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Upgrades Graphics Software Hardware

Turning A FX5900 Into A FX5950 Ultra, Tool-Free 337

Posted by timothy from the one-and-a-half-upmanship dept.
A reader writes "Some very interesting details coming from various tech sites such as ExplosiveLabs and 3DChips that shows it is possible to turn a GeForce FX5900 into a FX5950 Ultra (which is NVIDIA's top of the line video card chipset currently available) through simply using the FX5950 Ultra BIOS on the FX5900 video card."
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Turning A FX5900 Into A FX5950 Ultra, Tool-Free More

Turning A FX5900 Into A FX5950 Ultra, Tool-Free

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  • Deja vu (Score:4, Insightful)

    by aardvarko ( 185108 ) <webmaster AT aardvarko DOT com> on Saturday January 10, 2004 @11:52PM (#7942253) Homepage
    It's the Quadro all over again!

    • Re:Deja vu (Score:5, Informative)

      by Neurotensor ( 569035 ) on Sunday January 11, 2004 @05:53AM (#7943626)
      Yeah I actually tried that hack out - my friend from tech-junkie.com brought over his brand-new GF4 Ti4600 reference board that NVIDIA gave him for review, and I added a jumper to flip it between GF4 and Quadro. Yes that was me doing the soldering, and it took ages since the through-hole resistor leg was bigger than the surface-mount resistor pad ;) I'm sorry that the article is down but the site doesn't exist any more. Enough encouraging replies could get the article up on his private site though...

      Anyway the result was that the Windows drivers said we had a Quadro, but since my friend also had a Quadro reference board of whatever model is comparable to the GF4, we found that the real Quadro had extra OpenGL features that the fake one didn't. We tried BIOS swaps etc. and we never did get a Quadro... except for the one that NVIDIA already gave us ;)

      As an aside, the hacked GF4 is in the machine I use regularly at home and it's in front of me now. Still working perfectly, although I've never set it to Quadro since that would be a bit silly now wouldn't it... =)

  • When will they ever learn? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by LostCluster ( 625375 ) * on Saturday January 10, 2004 @11:55PM (#7942264)
    Why do businesses sell underclocked hardware when they know some geek somewhere is going to try loading the higher software in and seeing what happens? If that test comes back positive and can be duplicated... we'll be reading it here on /.

    • Re:When will they ever learn? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by AvantLegion ( 595806 ) on Saturday January 10, 2004 @11:58PM (#7942296) Journal
      Because it costs less than developing two separate pieces of hardware, and they don't really care if the geek fringe overclocks - they'll do it anyway.

    • Re:When will they ever learn? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by EmCeeHawking ( 720424 ) on Saturday January 10, 2004 @11:59PM (#7942301)
      Why do businesses sell underclocked hardware when they know some geek somewhere is going to try loading the higher software in and seeing what happens?

      Because they also know that 99% of their customers don't read slashdot and don't care.

      Cost savings by using the same architecture in several products: $ LOTS

      Revenue loss from slashdotters who value their time much less than their money: $ NOT MUCH

      Net Profit: Only a very small amount less than $ LOTS

      • Re:When will they ever learn? (Score:4, Informative)

        by shaitand ( 626655 ) on Sunday January 11, 2004 @12:07AM (#7942354) Journal
        "Revenue loss from slashdotters who value their time much less than their money: $ NOT MUCH"

        None really, after all, how many slashdotters who might have bought an ATI card might buy the second most expensive card nvidia makes now? They wouldn't sell the 5900 if they didn't make money of it. They will make a profit on every fringe overclocker who jumps on the bandwagon.
        • Well, come to think of it, I've gotten screwed by ATI's abandoning of hardware a couple times now, so ATI is on the "never buy, ever" list (and I got it put there for the fortune 500 company I work for, as well) so I wouldn't have bought an ATI card anyhow, but this is a cool bit of info. Not something I'd use at work, but still interesting.
          • Their website has drivers for every card they have ever made. I use a 6 year old Rage Pro in my firewall box, and an original Radeon DDR in my secondary machine I use for ripping DVD's and other time consuming activities. I installed the regular Catalyst drivers for the original Radeon I got in early 2001 that I installed on my 9700 Pro.

