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Unlocking the GeForce 6800
Timmus writes "Firingsquad is running a story on how to unlock all 16 pipelines in nVidia's GeForce 6800. By default the card only ships with 12 pixel pipelines enabled, but with a tool and a few mouse clicks, the card can be unlocked to run with all 16 pipes. Performance improvements are seen everywhere, so it's a pretty nice free upgrade. These cards are currently selling for $200 online, so a 16-pipe GeForce 6800 delivers great bang for the buck."
because you want to charge an extra $50 for those cards.
It's cheaper to do things this way than it is to actually alter your production lines.
MBAs learned long ago that in many businesses you can make more money selling both high-end and low-end products in the same market than you would by selling just high-end. Disabling 4 of the pipelines allows them to do this with one main production line and one product development effort.
AGP only, it seems. No love for us PCI-E types.
I think the people above me are having sex - or they're sleeping restlessly and agreeing with each other a lot.
Discluding the cards that might not be up to snuff to be sold to work consistently with 16 pipes on, it still makes sense to sell a "lower-end" card, if your aim is to make money, and not to help people that you don't know, and honestly are not that nice people anyways.
By selling a "low-end" and a "high-end" card, you can take the most money from everyone- Milk the guys that can afford it for all their worth, but still sell to the poor sods that still need to play Half-Life 2 at some overly-impressive benchmark.
This made sense before when the low and high end cards were different hardware, and it still makes sense now when the cost of manufacturing 2 different boards is higher than just making one and 'neutering it' to get two.
And I'm pretty sure it'll hurt sales. Not by any noticable amount, though since, come on, only an uber-nerd would really learn how to and then actually do this.
-Aylw
Perhaps, but these two incidents, the camera hack and now the video card hack, may induce corporations to rethink their software locking strategies
Although maybe new to yourself, hacking products in this manner is not new to manufactors or others. Remember the old SS/DS floppy disk debate? My Yamaha 200T 2x burner had a wire to clip and could be flashed to a 400T 4x back in 1997. I'm sure Nvidia is not happy but the fact reamins that for many electronic products, it is far cheaper to maintain one single assembly method and make one actual physical product and cripple it with a jumper or software then to support multiple product lines.
This is actually one of the best found "upgrades" for video cards in recent past.
In order to enable the extra pipelines all you have to do is modify the Registry (in Windows) and if all of the pipelines are functional then it "just works". The great side to this is that if there are any problems witht he pipelines then you can just revert back to the original settings.
Previous mods like changing the Radeon 9800 pro into a 9800 XT required flashing the card with a different firmware to unlock the disabled features, or worse (like the old geforce4 to quatro mod) required soldering contact points on the card.
The first few batches of this card were pretty hit and miss ( and usually 75% miss) but as Nvidia refined their chipset manufacturing process more of these cards are actually using high quality chips that have fully functioning pipelines that have just been disabled to sell at the lower price point, so your chances of getting this "free upgrade" are pretty good (esp with certain models).
There is even a free tool http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=163
that gives a GUI interface that shows all of the pipelines, their status, and allows you to change them on the fly (you can change the settings back and forth but a reboot is required to take effect).
I did this with my AGP GeForce 6800, and the extra piplines didn't work for me. They were damaged. Also you can unlock an extra vertex processor on it, which did work fine for me. I have read that it's about a 50-50 chance that the pipelines will work, as that is one of the reasons they are not sold as ultras. A reason they do work on some cards is that something else was wrong with the card that is also limited on the 6800 model, such as using less memory at slower speeds.
The overclockers.com forums has a sub-forum specifically for video cards and their mods.
http://www.ocforums.com/
check out the video card section here:
http://www.ocforums.com/forumdisplay.php?f=7
Can't - the higher models have 256MB of RAM :P
That was there for a very specific reason: the lame-assed DRM in the original Lotus 1-2-3 used a CPU delay loop to time hacks on the floppy drive that they used to prevent normal copies from working. The DRM scheme failed with CPUs that ran faster than the original 4.77MHz 8086.
Therefore, to load Lotus 1-2-3, you had to turn off the turbo button to slow your machine down to the original speed of a 4.77MHz PC. It was also useful to run a handful of early games that used CPU speed to time the action.
What was really stupid is that the DRM scheme drove millions of otherwise law-abiding people to use questionable cracked copies. The original DRM'd 1-2-3 floppies were so precious, and floppy disks were so unreliable and subject to wear, very few people would risk using their original disks for day-to-day use. Most everyone I knew, even in large corporations, used cracked disks instead. The original disks stayed safely on the bookshelf in those thick cardboard ring binder + carton combos that software always used to come in.
You can't SLI vanilla 6800's, only the 6600GT, 6800GT, and the 6800 Ultra.
