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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.
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.
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I turned my 6800 into a Radeon 9700 Pro with my 1337 sk1lz!
In the first place, why would you deliberately lock down 4 of the pipelines to begin with? Wouldn't it make more sense to just go ahead and have all 16 pipelines pumping out the frames in the first place, to give a TRUE impression of what the card can actually do, instead of crippling the card?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
till they unlock 64 pipelines.
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.
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.
Pff. I'll save my money for the Radeon 6502.
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.
I used to be the kind of guy that would spend $400 on a new videocard that you can get for $200 within 6 months. That's since changed
Last night, my mother in law bought me a new videocard (CRAZY!) because she missed my birthday a month ago... it's an ATI X700Pro 256meg that ran $179.00 after instant $20 rebate.
I installed it last night and it was VASTLY superior to the card I got 1&1/2 to 2 years ago for nearly $500. I turned everything up on Farcry, WoW, and BFVietnam. It's smooth as glass on my AMD3000 machine.
I wont be shelling out that much money again anytime soon.
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This does not work on all GeForce 6800's. If you research this hack, as stated by another poster this has been a known hack for some time now, you will find information on why this is possible and why Nvidia "locks" some of the pipes. I seem to remember something about problems inherent in there manufacturing processes.
You can unlock all pixel piplines as will as additional vertex shaders. I bought a 6800 last year and tried this. I was able to unlock everything, but it resulted in artifacts and other issues that made games un playable.
Discluding the cards that might not be up to snuff to be sold to work consistently with 16 pipes on, it still makes sense to sell a "lower-end" card, if your aim is to make money, and not to help people that you don't know, and honestly are not that nice people anyways.
By selling a "low-end" and a "high-end" card, you can take the most money from everyone- Milk the guys that can afford it for all their worth, but still sell to the poor sods that still need to play Half-Life 2 at some overly-impressive benchmark.
This made sense before when the low and high end cards were different hardware, and it still makes sense now when the cost of manufacturing 2 different boards is higher than just making one and 'neutering it' to get two.
And I'm pretty sure it'll hurt sales. Not by any noticable amount, though since, come on, only an uber-nerd would really learn how to and then actually do this.
-Aylw
Again, a lot of newbies posting on slashdot. VGA card modding is nothing new (ATI released moddable cards 9500-9700pro and other stuff) a while back. Just go google for them. Also, 200$ for a graphics card is not overkill - you get what you pay for.
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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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).
Anyone else find their test results to be kind of odd? No ATi cards in the 3dmark05 benches. The lower end cards (9800 and 5900) achived results that are the complete opposite of every other test I've seen in Doom 3 and HL2. The test system was also fairly out of date, meaning the top end cards were probably somewhat limited. I'm not calling them liars, this stuff just seems kind of... iffy. (terribly sorry for the double post, I had problems logging in, not cowardace)
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.
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.
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).
I also did a softmod on the vanilla 9500. It worked great, and I sold the system to a friend. The 9500 and 9500 PRO were actually different boards, however the 9700 and the 9500 were the same.
As I remember it, the mod was first tried when someone in europe (thinking Germany) spotted the one difference between a 9500 and a 9700, one solder point. They changed the solder point and their 9500 was a 9700.
Someone made a driver that ignored the signal the card sent to identify it's model, just assuming the model to be a 9700. A lot of the cards worked too, it sure kept the 9500 vanilla above the cost of the 9500 pro for a while.
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Yep, all the Beamer-owners I know are cost cautious. They love to save a buck. Hell, most of 'em take the "BMW" logo off, I mean who cares about the a silly brand name? I bought this for the *performance* man.
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How can this be accomplished on Mac OS X on a Power Mac?
It will be interesting to see what the various tuners do with the E90 325--presumably the big guys like Dinan who enjoy a close relationship with BMW might get some pressure not to release a cheap 255 hp upgrade. The VANOS systems are supposed to be very hard to modify--it may turn out to be non-trivial to make the change without inside information.
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.
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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.