            So in the Rage 128 days ATI had poor drivers, but that was years ago and that was not due to abandonment of a product. The company had a little trouble transitioning to 3D

        • Re:When will they ever learn? (Score:4, Funny)

          by caferace ( 442 ) on Sunday January 11, 2004 @02:04AM (#7942875) Homepage
          after all, how many slashdotters who might have bought an ATI card might buy the second most expensive card nvidia makes now?

          Is this a quiz? I say fewer than those who are "Friends of Rob".

        • Re:When will they ever learn? (Score:5, Interesting)

          by WasterDave ( 20047 ) <davep@z e d k e p.com> on Sunday January 11, 2004 @04:55AM (#7943467)
          how many slashdotters who might have bought an ATI card might buy the second most expensive card nvidia makes now?

          Well, gotta be good news for nVidia, right? So why not do it? Why not make the cards deliberately up-clockable from the BIOS?

          Basically product differentiation is about getting people to pay the maximum amount they are happy with. So, I don't have $400 for an ultra-pro-turbo, but I do have $300 for a vanilla and this is the tidbit that makes me part with my money in nV's direction. Well ... gonna be up for it, aren't they?

          Related story: I applied the screen spanning hack to my iBook so I could use it in a more "PowerBook" style. Having whetted by appetite I've now gone off and bought the real thing. BIOS hacks as a loss leader?

          Dave

      • Re:When will they ever learn? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Cyclone66 ( 217347 ) on Sunday January 11, 2004 @12:13AM (#7942391) Homepage Journal
        I would imagine that many buyers of $500 video cards are the slashdot type. Don't forget, the high end video cards are the flagship product but they aren't the big sellers. They make much more cash from the sub $200 cards (check the financial statements). The high end cards are just for reputation and bragging rights.

    • Re:When will they ever learn? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by irokitt ( 663593 ) <archimandrites-iaur@@@yahoo...com> on Sunday January 11, 2004 @12:04AM (#7942330)
      It's about economics. The same thing often occurs late in a processor's production line (recent examples are the Pentium III and certain Athlon XP silicon cores). While the hardware is capable of running faster, the company still has to provide a low-end (cheap) solution. Otherwise, their competitor(s) might snag some purchases with their cheaper chips/hardware. One other reason is that the clock jump from one model to another might be large. In the old Pentium days, the leap from 33MHz to 66MHz was large, and a chip that might perform well at, say, 61MHz would be sold as a 33MHz chip. Again, a business decision that could be a boon for someone brave enough to try overclocking.

      • Re:When will they ever learn? (Score:5, Informative)

        by jrockway ( 229604 ) <jon-nospam@jrock.us> on Sunday January 11, 2004 @12:13AM (#7942390) Homepage Journal
        Exactly. On the AthlonXP there are jumpers that change the XP into a MP. There is another set that changes it to a Mobile Athlon. More jumpers change a 2500+ to a 3000+ (multipliers), etc, etc. Producting 10 different cores would make the processors cost about $1000 a piece. Selling 3200+s for more than they cost and 2500+s for less make AMD profitable (well, not really. but it's the right idea :)

        Anyway, your 2500+ is only guarenteed to run at 1700MHz (or whatever). If it runs at 2200MHz, great. If not, tough shit. If you buy a 3200+, though, then it had better run at 2200MHz (200x11, right?). If not, then you can complain.

        Selling underclocked 3200+s as 2500+s allows AMD to sell bad 3200+s instead of throwing them away. The reason that some overclock well is because AMD tests a few out of one batch, and if any are bad AMD brands them _ALL_ as 2500+s. So it's highly likely that you really have a 3200+, but, again, don't count on it.

        • a few issues (Score:4, Informative)

          by pummer ( 637413 ) <spam&pumm,org> on Sunday January 11, 2004 @12:59AM (#7942637) Homepage Journal
          Actually, you got some things wrong. Firstly, the things that determine XP vs MP and Mobile vs Regular aren't jumpers; they're bridges. You have to connect them electronically by means of a pencil or rear window defroster kit.

          And, the 2500+ runs default at 1833MHz.

