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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 /.
Based on the 3DLabs article, I'd be concerned that this is a situation like what happened with the Intel 486DX/SX. i.e. The chips that test better are marked as DX and the chips that have minor flaws are downgraded and marked SX. Installing the upgrade BIOS may put a strain on your chip that could damage it.
Basically, if you do this, don't be surprised if your card becomes toast a shortwhile after.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Is anyone else reminded of those virus programs that claimed to magically make your 386 a 486? Do you really think the BIOS is the only difference between the two cards?
might take more than a bios update though ;)
Note to manufacturers: Stop creating products that feature factures. Got it. good.
It's not clear to me that this does anything other than change the text string containing the name of the card. It seems under some conditions people get better overclocking, but that could easily be due to room temperatures and the like. Are there any particular features in the 5950 not present in the 5900?
For great justice.
Will it turn my 5950 into one of those sweet 288MB Wildcat cards from 3DLabs? That would be worth the risk.
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?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
FWIW the only reason I went with nVidia for the new computer I recently put together was for their Linux support. I dual boot the machine and I do game in Windows, but I wanted nVidia's proven track record of supporting their hardware with Linux drivers. The Twinview support for Linux is nice too, gotta have my dual monitors in Linux too.
I also wasn't looking for the top of the line vid card so since I wasn't dropping a wad of cash I did't care that I wasn't getting bleeding edge FPS performance.
I can just see it, Nvidia Board Meeting:
Okay, I've been to this site, slashdot.org, and they have some radical ideas about business plans, but I think they have something we can use. It's called the ? plan, and always ends in profit. See, here's ours:
1. Release Underclocked Card
2. Release NEW and IMPROVED card, costing more money!
3. Piss off people with NEW and IMPROVED card when they find out Underclocked card can have new bios, being just as good as NEW and IMPROVED card.
4. People who pay more for NEW and IMPROVED card don't buy any more NEW and IMPROVED cards.
5. ???????
6. Profit!!!!!!!!!!
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
-This is your bin-sorted video card.
-This is your overclocked bin-sorted video card catastrophically failing.
Any questions?
I think you're right, they seem to be basing the fact that it's an "Ultra" completely off the fact that the Windows control panel says "NVIDIA GeForce FX 5950 Ultra". The people on the message board post benchmarks, and they're all lower save for one - you can overclock the card slightly higher when it's running the Ultra's bios... w00t.
Poor sales figures for the FX950 because people are buying a cheaper one instead? Simply post a way for people to easily fry their cheaper card so they can then upgrade to the better one!
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
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?
It makes less difference than that, there isn't even ONE game out there which gains any sort of benefit from the past THREE generations of cards from both ati and nvidia.
;)
Yes the cards are faster, but they already rendered the game at perfect speed 3 generations ago. A Geforce 4 will run any game out there perfectly... won't hold up in the benchmarks but you won't get a single visible frame faster performance on any actual game with a radeon 9800 pro
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.
Personal Website
More likely, NVidia bins its chips like all other hardware manufacturers. Cards are manufactured to be the same, and are then stress-tested. Those that make the cut are shipped out at the highest speed, those that don't get underclocked. Sure, you can clock a 5900 back up, but the chances of failure are much higher than with a real 5950 Ultra.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
you are just right about the linux support
q3 runs ~160 fps on my 9700 Pro
and ~250 on my 5900
stop supporting microsoft with pirating their software!!!!!
They have a binary driver, that driver may or may not load. Nvidia has an installer, which will detect your kernel version and compile an interface for it regardless of what linux version you use.
The net result is ATI's drivers won't run on 70% of linux systems out there, whereas Nvidias will run on everything including the 2.6 series kernels before they even became stable.
On the other hand the actual performance of nvidia's drivers have been going downhill with each and every release.
I have a Chaintech GeForce FX5950, and I love it. I don't care if someone can flash their card to upgrade it. But I also realize that like all processors they are binned, and as such - my own card runs a bit cooler in the end.
I believe I hear the DMCA police coming.
Seriously, I wouldn't be surprised if they whipped out the DMCA threatening letters for this.
_______
2B1ASK1
What resolution do you run at? I game at 1280x1024 all options turned up to the max. I can assure you that my FX5900 is a marked improvement over my TI4600. Before that I had an ATI AIW8500DV - but that card was a piece. I still have my ATI AIW128Pro 32mb AGP doing a nice job on capture. Old hardware can be usefull, but everything has it's place.
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."
That was exactly what the ExplosiveLabs post said.
