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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.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
I turned my 6800 into a Radeon 9700 Pro with my 1337 sk1lz!
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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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