          /overclocker
        • the reason they are guarenteed at certain clock speeds, and yes, I know what im talking about, is because when a chip is cast it is cast on a wafer, the area of the wafer is not uniform as you go from the center to the edges of the wafre. When the process is being done the wafers have impurities which can exist in some of the chips cast on the wafer.

          So what they do is they have machines that roll the new made chip through and test how high it is "safe" to clock it at a certain level. The ones that are mo

    • Re:When will they ever learn? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MBCook ( 132727 ) <foobarsoft@foobarsoft.com> on Sunday January 11, 2004 @12:10AM (#7942370) Homepage
      I doubt that such is the case here. My guess is that the chips on the 5900 didn't pass QA at 5950 speeds. The people who are doing this may get a performance boost, but they are playing with fire. There are two possibilities:
      1. The chips passed as a 5950 - They got lucky, but the board might still not be designed for the higher clockspeed or whatever. You could run into problems.
      2. The chips failed at 5950 - OK, you may not notice it now, but problems could appear soon. Maybe just little graphical artifacts, maybe full scale crashes. You could be about to ruin your card.

      This is probably just like if you discovered that you could do something to change the multiplyer on the Pentium 4. Maybe it will work better, but there is a decent chance that it won't. And you might not find out untill you've been playing for 3 hours online and are about to cream the top ranked guy on the server in CS. You're about to jump out from behind a box and knife him in the skull (I always loved that) and *WHAM*... your computer crashes and the video is screwed up. If you're lucky a reset will fix it. But if you were lucky, that probably wouldn't have happened. Hope you didn't break it.

      It's not always corporate greed, there can be a reason.

      • Re:When will they ever learn? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by AvantLegion ( 595806 ) on Sunday January 11, 2004 @12:21AM (#7942439) Journal
        >> It's not always corporate greed, there can be a reason.

        It's not even "corporate greed".

        The consumer gets a card with a higher-quality product than advertised. Give me an "underclocked" card rather than one pushing its performance envelope as far as it can go, at the same price, anyday.

        The manufacturer gets to keep costs down.

        WHO LOSES? Nobody.

        Some people will complain about anything. :)

      • Parallels in Software (Score:3, Informative)

        by Halo- ( 175936 )
        The parent post could well be correct. In software development, "time to market" is a huge factor. As a result a lot of features get developed without time for proper testing. It's not common to leave untested features in one release of a product which are disabled, test them later when time permits, and enable them as part of the next release. The obvious danger is that if the untested feature contains bugs, then.... doh!

    • Re:When will they ever learn? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Waffle Iron ( 339739 ) on Sunday January 11, 2004 @12:28AM (#7942471)
      Why do businesses sell underclocked hardware when they know some geek somewhere is going to try loading the higher software in and seeing what happens? If that test comes back positive and can be duplicated... we'll be reading it here on /.

      You've answered your own question. Countless thousands of potential customers are eagerly reading about nVidia's products on /. right now, and it didn't cost them a cent in advertising budget.

      Think of it like a discount coupon. The geeks reading about it here probably weren't going to buy either board until they saw this story. But now with the prospect of getting something "for free", many will rush out to grab one, and nVidia makes sales that otherwise would not have happened.

    • Because it's not as simple as being underclocked (Score:5, Informative)

      by Sycraft-fu ( 314770 ) on Sunday January 11, 2004 @01:30AM (#7942744)
      See what happens with chips is that every chip of a given type comes from the same fabrication process, same wafers. A given design of the P4 (like say the Northwood) ALL comes from the same place, regardless of speed. So, what happens? Does Intel just underclock lots of chips? No. They rate them.

      Despite the amazing levels of controls, there are imperfections on silicon wafers, and imperfections in the etching process. Not every chip comes out the same. So when chips come off the wafer, they need to be tested and rated. Some fail outright, the just don't work at all. Those get tossed, or made into keychains or the like. Of the ones that DO work, they are tested for the maximum speed they'll reliably perform at and seperated into bins based on that. So off of a given wafer you can easily have chips that run anywhere from 1ghz to 2ghz and such.

      Now, where underclocking comes in is a few cases:

      1) Some companies tend to be conservative with their speeds. Intel is one of those. Generally speaking, their chips can really handle more than they claim. Intel is careful, though, and in the one case they weren't (certian 1ghz P3s) they got burned by chips that failed.