Before we get into the hack itself, we need to look at the chips and BIOSes involved. The 5900 cards use the NV35 chipset, and the 5950 uses the NV38 chipset. The two chips are very similar, but they are not exactly the same. This is not the Radeon 9500 to 9700 hack. In that situation, you had an R300 in both cards--here, you have to very similar chips. The differences between the NV35 and the NV38 are slight, at best, and as far as anyone knows, they have more to do with the cost of manufacturing than anything else (I've heard that 5900 cards are so cheap now simply because they are being dumped in lieux of 5950s).
So, where does that leave us? The BIOS hack. Essentially, it does three things to the best of anyone's knowledge:
So, the decrease in performance at the same clock speeds is due to the relaxed memory timings, but just like with anything else, you can get a higher overclock as a result.
HOWEVER--there is one potentially serious problem. Most people have reported that the 5950 BIOS flash has caused no change in the reported temperatures. Given what we know about the new BIOS and increased voltage, this makes no sense. I am, then, forced to wonder if the temperature diode becomes less accurate after the BIOS is flashed with the 5950 BIOS. No one has confirmed this, and since I don't have a 5900 to try it on, I can't either. However, it's something to keep in mind.
Finally, this is not newsworthy in the least. It's the same as people changing 9800 non-Pro BIOSes to those of 9800 Pros and getting better memory overclocks. It's nothing special or magical; you're not doubling the number of pipelines and the memory bus like you were with the 9500 to 9700 hack. However, it works (or seems to, at least), and it's pretty cool.
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nV News
Next you're going to tell me my frame rates will go DOWN a whopping 2%!
"---Original BIOS---
FX5900 @ 475Mhz/950Mhz DDR (Overclocked to FX5950U Speeds)
3DMark03: 5770
---A380U BIOS---
FX5950 @ 475Mhz/950Mhz DDR (Default FX5950U Speeds)
3DMark03: 5661"
Sounds like one mod I can't wait to do...
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Actually, you got some things wrong. Firstly, the things that determine XP vs MP and Mobile vs Regular aren't jumpers; they're bridges. You have to connect them electronically by means of a pencil or rear window defroster kit.
/overclocker
And, the 2500+ runs default at 1833MHz.
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.
Does it even need a BIOS? I thought the *only* diffrence between the 9800 and 9800 pro was clock speed, and even the heatsinks were the same.
Browse at -1, because trolls are often the most creative part of
Wow! Thats cool. I wonder then if there is a way to turn my vodoo3 into a Video Card...
- no sig.
Some people will complain about anything. :)
I nominate that the above statement replace "News for nerds, stuff that matters." as the Slashdot motto.
See what happens with chips is that every chip of a given type comes from the same fabrication process, same wafers. A given design of the P4 (like say the Northwood) ALL comes from the same place, regardless of speed. So, what happens? Does Intel just underclock lots of chips? No. They rate them.
Despite the amazing levels of controls, there are imperfections on silicon wafers, and imperfections in the etching process. Not every chip comes out the same. So when chips come off the wafer, they need to be tested and rated. Some fail outright, the just don't work at all. Those get tossed, or made into keychains or the like. Of the ones that DO work, they are tested for the maximum speed they'll reliably perform at and seperated into bins based on that. So off of a given wafer you can easily have chips that run anywhere from 1ghz to 2ghz and such.
Now, where underclocking comes in is a few cases:
1) Some companies tend to be conservative with their speeds. Intel is one of those. Generally speaking, their chips can really handle more than they claim. Intel is careful, though, and in the one case they weren't (certian 1ghz P3s) they got burned by chips that failed.
2) Sometimes, yeilds are just too good. Like you have a big demand for 1.6ghz chips, but most of what you are making runs at 2ghz or more. No problem, you take some from the 2ghz bin and underclock and mark them as 1.6ghz. They run slower just fine.
3) The chip runs at a higher speed, but has problems. Sometimes a chip will run faster, but parts of it fail to work prpoerly. So while 98% of the chip works fine at 2ghz, 1 unit just won't work past 1.5ghz. Can't really be selling chips that "mostly" work (remember how bad Intel got burne on the Pentiums with the FDIV bug) so it needs to be marked down.
Little real world example:
Back in the day of the Celeron A's, overclocking was real popular. Intel was having just great yeilds on their chips and most of their slow chips would really work much faster. So what you'd do is buy a cheap Celeron 300a, which was designed to run on a 66mhz bus, and run it on a 100mhz bus. This would bump the chip up to 450mhz. Basically, a system like this ran as fast or faster than a PII 450, and cost a hell of a lot less. Me and tons of friends did just this.
