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Turning A FX5900 Into A FX5950 Ultra, Tool-Free
A reader writes "Some very interesting details coming from various tech sites such as ExplosiveLabs and 3DChips that shows it is possible to turn a GeForce FX5900 into a FX5950 Ultra (which is NVIDIA's top of the line video card chipset currently available) through simply using the FX5950 Ultra BIOS on the FX5900 video card."
It's the Quadro all over again!
Why do businesses sell underclocked hardware when they know some geek somewhere is going to try loading the higher software in and seeing what happens? If that test comes back positive and can be duplicated... we'll be reading it here on /.
What is the net effect of this? A couple extra FPS? What game really needs this?
so is this another case of the consumer getting ripped off or does the higher end card use better quality, higher tolerance components and so the price differential is justified ?
If I'm not mistaken, why would you even want a fx5900 in the first place?
Because NVidia supports FreeBSD and Linux, while ATI has been giving less than stellar support to Linux? Besides, my GeForce2 GTS is still sufficient for most games. Does the performance gap between ATI and NVidia really change things that much?
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I used to think ATI lacked Linux support...but if you've checked them lately their support is great. Then even recently were looking for someone to fill a position known as Linux Technologist. I almost felt like applying.
did i miss something, or are those benchmarks showing the "upgraded" bios is actually making the card run slower if they don't overclock even further?
pot kettle black
God I wish people would get off there "I want everything for free" High around here..
The people who bought a FX5950 Ultra payed more for a card rated to work at higher speeds, For a warrenty that will still be valid if there card fails due to normal reasons.
They paided more because they choose to do so.
Tommorow someones going to complain that a version of quickbooks pro can be upgraded to quickbooks business with a simple crack, and that is just not fair to the people who spent real money on quickbooks business.
Or.. The diamond ring my friend bought is exactly the same as mine, but I paided more.. Its just wrong.. How dare stores charge diffrent prices.
Windows 2003 Can support unlimited users, But you pay for it. Its the exact same software regardless. How dare microsoft expect you to pay for such a thing.
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This is true to a point - but the faster cards handle higher resolutions at good frame-rates before choking on all the pixels streaming through them. On the high end cards like the Radeon 9800XT, the system bus often gets saturated before the card itself is maxxed out (when gaming at some resolution like 1600x1280).
If you're one of the majority of people who see no real reason to play games at resolutions above 1024x768, then yeah - anything since a GeForce 2 is probably plenty fast enough to make all the games "playable".
The huge resolutions only start making sense when you use really large monitors (which some people are starting to do nowdays). In fact, this is one reason I think the Apple Mac was getting left out of most of the gaming marketplace for so long. Until recently, they didn't really offer any high end 3D cards for their PowerMac line, but at the same time, were much more likely than most PC users to have a large Cinema display running natively at a high resolution.
So does this just make overclocking easier, or does it turn on other features? I ask because the 'professional' cards (i.e. the kind use 3D artists would benefit from) have acellerated wireframe drawing and the like. Is that the case here too, or is it just a few extra FPS in Quake?
"Derp de derp."
or NVidia will be forced to take the approach AMD did. AMD got tired of newbie overclockers buying $90 XP2500s and easily overclocking them into $500 XP3200s, so they locked the multiplier, one of the methods used to overclock AMD chips.
Thus proving, the many ruin things for the few.
Notice that this is an increase in the voltage, inside the chips.
Then note that we're talking about the lowest-micron fabrication in general commidity chips.
Do you REALLY want to be increasing the voltage, and therefore temperature, magnetic fields, and other properties, on something like that?
I guess if you have the money to throw away, go ahead. I don't have a 5900 (I can't get my work to spring for it, so I bought my own FX card before it), but I wouldn't just try something like this until I'm willing to throw out the card.
frob
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
I'd prefer a card that has *OPEN* drivers. It may not matter to you, but it does to me. My Matrox Millennium II still works like a champ.
Enforcing the distinction is the only reason for proprietary NVidia drivers. Some features are crippled in the driver when the common driver detects a GeForce card. This is probably the real reasons for the binary-only Linux driver. It also means you can't run many less common OSs on machines with NVidia's NForce chipset, because NVidia uses a common driver for all their hardware.
The most annoying broken feature in the GeForce line is that multiwindow handling is done badly. In Quadro mode, eight overlapping windows are supported in hardware. In GeForce mode, only one is supported. Try running a few OpenGL apps at the same time to see the difference.
It's surprising that NVidia still bothers with the distinction. At one point NVidia bought an interest in ELSA, which was the only remaining seller of Quadro cards. ELSA went bust about two years ago. (I have an ELSA board, with a worthless 7 year warranty.) So there's no high-end wholesale customer to protect. Now PNY makes Quadro cards, but they're basically an assembly house, not a graphics company, and the Quadro is a minor part of their business.
If NVidia wanted to have a useful distinction between models, putting more memory on the pro boards would be worthwhile. Animators can use a gigabyte or two of texture memory, because their polygon counts aren't reduced like those of games. Even if you're doing game work, polygon reduction comes late in the process.
If you've ever overclocked, you'd understand that hardware starts getting errors when it's pushed too far. In a video cards' case, it will begin rendering things incorrectly.
I can tell you don't understand much about electronics.
From a user's point of view, its a crap shoot. There are variances in tolerances between two pieces of hardware which role off the same assembly line; your personal experiences (which I would imagine do not consist of identical hardware specs. as the rest of us) cannot be applied across board. At the end of the day there is no way of predicting exactly:
1. How long the delay between the time an over-clocked piece of hardware will begin acting-up and the moment there is actual component damage,
2. Whether or not that piece of hardware will ever function properly again at spec. speeds
3. Whether all hardware will display the same anonamolies prior to destruction when overclocked.
But then again, most people who read your post will know you're full of shit anyway.
Basically, if you get your card to where it gives no errors, and are able to keep it around the same temperature, it won't have any troubles.
Nope, not true. Back when the latest craze on Slashdot was to buy yourself a dual Celeron 366 setup and overclock it to ~500mhz, I knew several people that did that. They all had no problems for about a year, and then the system abruptly stopped turning on.
Hacked driver? Not really...
I think you're talking abuot softmodded 9500s to 9700s. The Radeon 9500 had 8 pipelines, and so did the 9700, it was just that the 9500 was clocked slower. So people tinkered with the drivers and bioses and got a 9500 pro looking like a 9700 pro, provided the chip could take the speed. ATI saw this, and with the 9600, they changeed it so that the 9600 had 4 pipelines, and the 9800 had 8 pipes. Funnily enough, the 9800 XT's core runs at 412MHz or so, and the 9600 XT's core runs at 500MHz. It happens that the 9800XT chip is 150nm process, the 9600 XT is 130nm process. So yes, they are infact two different chips.
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