Unlocking the GeForce 6800 234
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."
Nice Work! (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Nice Work! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Nice Work! (Score:3, Insightful)
or when they start shipping it with the mod unlocked themselves.
Re:Nice Work! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Nice Work! (Score:5, Informative)
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'.
Re:Nice Work! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Nice Work! (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Nice Work! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Nice Work! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Nice Work! (Score:2, Funny)
What the hell is this "confirm im not a script" crap, anyways?
Re:Nice Work! (Score:2)
Re:Nice Work! (Score:2, Interesting)
If they are really having problems with scripted spam from logged in users, block the fraggin' accou
Re:Nice Work! (Score:2)
I won't say this is the best card unlocking ever - I think that goes to the 9500->9700 trick bu
Willy-waving (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Both (Score:2)
Re:Nice Work! (Score:3, Insightful)
I hate to trolll but.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I hate to trolll but.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:I hate to trolll but.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I hate to trolll but.... (Score:2)
Re:I hate to trolll but.... (Score:2)
I did this (Score:2)
This is not always true. Some cards work fine with all 16 pipelines enabled, and nVidia might be locking 4 pipes on 6800 Ultra GPUs to make a volume target in the 6800 non-Ultra market.
However, sometimes the cards really don't work. I tried this trick, and it unlocked the extra 4 pipes yielding a significant performance improvement, but it caused lots of visual artifacts. I promptly set it back
I turned (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I turned (Score:2)
Re:I turned (Score:2)
Big Deal (Score:2)
Disabled Hardware?? (Score:3, Interesting)
no, (Score:5, Informative)
It's cheaper to do things this way than it is to actually alter your production lines.
this is a fault tolerence technique (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:Disabled Hardware?? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Disabled Hardware?? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Disabled Hardware?? (Score:2)
Re:Disabled Hardware?? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Disabled Hardware?? (Score:2)
Re:Disabled Hardware?? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Disabled Hardware?? (Score:2)
Re:Disabled Hardware?? (Score:2)
Re:Disabled Hardware?? (Score:3, Interesting)
Why would the PCI-E version only ship with 12 pipelines, hrm? Especially when it's got double the bandwidth and two-way writing?
Re:Disabled Hardware?? (Score:2)
Welcome to /.
Re:Disabled Hardware?? (Score:2)
Re:Disabled Hardware?? (Score:2)
Re:Disabled Hardware?? (Score:2)
Re:Disabled Hardware?? (Score:2)
But they sold enough of them and then the slightly reworked dx's as 487's that they took to deliberately dissabling the math-co's (even after yeilds got much much better) on perfectly good 486dx's to keep up 'low end' sales and of course sales of 487s. This allowing them to not only sell more of each waffer, but have higher total sales.
Mycroft
I'll wait a while.. (Score:2, Funny)
No one has mentioned this yet, but... (Score:5, Informative)
6800? (Score:5, Funny)
is there a centralized list of these hacks? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:is there a centralized list of these hacks? (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.ocforums.com/ [ocforums.com]
check out the video card section here:
http://www.ocforums.com/forumdisplay.php?f=7 [ocforums.com]
Reminiscent of Cannon 300D Hack (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Reminiscent of Cannon 300D Hack (Score:2)
Re:Reminiscent of Cannon 300D Hack (Score:2)
Re:Reminiscent of Cannon 300D Hack (Score:2)
Re:Reminiscent of Cannon 300D Hack (Score:2)
If a company produces two products; A and B, product A being product B with a couple of features technically available but disabled you have to ask why product A exists at all. Surely product B should just be sold at product A's price. If a company is selling crippled products at below-cost one can only assume they're trying to manipulate the market. If they're then selling the uncrippled version at a high markup, what exactly are they pulling?
Re:Reminiscent of Cannon 300D Hack (Score:3, Informative)
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 work
Re:Reminiscent of Cannon 300D Hack (Score:2)
Re:Reminiscent of Cannon 300D Hack (Score:2)
In the case of GPUs on video cards, hardware is usually disabled due to defects and marked down.
