So i was looking over some of my retro kit and noticed some things.

On one of my motherboards there is the solder pads for a firewire pin header that is there on some revisions of the board but not others. The board has a firewire controller on it and the rear port does work.
If I added a header to the board what would happen?

Also and more important and the real reason I started this thread.

Old graphics cards.
Some of them, as you know come with different amounts of memory on the cars 32 and 64mb versions or 64 and 128mb versions etc.

If I have a 64mb version of a card, let's say a Fire GL 8800 (just a name, it could be any card but that one as it doesn't come in a 64mb version so it can't be used), and that card has solder pads for the extra ram chips of the 128mb version of the card but as I have the 64mb version those pads are just not populated.
Is it just a matter of
Getting a spare fire gl 8800 that has a problem not related to ram taking the ram chips off it and putting them in place on the working card and then I have a 128mb version of the card?
Or would some flashing of the cards firmware be required to make it recognise the extra ram it now has?

Any thoughts or ideas on this or similar would be welcome.