Well, the levels of success varied. My roomate at the time had a total and unqualified success. He dropped the chip in and it ran with no tweaking at all. As far as I know, he still has it in an anticillary system today. Basically, his chip was one from the 450mhz (or better) bin that had been marked down to meet demand.
I had less success. Mine I had to boost the voltage by about 20% to make it run stable at 450mhz. This I did and it worked fine... For about a year. Then my system started to have odd instabilities, crashing all over for no apparent reason. Went to the point of unusable in a very short time. The root of the problem was apparent when I had it calculate Pi and it got a slightly wrong answer. My chip was shot, and I had to get a new one. So while my chip could be made to run at 450mhz, it wasn't really capable fo taking it, and the stress eventually destroyed it.
Another friend simply never got it to work. Chip ran fine at 300mhz, but whenever he tried it at 450, the system just wouldn't POST. Tried cranking the voltage and all the tweaks he could think of, to no end. His chip was rated 300 for a reason, that's all it could do.
A similar situation existed with Intel's SX/DX chips. Basically, Intel found that a high number of chips had faulty math coprocessors. Thing was, the main unit worked fine, it was just the FP unit that was faulty. Well rather than throw the whole chip out, they'd just disable the math co and sell it as an SX.
So just because you can hack BIOS/microcode/whatever to make something run faster, doesn't mean it can handle it. Sometimes, it really is a faster chip underclocked, sometimes, it is clocked that speed for a reason. IT's a crapshoot. You also need to be careful since you CAN damage the chip doing it, like I did. No bigge for me, it was a Celeron that cost me like $80 and I got a year of use out of it. Be a much bigger deal if it was a $300 graphics card and you burned it out after a month.
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.
The parent post could well be correct. In software development, "time to market" is a huge factor. As a result a lot of features get developed without time for proper testing. It's not common to leave untested features in one release of a product which are disabled, test them later when time permits, and enable them as part of the next release. The obvious danger is that if the untested feature contains bugs, then.... doh!
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.
The question is, how is their performance relative to the Windows drivers? NVIDIA's Linux drivers are 100% as fast as their Windows ones. Last time I checked ATI's drivers, they were half as fast as their Windows ones.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
speed isn't everything though.. ATI has a continuing history of problems with their drivers that can cause problems in games, maya etc. Nothing worse then getting a program (especially if u buy it), and discovering graphical corruption problems the hard way. Another thing is that benchmarks like 3d mark 2003 do not represent real life performance. For starters, Directx 9.0 runs slower on just about every video card, and most games dont really even utilise dx 9 features (even the latest ones). Benchmarks also aren't optimised in the least for specific systems, so stuff like the nature scene in 3dmark 2003, would probably run alot faster if optimised on a per card basis. 3D mark also appears to just want to stuff as much polygons onto the scene, without taking much into consideration (I'd personally love to find out if the grass in the nature scene are all different models, which would be a total joke).. Anyway, i've found my geforce FX 5900 to be an excellent card, and mostly bug free, and nvidia are right to be saying that many benchmarks do not represent real performance. Overall though, if u already have a video card, no point of spending more money, at least not until the next generation of nvidia cards which will support 2D better
the reason they are guarenteed at certain clock speeds, and yes, I know what im talking about, is because when a chip is cast it is cast on a wafer, the area of the wafer is not uniform as you go from the center to the edges of the wafre. When the process is being done the wafers have impurities which can exist in some of the chips cast on the wafer.
So what they do is they have machines that roll the new made chip through and test how high it is "safe" to clock it at a certain level. The ones that are more impure get sold as a lower ghz chip, the ones that are more pure get sold as higher ghz chips.
When you overclock, you are overclocking a chip that has failed its pre-test qualifications for the clock speeds you want to clock it to, which is why thye wont give you money on your warrentee if you tell them you fried your chip overclocking.
If you don't vote, you don't matter, so don't waste your time telling me your opinion
Their website has drivers for every card they have ever made. I use a 6 year old Rage Pro in my firewall box, and an original Radeon DDR in my secondary machine I use for ripping DVD's and other time consuming activities. I installed the regular Catalyst drivers for the original Radeon I got in early 2001 that I installed on my 9700 Pro.
So in the Rage 128 days ATI had poor drivers, but that was years ago and that was not due to abandonment of a product. The company had a little trouble transitioning to 3D graphics cards, but so did lots of other companies. They eventually got their act together.
I am always amazed by these trollish fanboys. ATI used to be the only reliable company for drivers (1990-1998), and their image quality is and always has been top notch. Since the original Radeon came out, I think their support has been great.
I don't read or respond to AC posts