Yay Canon! (Score:2)
Re:Reminiscent of Cannon 300D Hack (Score:2)
If companies rethink this software lock out strategy, what exactly do you think is going to happen? I'll tell you what. Our cost of living is going to go up. So if they can't make product A and sell A-1 at $200 and A-2 at $100 then they will just sell product A at $250.
Companies exist to ma
Re:Reminiscent of Cannon 300D Hack (Score:2, Interesting)
Probably exactly the same for XP Pro vs Home, SQLServer vs MSDE etc.
Re:Reminiscent of Cannon 300D Hack (Score:2)
1985(??), ZX Spectrum "Turbo" ROM, several nasty bugs in basic patched and 6 times faster cassette tape loader code, speeding up full 48k RAM loading from about 15 minutes down to less than 3.
Canon Rebel (Score:2)
I understand why they do it, but if I'm paying for the hardware, I want to jolly well use it!
Be warned though (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Of course, however (Score:2)
This trick is real common in the chip industry. If you get something that tends to have problems of partially, but not completely, failing, just disable part of it and sell it as a lower version. CPU makers do a similar thing with binning CPUs.
All of a given type of CPU come from the same assembly line. What they then do is test each core. Some don't work and get thrown out. The rest and rated as to their maximum
Locking down makes sense... Business Sense (Score:3, Informative)
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
alas (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:alas (Score:2)
No, I get what you paid $200 for, for $40 a year from now...
Good Deal? You bet... (Score:5, Informative)
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 [guru3d.com]
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).
Re:Good Deal? You bet... (Score:2)
Unlocked and with a relatively modest overclock (5 vertex pipes/12 pixel pipes @ 325MHz core/700MHz memory to 6/16@380/820; some cards go over 400/900 on stock cooling) I managed to take myself from 9
Test results... (Score:3, Interesting)
Does this work on all of them? (Score:2)
Remarkers Delight (Score:2)
Worst case scenario, you sell the 'defective' ones at face value.
Re:Remarkers Delight (Score:2)
Re:Remarkers Delight (Score:2)
Re:Remarkers Delight (Score:2)
Did this (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Did this (Score:2)
Re:Did this (Score:2)
(Of course it is, stupid question really.)
Re:Did this (Score:2)
Mycroft
linux? (Score:2)
i'd jump on this card if a similar technique could be achieved in linux.
so has it been done?
Re:linux? (Score:2)
RivaTuner is nice because it provides a convenient GUI for playing around with different configurations easily, and I would definitely recommend going that route first of all, to find out which pipelines and/or vertex shaders can be enabled on your particular card.
After any configuration change one should test it thoroughly with a bunch of shader intensive 3D apps (like HalfLife 2, Doom 3, 3DM
Apple (Score:2, Funny)
Not LAME enough. (Score:2)
Now lets see them unlock (Score:2)
NVidia really are testing my patience, I think it will be ATI next time for me.
Re:cheapskate's advice (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:cheapskate's advice (Score:2)
Re:cheapskate's advice (Score:2)
Re:The next 9500pro (Score:2)
right on (Score:3, Interesting)
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 m
Re:The next 9500pro (Score:2)
Re:DMCA (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:DMCA (Score:2)
Re:I'm not sure (Score:2)
It's playable but it does lag in certain sequences even on modest settings. A 6800 would certainly make for a decent improvement.
Though for my case the 5200 is enough power.
Tom
Re:I'm not sure (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I was all excited... (Score:3, Informative)
You should have dipped into your wallet less (for the 6600GT) or more (for the 6800GT).
Re:I was all excited... (Score:2)
Re:Same thing with a new BMW 3-Series (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Same thing with a new BMW 3-Series (Score:2)
The motorcycles are "beemers" (and OK, sometimes "beamers") but given that, it still doesn't include the 3-series.
Re:Same thing with a new BMW 3-Series (Score:2)
Warranty... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:question (Score:2)