      2) Sometimes, yeilds are just too good. Like you have a big demand for 1.6ghz chips, but most of what you are making runs at 2ghz or more. No problem, you take some from the 2ghz bin and underclock and mark them as 1.6ghz. They run slower just fine.

      3) The chip runs at a higher speed, but has problems. Sometimes a chip will run faster, but parts of it fail to work prpoerly. So while 98% of the chip works fine at 2ghz, 1 unit just won't work past 1.5ghz. Can't really be selling chips that "mostly" work (remember how bad Intel got burne on the Pentiums with the FDIV bug) so it needs to be marked down.

      Little real world example:

      Back in the day of the Celeron A's, overclocking was real popular. Intel was having just great yeilds on their chips and most of their slow chips would really work much faster. So what you'd do is buy a cheap Celeron 300a, which was designed to run on a 66mhz bus, and run it on a 100mhz bus. This would bump the chip up to 450mhz. Basically, a system like this ran as fast or faster than a PII 450, and cost a hell of a lot less. Me and tons of friends did just this.

      Well, the levels of success varied. My roomate at the time had a total and unqualified success. He dropped the chip in and it ran with no tweaking at all. As far as I know, he still has it in an anticillary system today. Basically, his chip was one from the 450mhz (or better) bin that had been marked down to meet demand.

      I had less success. Mine I had to boost the voltage by about 20% to make it run stable at 450mhz. This I did and it worked fine... For about a year. Then my system started to have odd instabilities, crashing all over for no apparent reason. Went to the point of unusable in a very short time. The root of the problem was apparent when I had it calculate Pi and it got a slightly wrong answer. My chip was shot, and I had to get a new one. So while my chip could be made to run at 450mhz, it wasn't really capable fo taking it, and the stress eventually destroyed it.

      Another friend simply never got it to work. Chip ran fine at 300mhz, but whenever he tried it at 450, the system just wouldn't POST. Tried cranking the voltage and all the tweaks he could think of, to no end. His chip was rated 300 for a reason, that's all it could do.

      A similar situation existed with Intel's SX/DX chips. Basically, Intel found that a high number of chips had faulty math coprocessors. Thing was, the main unit worked fine, it was just the FP unit that was faulty. Well rather than throw the whole chip out, they'd just disable the math co and sell it as an SX.

      So just because you can hack BIOS/microcode/whatever to make something run faster, doesn't mean it can handle it. Sometimes, it really is a faster chip underclocked, sometimes, it is clocked that speed for a reason. IT's a crapshoot. You also need to be careful since you CAN damage the chip doing it, like I did. No bigge for me, it was a Celeron that cost me like $80 and I got a year of use out of it. Be a much bigger deal if it was a $300 graphics card and you burned it out after a month.
    • Last time I can recall was with the intel i865pe/875p chipsets. They were built identical, the only thing is that the 875p chipset had PAT and the ability for ECC RAM.

      Since they were built the same, the 865pe could be run with PAT technology enabled by bypassing something.

      Companies such as ASUS released 865pe motherboards with PAT technolgy then when Intel complained, they renamed it to 'MAM' (Memory Acceleration Mode) technolgy.

      I also saved myself $50 by buying the 865 based mboard.
      • The only caveats being that in order to get PAT working on the 865PE chipset you need to:

        A: be running a 1:1 memory divider
        B: Have "Turbo" or "Ultra-Turbo" on in your bios.

        I'm happily running 1100fsb with a 2.4c OC'd and a gig of AData Vitesta ram on a MSI Neo2-LS right now. PAT enabled. If you plan to run 1:1 divider, and you plan on getting very fast ram, the 865PE is a foregone conclusion. The Asus P4P800 is a great board for running 1:1 divider. Court is still out on the Abit boards. There seems to be

    • I recall a site I worked at back in the eighties where we had a certain model of mainframe, and a support contract valued at tens of thousands of dollars a year. We decided to "upgrade" the machine to a higher spec in the same series, and the next time the engineer was onsite for routine maintenance (which was usually every week), he took out his wire cutters and snipped a link on one of the processor boards. Bingo - hardware upgrade! The link was some kind of jumper that imposed certain restricions on th

  • I wouldn't recommend this (Score:5, Interesting)

    by AKAImBatman ( 238306 ) <akaimbatman@gmaYEATSil.com minus poet> on Saturday January 10, 2004 @11:56PM (#7942276) Homepage Journal
    Based on the 3DLabs article, I'd be concerned that this is a situation like what happened with the Intel 486DX/SX. i.e. The chips that test better are marked as DX and the chips that have minor flaws are downgraded and marked SX. Installing the upgrade BIOS may put a strain on your chip that could damage it.

