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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."
Thsi is kinda old news. People have been doing this for about a year now ever since the card came out. Either way its a good guide to getting some extra bang for your buck although everyone needs to remember that if the card worked 100% fine with 16 pipelines they would have sold it that way.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
Two reasons to turn off some of the pipelines:
a) They were defective, and this allows you to salvage the part.
b) People with too much money will gladly pay significantly more money for a slightly higher end version of the same card.
does anybody know whether there's a website where a comprehensive list of these 'free update' hacks is maintained?
there seem to be an awful lot of them (Sony Clie 710->740, Siemens A55->C55, 720kb-->1,44MB Floppies, etc.) but usually they pop up in rather dubious threads on some weird forum, and having them in one nice place would certainly be nice.
This sounds rather like the incident which occurred with the Canon EOS 300D Digital Rebel where the entry level model had very similar features to the higher end "professional" model costing hundreds of dollars more. However, it was discovered by some enterprising users that a relatively simple hack, flashing the BIOS with a modified version, could "unlock" the hardware and enable most of the features that were found on the more expensive model. This type of hardware homogeneity protected by software locking is advantageous for the manufacturer because it reduces manufacturing costs, since only one version of the hardware need be produced, but it is also vulnerable to those users who are sophisticated enough to circumvent the software locks. Is it possible that NVIDIA was holding back these pipes as a stop-gap measure so that they could release a new "Ultra" version of an existing card on short notice to counter a new competitor release more quickly? Perhaps, but these two incidents, the camera hack and now the video card hack, may induce corporations to rethink their software locking strategies. In the meantime it appears that savvy consumers can reap the benefits of these companies' mistakes.
This does not work on all GeForce 6800's. If you research this hack, as stated by another poster this has been a known hack for some time now, you will find information on why this is possible and why Nvidia "locks" some of the pipes. I seem to remember something about problems inherent in there manufacturing processes.
You can unlock all pixel piplines as will as additional vertex shaders. I bought a 6800 last year and tried this. I was able to unlock everything, but it resulted in artifacts and other issues that made games un playable.
This is unlikely. In the article itself, they note that graphical artifacts appear when you turn on this mod. This is likely because they didn't QA that section of the chip, and it's probably defective-ish. Now, that doesn't mean you'll definitely get a buggy chip, but NVidia won't unlock this because the part isn't tested, and assumed broken.
In fact, it may be reject parts from the Ultra series that makes it 6800 standard. From what it looks like, they deactivate the broken pipelines and then sell it as a lower model, much like CPUs do with clockrates.
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