When trying to book an upgrade:<p>"Please note: All Upgrades have been put on hold due to the double cost of Memory Modules. The option to upgrade the supported GPUs has been disabled on the booking page."
I recognized the name of the company from the YouTube videos they have posted. It is likely a legitimate business, but as they are in a region I am not in, I can't speak to their actual performance or reliability. Here is their YouTube page:<p><a href="https://youtube.com/@graphicscardrepairs-tk7ql?si=OIO98TbmAsmlN_tM" rel="nofollow">https://youtube.com/@graphicscardrepairs-tk7ql?si=OIO98TbmAs...</a>
Is this like Runescape free armour trimming? You send your gpu, and get it back with 2x memory?
This seems to be a company in the UAE. I've noticed in general that the far (and middle) East have far more miscellaneous repair services companies than the West, and also more information online about it (albeit not in English.)
Yeah. Even a smaller town will have a random repair shop where a guy will replace phone screens, solder in a replacement power supply, and he seemingly has some kind of connection that can get him all these parts from Shenzhen. A comparable sized town in America won't have anything comparable other than a Dollar General selling phone chargers.
And the person at the repair shop typically has a Masters degree in electrical engineering or similar.
I have a guy which can fix almost anything.
But well, he has high paying job, and has 600k EUR apartment.<p>You can't expect him to waste weekend fixing something for pennies.<p>Unlike a guy living in shed, driving 20+ yo Daewoo Lanos.
Well and also parts are far more available and way cheaper. Had to replace 2 capacitors and a thermistor in an power supply not long ago. Cheapest price I could find for those 3 parts? $40. The highest unit price of those components individually was like $1.25, but I didn't need 20+ of each and everywhere else had crazy shipping costs on top of 20x markup. And there was no place within 300 miles that sold anything like that if I didn't want to wait 2 weeks for it to arrive.<p>A chinese guy could get those parts for way less, have them shipped way faster, or probably just buy them from a physical store not that far away. The chat, diagnosing, and repair took me less than an hour overall so with cheap parts I could have charged someone $40 and made $35 an hour if I had cheap and available parts while saving them $250. But dealing with parts issues nearly triples my minimum price for a business operation because I either have to spend a bunch of time finding the best deal for parts and have this thing sit on my bench for two weeks+ as they ship, or get ripped off paying 80 dollars to get it within a week. And by time they are spending $120 on a repair, they are already nearly half the price of buying something brand new that can be shipped to their door in 2 days with a 2 year manufacturers warranty, so they wouldn't want to attempt to pay someone to repair it at all.
A comparable town in the US would absolutely have a local or franchise repair business doing those things. What neither of them will have in abundance are shops replacing BGA modules as an upgrade. For that it'd be major cities only.
At least in Australia, anything outside common phone repairs goes in to the "not worth it" basket. I had a USB-C port snap of a microphone, PCB pads were still fine, just needs someone to use a hot air gun to attach a new port. Repair stores didn't want to touch it.<p>And I can see the logic. Wages are so high that anything that they can't exactly know the repair time and success rate can easily exceed the device value. While in lower income countries they can afford to mess around for quite a while on repairs since the replacement cost is relatively massive.
I don't entirely understand why they "didn't want to touch it"? Surely they were capable of soldering a new port. I'm sure they'd have had to charge a lot. There's unlikely to be much difference in cost between the repair and a replacement microphone.<p>But why not offer that? All else being equal I'd rather fix something than put it in landfill and buy a new one. Am I the only one?
We say wages are high in the west, yet we are literally paying people to stand around in line for us.<p><a href="https://www.investigatetv.com/2026/01/16/professional-line-standing-becomes-growing-business-americans-seek-skip-waits/" rel="nofollow">https://www.investigatetv.com/2026/01/16/professional-line-s...</a>
Replacing components like a phone screen, yeah - but not the kind of thing the OP is talking about.
More like replacing a worn USB-C port on a random motherboard using a soldering iron, hot air station, and microscope, or tracking down an unknown failed component on a circuit board, or swapping a random surface-mount Motorola chip in the ECU of your early-2000s car. Sometimes there’s a whole market square where every shop specializes in one of these things.<p>And it's not that expensive.