    Basically, if you do this, don't be surprised if your card becomes toast a shortwhile after.

    • Re:I wouldn't recommend this (Score:5, Informative)

      by MoronGames ( 632186 ) <cam.henlin@gm[ ].com ['ail' in gap]> on Sunday January 11, 2004 @12:02AM (#7942316) Journal
      Basically, if you do this, don't be surprised if your card becomes toast a shortwhile after. Umm, no. If you've ever overclocked, you'd understand that hardware starts getting errors when it's pushed too far. In a video cards' case, it will begin rendering things incorrectly.

      The errors start happening LONG before hardware burns up, and is soon as the card is set to a slightly lower speed, the errors disappear.

      Basically, if you get your card to where it gives no errors, and are able to keep it around the same temperature, it won't have any troubles.
      • but don't be suprised if a game locks up for no apparent reason when doing this.
      • As somebody who lost a motherboard to over-clocking: bull.

        The typical result may be errors occurring before a significant component failure, but that is not 100%.

        I over-clocked a motherboard years ago and the result was one of the support components failed without warning. The failure showed itself as errors when transferring data using particular DMA channels. Floppy disk, and digital audio for a soundblaster. The failure did not reverse itself when clockspeed was returned to normal. Friends of mine have

        • Re:I wouldn't recommend this (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Frobnicator ( 565869 ) on Sunday January 11, 2004 @01:15AM (#7942695) Journal
          As you said, overclocking will sometimes break stuff, rather than gradual failings.

          Notice that this is an increase in the voltage, inside the chips.

          Then note that we're talking about the lowest-micron fabrication in general commidity chips.

          Do you REALLY want to be increasing the voltage, and therefore temperature, magnetic fields, and other properties, on something like that?

          I guess if you have the money to throw away, go ahead. I don't have a 5900 (I can't get my work to spring for it, so I bought my own FX card before it), but I wouldn't just try something like this until I'm willing to throw out the card.

          frob

      • Re:I wouldn't recommend this (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        If you've ever overclocked, you'd understand that hardware starts getting errors when it's pushed too far. In a video cards' case, it will begin rendering things incorrectly.

        I can tell you don't understand much about electronics.

        From a user's point of view, its a crap shoot. There are variances in tolerances between two pieces of hardware which role off the same assembly line; your personal experiences (which I would imagine do not consist of identical hardware specs. as the rest of us) cannot be appli
      • Basically, if you get your card to where it gives no errors, and are able to keep it around the same temperature, it won't have any troubles.

        Nope, not true. Back when the latest craze on Slashdot was to buy yourself a dual Celeron 366 setup and overclock it to ~500mhz, I knew several people that did that. They all had no problems for about a year, and then the system abruptly stopped turning on.

    • Re:I wouldn't recommend this (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Naffer ( 720686 ) on Sunday January 11, 2004 @12:06AM (#7942343) Journal
      I'm sure that Nvidia bins their chips for speed, but from what I've heard at various online forums is that some people belive that the 5950 bios slightly increases the memory and GPU voltage (usually helps with some overclocking). If you look closely, you'll see that at the same clockspeeds, the 5900 bios is faster. More then likely, the 5950 bios includes looser memory timings that allow for higher clocked memory.
    • I believe the SX was the 486 without the math coprocessor.

  • 386to486.exe (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Mynkami ( 740099 ) on Saturday January 10, 2004 @11:57PM (#7942283)
    Is anyone else reminded of those virus programs that claimed to magically make your 386 a 486? Do you really think the BIOS is the only difference between the two cards?

