Mine appears to be finally giving up the ghost, starting to get weird artifacts on my screen.
It’s a testament to how good of a card it was though - up until LLM’s hit us, I never felt the urge to look for something else. It would drive my 49in monitor and run anything I cared to play at good settings.
The A770 is available in a 16 GB variant, making it the cheapest card on the market to have that much VRAM. Nvidia's closest competitor, the 3060, only has 12 GB and to find more you need to go up to a 3090/4080. On the AMD side the 6800 also has 16 GB, but it's a fair bit more expensive than an A770.
Modern VRAM (GDDDR) runs at very high frequencies and very low latency. This makes the wiring between the RAM chips and GPU very tricky (they need to be short and the same length), so slots aren't an option. There were actually VRAM slots in some 90s GPUs.
VRAM runs at high frequencies, delivers insane throughput, but the latency is not great. GPUs don’t need low memory latency. They have very high degree of parallelism. GPU cores switch to other threads instead of waiting for data from memory.
My current GPU has 484 GB/second memory bandwidth. It would require 7 channels of DDR5-8400 memory (the fastest one currently defined by these specs), and GPUs aren’t yet large enough to fit 7 slots of SO-DIMM.
If you look at a modern card you can see how the ram is designed - randomly around the actual GPU core - to get it as close and consistent as possible.
Some chips are moving towards having the ram on the same die package as the actual GPU as one integrated chip.