I don’t think that is true. Ubiquitous access to free or low cost education is what makes this possible, and I certainly don’t see those kinds of businesses in towns of 50-100k people in the USA. There are people that are capable of that kind of work, of course, but they are employed by x corp or do contract work, and they are not competing with the cost of replacement consumers devices, since their rates would have to be > 150 an hour to stay in business.
This used to be a common thing even in Portugal, until we started going down the throw away working electronics mindset, and yes we're to blame as well, consumers drive the market.
Ohhhh wow thats my card! The upgraded ones seem so be around 300 usd on Chinese apps. Is that worth it?
Damn I have one of these and it is still good shit. It's the best one I think, the Asus ROG OC edition sitting in a razer core x external GPU. I want this but does it make sense? I'm guessing it doesn't make sense as I'd have to send it there.<p>I'd prefer some instructions on how to do this myself.
In Japan, these 22GB 2080 Tis have been showing up on flea-market apps for months now, and I suspect many of them may be coming from China. I’ve been wondering whether buyers realize they’re modified cards, not factory models.
Hopping on VastAI or Runpod (GPU renting websites) it is easy to spot a bunch of these cards. In terms of AI performance though it doesn't seem to be that good.
Many users focus only on the GPU, but a balanced system is equally important. Glad this aspect is highlighted.
The procedure:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dWSWDOj6Ag" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dWSWDOj6Ag</a>
Honestly, I have a 2080ti that I use to play and I can tell you the math isn't there to upgrade it. It's much easier to just find a 3090/4090/5090 and keep pace with the software and hardware simultaneously.
The 2080 is really getting long in the tooth. You're probably better off buying a 3090/3090Ti with 24GB, if you can find one.
Here I am still rocking my 980 TI with 6GB :)
It's childish behavior to hide the price of your services.
It does clearly state that the price is variable depending on what it costs them to source the memory modules.<p>And other pages give the costs for repairs & diagnostics, which are probably in line (it's effectively a type of 'repair').<p>(Although prices are in emirati dirhams, given they're based in Dubai)
What is the price for this upgrade?
This seems to have been going on for a while, Toms Hardware have articles on these cards going back a couple of years -<p><a href="https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/chinese-workshops-recondition-nvidias-old-flagship-gaming-gpu-for-ai-rtx-2080-ti-upgraded-to-22gb-for-dollar499" rel="nofollow">https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/chinese-work...</a><p>It looks like for a while this was a way to work around the US tech bans in China. And cards with this mod pre-applied seem to be on ebay for about $500, which is cheaper than used 3090s from what I can see.
I wonder what the benchmarks are after the upgrade for that beast of a GPU.
I mean you could just use this, right?<p><a href="https://downloadmoreram.com" rel="nofollow">https://downloadmoreram.com</a>
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Both of your statements are not true. Freezone LLCs do not require Emaratis. Even if the company is owned by an Emarati one absolutely can bring legal action against the company.
You mean, that if I could have used this service, it would have been a scam and that such scams are common in the UAE, so in the future people should avoid repair companies in the UAE regardless of the specific vendor?<p>That seems a bit of a stretch, but I have never dealt with the UAE, is this a real thing that people know about?
Scam has started to become overused like the word slop. Scam has a specific meaning. Sounds like you are complaining about a potential problem while a scam is a guaranteed problem
Considering the price is listed at $0, it doesn’t inspire confidence to do business with this enterprise.<p>The 2080ti is what, 8 years old at this point? Upgrading the RAM is throwing good money after bad.
Huh. On my device it shows up as 0 AED. I wish it could be in $, I don't know how to exchange all that money
Depends on the price, surely?<p>A 2080Ti is approximately on a level with a 5060Ti (from a quick search), though obvs does not support the newer DLSS features etc. So to get a good upgrade you’re looking at a 5070 or better.<p>If this gives you a performance boost for less $$$ …
"The final cost depends on the availability of high-capacity memory modules."