    • Re:386to486.exe (Score:5, Informative)

      by Phosphor3k ( 542747 ) on Sunday January 11, 2004 @12:06AM (#7942342)
      In many cases, yes. The last two or three generations of cards from NVIDIA and ATI have largely been made up of only two or three physically different cards per generation, per manurfacturer (with different bios's installed though ocasionally a resistor or two had to be soldered in a different location as well). In ATI's case, many of their recent "budget" cards could have extra pipelines unlocked by merely using a hacked driver.

      • Re:386to486.exe (Score:3, Insightful)

        by doormat ( 63648 )
        Hacked driver? Not really...

        I think you're talking abuot softmodded 9500s to 9700s. The Radeon 9500 had 8 pipelines, and so did the 9700, it was just that the 9500 was clocked slower. So people tinkered with the drivers and bioses and got a 9500 pro looking like a 9700 pro, provided the chip could take the speed. ATI saw this, and with the 9600, they changeed it so that the 9600 had 4 pipelines, and the 9800 had 8 pipes. Funnily enough, the 9800 XT's core runs at 412MHz or so, and the 9600 XT's core runs a

    • Re:386to486.exe (Score:2, Interesting)

      by SuperJason ( 726019 )
      Possibly. A better analogy would be comparing a Pentium P120 to a P133. For a while, Intel was only making the P133, but would label some as P120's so that they had more than one product. It ends up being cheaper for them.

      That was only one example of a common practice with computer hardware.

    • Re:386to486.exe (Score:5, Interesting)

      by shaitand ( 626655 ) on Sunday January 11, 2004 @12:18AM (#7942424) Journal
      No but I sure remember those co-processor chips that DID magically make your 386 into a 486. I also remember those magic drills with which you could drill a hole in a single sided floppy and magically turn it into a double sided.

      • Re:386to486.exe (Score:3, Informative)

        by blincoln ( 592401 )
        No but I sure remember those co-processor chips that DID magically make your 386 into a 486. I also remember those magic drills with which you could drill a hole in a single sided floppy and magically turn it into a double sided.

        Those are good comparisons to the topic of this article, because both of those products had downsides similar to those of the 5900 mod.

        - The 386 -> 486 chips gave you a faster processor, but not the other hardware to go along with it (e.g. a faster bus). The 5900 mod (as far a

    • Re:386to486.exe (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Thing 1 ( 178996 ) on Sunday January 11, 2004 @12:25AM (#7942458) Journal
      Is anyone else reminded of those virus programs that claimed to magically make your 386 a 486? Do you really think the BIOS is the only difference between the two cards?

      I'm also reminded of Microsoft's disputed release of NT 3.51 Workstation vs. Server. The price differential was significant, and the only difference between the two installs was a couple Registry entries.

      Workstation had all the same code that Server had; it was just "crippled" by the Registry entries so that Microsoft could make more money selling Server versions to the Enterprise.

      (I love that high-tech companies these days are targetting the Star Trek mothership with their marketing campaigns!)

      But seriously, that was pretty sneaky. It was the exact same build (I know because I built NT back then), but just had a couple bits flipped. And it's still happening: XP can handle RAID arrays, but cannot create them: you need a Server product for that. And NT 4.0 could create RAID arrays from Basic disks; as of Windows 2000, the disks must be Dynamic in order to create a RAID array out of them. This of course makes it impossible to migrate that RAID array to a Linux solution, meaning administrators will balk at the time-consuming "create new array with different disks (i.e., buy more hardware), then copy the entire thing over, then find new use for old disks."

      • Microsoft still does the same thing. Take directX for example. If you download it and install it, it won't work without a reboot. But if you pay for the "corporate" version, it miraculously doesn't need a reboot any more.
        • Didn't know that, thanks.

          Also, I retract my statement: Windows XP cannot handle RAID arrays. I just created an array in a VM, then tried to attach them to an XP VM, and it identified them as new disks. So if you want redundancy, you're stuck on either Windows 2000 or Windows 2003 Server; you cannot use XP.

  • I'm waiting until it can be turned into a Radeon.. (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 10, 2004 @11:57PM (#7942287)
    might take more than a bios update though ;)

    Note to manufacturers: Stop creating products that feature factures. Got it. good.

