area-51m r1 What’s your opinion on upgrading the VRAM of the Area-51m’s RTX 2080 8GB to 16 GB?

[Amir.s]

I’m thinking about upgrading my Area-51m’s RTX 2080 to 16 GB of VRAM. What do you guys think? Has anyone here done it?

[2CPU]

Would you also need to adjust the VBIOS to know that it has changed?

[ssj92]

You might need to somehow mod vbios too. 

 

If you can do it then you can also try removing the 2080 core and transplanting rtx 3080 core. 

 

They might use same bga package 

[2CPU]

That would be really awesome....

[Maro97]

On 8/7/2026 at 9:35 AM, ssj92 said:

You might need to somehow mod vbios too. 

 

If you can do it then you can also try removing the 2080 core and transplanting rtx 3080 core. 

 

They might use same bga package 

No way to upgrade rtx 2080 chipset to rtx 3080 chipset …

RTX 2080 Mobile (TU104, the N18E-G3 variant): the chip uses the GB4B-256 package with 2228 solder balls, measuring 37.5 × 37.5 mm. This figure is confirmed by NVIDIA's official document (NPN-09178).

RTX 3080 Mobile (GA104): I couldn't find a confirmed number in the sources I searched. The commonly cited figure for GA104's package is around 1752 balls, but I'm not sure of it, so don't rely on it when buying a stencil or reballing parts.

What is certain is that the ball count and package size differ between the two chips, so a single stencil won't work for both. You also can't swap one chip for the other on the same board.