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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 $200 online, so a 16-pipe GeForce 6800 delivers great bang for the buck."
I'm surprised, this actually showed a significant increase in performance in their charts. This is one of the best mods I have ever seen on a Video Card.
I wonder if this would actually hurt, or help Nvidia's sales, or have no effect?
I currently have an ATI card, and am very happy with ATI, but would be willing to switch to Nvidia since the price/performance on this card is so high now.
although everyone needs to remember that if the card worked 100% fine with 16 pipelines they would have sold it that way.
Not necessarily. If they need to fill a price point, chip companies will sell the higher grade stuff at a lower price point and intentionally cripple it.
Intel and AMD have been doing it for years, and they are hardly the only ones.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Again, a lot of newbies posting on slashdot. VGA card modding is nothing new (ATI released moddable cards 9500-9700pro and other stuff) a while back. Just go google for them. Also, 200$ for a graphics card is not overkill - you get what you pay for.
It's easier and cheaper to design one fast chip, and cripple half of the chips to sell to a lower market. Any company who fabs chips does this.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
They manufacture the part with identical pixel pipelines, and if one of them is flawed they can just disble it. This is a common technique in silicon manufacturing. E.g. the celeron is a pentium with the flawed half it's cache disabled.
Flaws happen, and at say 20% rate per chip that is a lot of your profits. If you your design is redundant and can survive with parts disabled you can recover a lot of that 20%.
As another example the Cell processor has one SPU disabled in the PS3.
The flaws may not be visible in all games, or occur frequently. Thats why lots of people report the card working fine. The maker has better testing.
Of course it is possible that they also crippled a few that were just fine...
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For profit reasons, a graphics chip maker wants to cover all possible market segments. For the cheap end of the market, they provide a card with basic functionality ie. four pipelines. For the expensive end of the market, they provide a card with as many pipelines as possible (16, 32, 64). To fill in the space between, they have graphics card with different capabilities - card makers can't really nobble screen resolution or colour depth any more, so they are left with 3D performance. And so they provide cards that have things like overlays, hardware accelerated line drawing and multiple pipelines disabled.
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Hmmm, lets say more or less a year, if nVIDIA sued tomorrow? This mod has been around for this amount of time now, and I'm suprised this has made it to the main page as "news".
More or less the same happened back in the Quadro/MX days. Using a soft-mod similiar to the one discussed in the article, you could transform your cheapo-but-great Geforce 2 MX into a much more costly Quadro card for graphic professionals.
The difference between now and then is that this mod isn't guaranteed to work for each and every 6800 card out there. So unless you get to test the hack before buying don't think you can get away with a 6800 Ultra at a lower price. If you buy it, take it home and the mod doesn't work because the extra pipelines are defective, you're stuck with a really pricey card (check the V9999 from ASUS) that will perfom worse per dollar than a 6800GT (or probably even a 6600GT).
Also, please read the DMCA again: this kind of mod is perfectly legal, unless you plan to put up a shop that sells them. If it weren't so, even overclocking would be illegal.
Hack your mind out of its sandbox.
Either you have incredibly slow reactions, your retarded or you like playing games in slow motion. I have an FX5200 and while I can crank it upto the full settings the game is unplayable (on both Debian Sarge and WinXP ). The Doom 3 setup auto-configures the settings to the lowest possible resolution on my machine with slightly better frame rates on my Windows XP partition than the Debian one. Medium is playable, but I occasionally notice lag.