6K views 42 replies 11 participants last post by  Titan5150  
#1 ·
I modded an RTX 3050 8GB card from x8 lanes to x16 lanes by just adding some capacitors to the board, and it cost me less than $2.00...

I read that the 3050 and the 3060 used the same PCB and that the lanes for all X16 are on the RTX3050 board; the only thing missing was some caps, and I can say this is correct!

The open pads are where the caps are needed...


Electronic device Display device Technology Electronics Computer hardware
Electronic device Display device Electronics Technology Computer hardware


I had read that it would give little to no boost in performance, but that is wrong...

Blue is before, and orange is after the mod!

Technology Screenshot Software Diagram


Not too bad for less than $2.00 dollars and an hour of time...;)
 
#2 ·
Well it can be wrong. It will be wrong if you are being bandwidth limited. My suspicion is your pcie4 is running at pcie3 for some reason and adding back the 8 lanes removed the bandwidth limit. A single pice3 device will throw the whole machine back to pcie3. So a single older m.2 drive, etc.. might even be extra cheap gear that is sold as pcie4 but can’t actually quite hack it.
 
#3 ·
It's a great little video card, It's an MSI RTX3050 Gaming X 8GB OC, bought it for $150 bucks. My motherboard is a Z390 Aorus Master, which is a PCIe Gen3 x16 board, and the video card was PCIe Gen4 x8 running at PCIe Gen 3 x8, After the mod, it is now running at PCIe Gen3 x16, which is giving it a performance boost...

If put on a PCIe Gen4 motherboard, it could be running at PCIe Gen4 x16 speed. I guess this makes me one of the very few people on the planet who have an RTX3050 8GB x16 video card?
 
#4 ·
GPUZ showing it at X16?
Im just wondering how adding caps for smoothing to data lines that are laser cut inside the die is adding pci-e lanes.
Maybe the performance difference your seeing is just from replacing the thermal compound.
 
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#5 · (Edited)
Yes, GPU-Z show x16 when before the mod it only shown x8, In fact, after I added the caps and booted up I was bumbed out because it was only showing x8 lanes and my bench mark was unchanged, BUT, two days later it hit me that I had a PCIe SSD card in the second slot, and with my motherboard if you have a card in the second slot the first and second split the x16 lanes making both cards run at x8 lanes, so I jumped up and moved the card in the second slot down to the third slot and booted, AND it was working!!!

The traces are all there, you can see them in the pictures above, I had read that the 3050 and the 3060 use the same PCB and that the traces are unchanged between them, I also read that the 3050 and the 3060 are the same chip and the 3050 got the chips that weren't good enough for the 3060 and nvidia just disabled whatever was needed to bring the chip down to the 3050 specs. the only thing changed was no caps on those 8 traces on the PCB. AND sure enough, it was all correct!

And I ran across a youtube video in Portuguese titled "Transformando RTX 3050 x8 em 16x： a incrível jornada para lugar nenhum". Watching the video, it sure seemed like they were saying modding the 3050 was easy, and you just needed to add some caps to the empty pads on the traces...

The bump in performance is real, I use "fan control" so my card always stays cool, even over-clocked with a full load, and I always keep an eye on temps...

I know how it sounds too easy to be true, But I'll be damned, It IS true! :D (y)
 
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#10 ·
Titan5150 said:
I had read that it would give little to no boost in performance, but that is wrong...
Click to expand...
If the test uses more than what comfortably fits in 8GiB of VRAM or needs to swap assets often, then yes PCI-E bandwidth will matter.

That's the irony of many of these lower end GPUs...they need more PCI-E bandwidth because they don't have enough VRAM to keep things local, but they are also capped on lanes for segmentation reasons.

What does the AIDA64 GPGPU test show?

bmgjet said:
Im just wondering how adding caps for smoothing to data lines that are laser cut inside the die is adding pci-e lanes.
Click to expand...
It couldn't. The implication is that the lanes were never disabled at the silicon level, just not connected at the PCB level.

Zfast4y0u said:
Pull ssd out, return gpu to original slot and you should have 16 lanes as well, your soldering did nothing i assume
Click to expand...
It's hard to see from these pictures, but those traces look like they aren't connected without the caps in place. This is how lanes would be disabled or enabled at the PCB level.
 
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#15 · (Edited)
If this is real, then shame on NVIDIA for intentionally limiting the bandwidth on RTX 3050 to x8 lanes and trying to save $2, probably even less than that for them.

In my old PC I have RTX 3060 12GB and I chose this gpu because it seemed like the best fit for this PC, it has x16 lanes which is important since the motherboard is stuck with PCI-E 2.0 and needs to make use of all the available lanes. It will be last gpu upgrade, the previous card was GTX 1060 6GB.

My old PC: i7-980 (x58 motherboard), 24GB DDR3, RTX 3060 12GB, Samsung 870 EVO 1TB SSD.
It's running Windows 10 LTSC IoT Enterprise which will get updates until 2032.
Even though i bought a new PC in 2022, I still use the old one for some things, it's still very capable.
 
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#16 ·
deathnite said:
If this is real, then shame on NVIDIA for intentionally limiting the bandwidth on RTX 3050 to x8 lanes and trying to save $2, probably even less than that for them.
Click to expand...
Using the same PCB for different SKUs is a cost saving measure, but specifying a lower PCI-E lane count on die flavors that can support more is not. They're doing it specifically to harm performance and possibly reduce power consumption slightly.

Many of the differences between SKUs are artificial and only exist to upsell some products while trying to keep lower cost products from cannibalizing their market.
 
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#19 · (Edited)
bmgjet said:
GPUZ showing it at X16?
Im just wondering how adding caps for smoothing to data lines that are laser cut inside the die is adding pci-e lanes.
Maybe the performance difference your seeing is just from replacing the thermal compound.
Click to expand...
Apparently they didn't bother to actually laser cut them and just didn’t add the bits. If they actually were laser cut you’d be right though.
Titan5150 said:
I have Windows 10 LTSC IoT Enterprise on one of my boot drives, It's a good OS...

I read this on Reddit about NVIDIA's reasoning for the x8 lanes...

"A key piece of specification that sets the RTX 3050 apart from the RTX 3060 is the PCI-Express bus width of just 8 lanes, that's PCI-Express 4.0 x8, compared to x16 on the RTX 3060 even though the GA106 is perfectly capable of x16, and all the custom-design boards we're testing today reuse PCB designs from RTX 3060 products with PCB traces for all 16 lanes in place. NVIDIA offers this explanation: "Dropping to 8 PCIe lanes improves supply. It allows us to source a wider variety of chips for the life of the product." In other words, NVIDIA is currently harvesting GA106 chips that didn't make the cut for RTX 3060, but could in the future switch to the smaller GA107 silicon, which physically has 24 SMs (3,072 CUDA cores) and a 128-bit GDDR6 memory bus, along with a PCI-Express 4.0 x8 bus. This switch would come with no difference in performance."
Click to expand...
smells heavily of marketing doublespeak. How about “Tthe actual cost isnt nearly as high as we charge so we cut it down more to sell To even more people, and we did it the cheapest way possible ‘cause hey, mo’ money”
do i trust a company in a duopoly to tell the truth? Well, no….
 
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#21 ·
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#23 ·
memtest_vulkan won't show PCI-E bandwidth because it deliberately tries not to overflow VRAM. Overflowing into shared memory would cripple it's ability to test local VRAM.

The 3DMark bandwidth results posted previously show figures that are impossible without 16x, assuming gen 3.0 (unless ReBAR was forced enabled for 3DMark, which confuses the bandwith test).
 
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#26 ·
Prophet4NO1 said:
You card is running in PCIe 3.0. That is why you got a performance gain.

View attachment 2713168
Click to expand...
It always runs in PCIe 3.0, It's a PCIe 3 motherboard.

It ran in PCIe 3 before the mod, it also ran in PCIe 3 after the mod. Only before the mod, it was running in PCIe 3.0 x8, and after the mod, it was running in PCIe 3.0 x16...

Do you see where the gain is coming from now?:unsure:
 
#31 ·
It should work on any of the 3050 8GB cards, I don't know about the 6GB cards...

They are on the back side of the board, right by the edge connector, this shortcuted link (if it doesn't go to the spot, it starts at 6:10) to this video takes you to someone doing it, if you can solder caps that small this will be a piece of cake!

If you have the skills, it's just this easy!


These are the caps you'll need, you'll need 16 of them, so get a few more in case one or two get away from you and fall into a black hole ;) , but they are very cheap, something like 0.08 cent a piece...


or

 
#41 · (Edited)
For a 3050 PCIe 4 x8, it was working quite well, it was consistently performing as well as, if not outperforming, other 3050s. After the mod, it is outperforming most other 3050s, but it can't keep up with a 3050 8GB on an i9-14000K PCIe 4, or similar AMD type platforms, even with x16 lanes...

PCIe 3 does have its limitations... ;)

But on the same platform, the mod to x16 really makes a significant difference...

Font Screenshot


I wonder how well it could do on a high-end PCIe 4 platform?:unsure:
I think it could beat any other 3050 8GB on the same platform!
I'll most likely never know...
 
#43 · (Edited)
After the x16 lane mod, I've done some tuning of the overclock, and now this card is crushing it against all other RTX3050 cards tested on Passmark Performance Test 11, regardless of what platform they are running on!!!

My RTX3050 8GB x16 Lane OC Vs all RTX3050 8GB Cards...

I didn't win every test, but I got most for the overall win! Not too bad for $152.00 and running on an old Z390 Motherboard?:unsure:

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