  • Just cosmetic? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Hythlodaeus ( 411441 ) on Saturday January 10, 2004 @11:58PM (#7942294)
    It's not clear to me that this does anything other than change the text string containing the name of the card. It seems under some conditions people get better overclocking, but that could easily be due to room temperatures and the like. Are there any particular features in the 5950 not present in the 5900?

    • You're right, this is dumb (Score:4, Informative)

      by ObligatoryUserName ( 126027 ) on Sunday January 11, 2004 @12:05AM (#7942340) Journal
      I think you're right, they seem to be basing the fact that it's an "Ultra" completely off the fact that the Windows control panel says "NVIDIA GeForce FX 5950 Ultra". The people on the message board post benchmarks, and they're all lower save for one - you can overclock the card slightly higher when it's running the Ultra's bios... w00t.

  • But (Score:2, Funny)

    by graveyardduckx ( 735761 )
    Will it turn my 5950 into one of those sweet 288MB Wildcat cards from 3DLabs? That would be worth the risk.

  • Wah, I broke my video card. (Score:5, Funny)

    by molafson ( 716807 ) on Sunday January 11, 2004 @12:05AM (#7942335)
    -This is your bin-sorted video card.
    -This is your overclocked bin-sorted video card catastrophically failing.

    Any questions?

  • You gotta wonder (Score:5, Funny)

    by nizo ( 81281 ) on Sunday January 11, 2004 @12:06AM (#7942345) Homepage Journal
    ...that shows it is possible to turn a GeForce FX5900 into a FX5950 Ultra (which is NVIDIA's top of the line video card chipset currently available) through simply using the FX5950 Ultra BIOS on the FX5900 video card."

    Poor sales figures for the FX950 because people are buying a cheaper one instead? Simply post a way for people to easily fry their cheaper card so they can then upgrade to the better one!

    • Yeah, I'm sure that the sales differences have nothing to do with the fact that for most people a 5900 is overkill for many things and they never need that 5950, so they buy the cheaper one and spend the extra (what is it, $150 or $200?) on games or something. If you can afford to risk your graphics card on something like this which could hurt it (see my other post in this thread), they you should have bought the better card in the first place.

  • uh, looks SLOWER to me (Score:5, Insightful)

    by compwizrd ( 166184 ) on Sunday January 11, 2004 @12:07AM (#7942355)
    did i miss something, or are those benchmarks showing the "upgraded" bios is actually making the card run slower if they don't overclock even further?

  • Everyone Hide (Score:4, Interesting)

    by eyeball ( 17206 ) on Sunday January 11, 2004 @12:22AM (#7942442) Journal
    I believe I hear the DMCA police coming.

    Seriously, I wouldn't be surprised if they whipped out the DMCA threatening letters for this.

    • Nah, this wouldn't apply. DMCA-based threats are caused by people defeating copyright-protection mechanisms. At least that's how it's supposed to be.

  • Professional card? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Sunday January 11, 2004 @12:31AM (#7942487) Homepage Journal
    So does this just make overclocking easier, or does it turn on other features? I ask because the 'professional' cards (i.e. the kind use 3D artists would benefit from) have acellerated wireframe drawing and the like. Is that the case here too, or is it just a few extra FPS in Quake?

    • So does this just make overclocking easier, or does it turn on other features? ... Is that the case here too, or is it just a few extra FPS in Quake?

      I'm right now looking at the Cg profile differences between them.

      Probably a few other people are doing this right now, too. There are some differences in the profile, but I'm not sure yet if they are actual hardware differences or differences in the way the bios uses the hardware.

      It will certainly be interesting to see when I, or somebody else, does figure

    • Only affects overclocking. There is no GeForce FX to Quadro FX hack yet. Unwinder (the Russian genius who made just about EVERY GeForce and ATI hack of note and maintains RivaTuner) has said that it probably won't be possible, but you never know.
    • FPS in Quake. Cause 400 is never enough.
  • Now, will someone please figure out how to quadroize the GeForce4 cards? They cost a hundred bucks, it would be bloody fantastic.

    • Re:Whee. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Animats ( 122034 )
      Yeah, the whole GeForce/Quadro thing is getting tired. They're basically the same chip.

      Enforcing the distinction is the only reason for proprietary NVidia drivers. Some features are crippled in the driver when the common driver detects a GeForce card. This is probably the real reasons for the binary-only Linux driver. It also means you can't run many less common OSs on machines with NVidia's NForce chipset, because NVidia uses a common driver for all their hardware.

      The most annoying broken feature in

  • What it does--for real (Score:5, Informative)

    by The Baron (nV News) ( 649004 ) on Sunday January 11, 2004 @12:57AM (#7942629) Homepage Journal
    This came up a week ago at nV News here, [nvnews.net] and it's spread really fast (whether or not it came up somewhere else first, I'm not really sure--might have been Futuremark or something, but we had it before the Korean site that supposedly started it). The thread has a ton of feedback, by the way, so it's something to consider. (oh, and /. mods, links are nice too. :) )

    Before we get into the hack itself, we need to look at the chips and BIOSes involved. The 5900 cards use the NV35 chipset, and the 5950 uses the NV38 chipset. The two chips are very similar, but they are not exactly the same. This is not the Radeon 9500 to 9700 hack. In that situation, you had an R300 in both cards--here, you have to very similar chips. The differences between the NV35 and the NV38 are slight, at best, and as far as anyone knows, they have more to do with the cost of manufacturing than anything else (I've heard that 5900 cards are so cheap now simply because they are being dumped in lieux of 5950s).

    So, where does that leave us? The BIOS hack. Essentially, it does three things to the best of anyone's knowledge:

    • Increases the voltage to the core slightly.
    • Loosens the memory timings on the DDR (yes, video cards have memory timings just like motherboards and system RAM).
    • Sets the default clocks to 5950 levels (no RivaTuner or Coolbits necessary).

    So, the decrease in performance at the same clock speeds is due to the relaxed memory timings, but just like with anything else, you can get a higher overclock as a result.

    HOWEVER--there is one potentially serious problem. Most people have reported that the 5950 BIOS flash has caused no change in the reported temperatures. Given what we know about the new BIOS and increased voltage, this makes no sense. I am, then, forced to wonder if the temperature diode becomes less accurate after the BIOS is flashed with the 5950 BIOS. No one has confirmed this, and since I don't have a 5900 to try it on, I can't either. However, it's something to keep in mind.

    Finally, this is not newsworthy in the least. It's the same as people changing 9800 non-Pro BIOSes to those of 9800 Pros and getting better memory overclocks. It's nothing special or magical; you're not doubling the number of pipelines and the memory bus like you were with the 9500 to 9700 hack. However, it works (or seems to, at least), and it's pretty cool.

  • Turn $300 into $400?! Yippy! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by iamhassi ( 659463 ) on Sunday January 11, 2004 @12:59AM (#7942635) Journal
    You mean I can turn a $300 video card [pricewatch.com] into a $400 video card [pricewatch.com]??! Oh glorious day!

    Next you're going to tell me my frame rates will go DOWN a whopping 2%!

    "---Original BIOS---
    FX5900 @ 475Mhz/950Mhz DDR (Overclocked to FX5950U Speeds)
    3DMark03: 5770
    ---A380U BIOS---
    FX5950 @ 475Mhz/950Mhz DDR (Default FX5950U Speeds)
    3DMark03: 5661"

    Sounds like one mod I can't wait to do...

  • Let's hope this doesn't get too widespread (Score:4, Insightful)

    by pummer ( 637413 ) <spam&pumm,org> on Sunday January 11, 2004 @01:02AM (#7942649) Homepage Journal
    or NVidia will be forced to take the approach AMD did. AMD got tired of newbie overclockers buying $90 XP2500s and easily overclocking them into $500 XP3200s, so they locked the multiplier, one of the methods used to overclock AMD chips.

    Thus proving, the many ruin things for the few.

  • Wow! (Score:5, Funny)

    by danidude ( 672839 ) on Sunday January 11, 2004 @01:08AM (#7942675) Homepage
    it is possible to turn a GeForce FX5900 into a FX5950 Ultra

    Wow! Thats cool. I wonder then if there is a way to turn my vodoo3 into a Video Card...

    • Wow! Thats cool. I wonder then if there is a way to turn my vodoo3 into a Video Card...

      Well, you'd have better luck jury rigging a hampster powered Etch-A-Sketch than a Voodoo 3

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