You should have dipped into your wallet less (for the 6600GT) or more (for the 6800GT).
This kind of thing has been going on for a very long time. ATI does it too. What happens isn't that the card isn't tested, it's that it /is/.
/. would have you believe...it was actually innevitable. Shit, soon /. will have a press release out on how to mod your x800/6800 into a fireGL/quadro :) Whooppie...what news...
After the card is made, they run a series of tests on it. If all parts work perfectly, you have the "6855,5 UltraDuper"; if all parts work, but instability occurs at higher clockspeeds, they call it a "6849 Ultra"; if certain parts (ie a few pixel/vertex shader units) don't work, they lock these off and call the card a plain "6800"; if more than a certain number don't work, they just trash the card.
Thing is, it's nothing new; ATI has been doing it (and softmods [software based] and hardware based modshve been available) since at least the 8xxx series. So whilst this is news, this isn't as hot as the blurb or
BTW, the same kind of thing goes on with cpu's, where it's called 'binning'.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
No they are not manipulating the market, but rather taking advantage of known properties thereof.
This has been going on for some time, since before modern pc's I'd bet, in other markets as well. And it's a fact most people learn about same time as they get old enough to vote or drink, so no one is being deliberately fooled.
It's simular to how you can find two brands of the same product in a store with as much as a 2:1 price difference and yet they are the EXACT same thing.
For example I once worked at a factory that packaged charcoal briquettes(sp?). There are exactly four types of them defined by two binary properties. All hardwood or mixed, with or without lighting fluids added. That's it, the packaging is just packaging and who's name on the outside has no bearing on the contents. When we had enough of brand x all we did was switch the bags we were filling, it all came from the same bin with absolutely nothing done between bag switches.
Yet go look in a store at the costs of the various brands. The same amount of the same thing can cost from $5 to $20 depending on who's name is on the bag.
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
You have to take all overclocking claims with a bit of salt, because for some people it's like the size of their penis depends on it. They'll be... very creative and selective in what they tell you, and that's putting it very mildly.
I've briefly been into the overclocker willy-waving scene myself, so you can take that as an admission. Guilty as charged, guv'nor.
Anyway, I've played with it long enough to know that there very rarely is a hard point where the card works 100% flawlessly, and 1 MHz higher it just locks up. There's more of a gradient grey zone where the card sorta works enough to finish one particular benchmark, but glitches, is unstable, or eventually overheats. And where it might work at that frequency in one game or benchmark, but lock up hard in 20 others.
The big overclocking brag-fests you read are usually from this grey area, not from the 100% stable zone.
Yes, you see some screenshots of a mondo 3DMark number there or of some utility showing the card running at 4 gazillion megaherz, but what you don't see is that it runs stable only for the 10 minutes needed to finish the benchmark. After that it overheats and starts artefacting, or outright locking up.
Be even more suspicious of brag-fests where they only ran half of 3DMark, and hand-waved the other tests as "bah, they didn't make much of a difference on the score anyway." (Ever notice how the biggest overclocking claims fall in that category?) Usually it means it crashed or locked up in those tests.
So I wouldn't take those as a baseline or as "_all_ 6800 cards make it that high with no problems, and it's just the mean MBAs at Nvidia marking them down." Fully expect that any card you buy might not be quite stable that high.
Which brings me to another point. To paraphrase another saying "overclocking gives you something for 'free', if your time is worth nothing." Because in the end the price you'll pay is a lot of time tweaking and testing that overclock... for each new game you buy, time replaying 30 minutes worth of something _again_ because the card locked up just before the save point, etc. It can end up a passtime in and by itself.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
This sort of thing has indeed been going on for a long time, and was invented by "granddaddy" Intel. The oldest example of a chip manufacturer turning off some capabilities on their chips and selling them as a lower end product that I'm aware of happened in the 486 era. Intel released the 486DX as a high end, expensive product with integrated FPU for the first time. Then they released the 486SX as a low end budget priced chip. The 486SX did not have a FPU, but what Intel didn't tell (though it became known rather quickly) was that the SX chips were identical to the DX except that the FPU was turned off in the fab. Thus the same assembly line produced both DX and SX chips.
And Intel even went the next step. They later marketed an "upgrade" for the 486SX which "added" a FPU to those systems. That was the 487DX, which was supposed to be installed in a separate socket on the motherboard and work in tandem with the existing 486SX. Again what Intel didn't say was that the 487DX was in fact a 486DX, and when it was installed on the motherboard it would simply turn off the SX altogether and take over. You could remove the SX chip and throw it away and it wouldn't make a difference. The 487DX was priced below the 486DX, but you ended up paying more for the 486SX+487DX than for a regular 486DX. And to prevent people from buying 487DX chips and use them instead of 486DX, they made the socket pinouts incompatible.
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem