My Video Properties reports the wrong GPU

[dedejean]

?video properties? reports my video card is a Geforce Go 6600 series? I tried several drivers, even the lates from nvidia.com to no avail. On the control panel > system > hardware > device manager > video it says geforce 6600GT on Viewsonic E70? but clicking the properties gives me Geforce Go 6600 (on one of the tabs). Does this have an effect? Or is this alright?

 

[Lord Evermore]

I don't think it should affect you. The differences between the Go and the GT are probably minor and not actually performance related, so the features and functionality ought to be the same. The GPU and memory clock speeds on the Go are a lot lower at stock though. It is somewhat odd that it shows up that way, but it may have something to do with simply the device ID on the card being wrong so the drivers aren't sure what chipset it uses. The Go of course is also designed to use less power.

Of course there's always the chance Inno3D actually did use a Geforce Go 6600 and programmed the BIOS to identify and clock it as a GT. I'm not sure if that would be considered a rip-off, or if you got a better deal.

 

[dedejean]

Originally posted by: Lord Evermore
Of course there's always the chance Inno3D actually did use a Geforce Go 6600 and programmed the BIOS to identify and clock it as a GT. I'm not sure if that would be considered a rip-off, or if you got a better deal.

OMG!!! that is soooo evil! why would they do that? But for the record, i get unclockable 500/1000 core/mem freq and a good 3dmark05 scores (comparable to other 6600GT scores online). im sure Go 6600 performs less, right?

 

[Lord Evermore]

At the same clock speeds, a Go 6600 ought to perform exactly the same as a 6600GT. Same number of pipelines between a Go, GT, and regular 6600, just different clock speeds. The Go would possibly use a little less power though, but that would be dependent on the card being designed properly for it to matter.

There've been a few cases over the years of "misleading" labelling and advertising where mobile chips were used instead of the desktop versions. I'm not saying Inno3D actually DID use a mobile chip, most of the time things like that are discovered and spread around the Internet pretty quickly. They may have just not programmed the BIOS ID properly or the chip may not have the proper ID so the drivers are mis-identifying the GPU; Windows may not be reading the same ID information for Device Manager.

 

[dedejean]

thanks for the convincing reply... so no worries for me right? I have this display problem:
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=32&threadid=1916641

i do hope this one's not related to this...

 

[aka1nas]

Are you using a beta or third party driver? Some of those may have originally been intended for a mobile chip and leaked/hacked to work with other cards.

 

[Lord Evermore]

The only drivers made available for mobile chips (until the 7 series) were from laptop manufacturer's own sites. nvidia up to now hadn't released any drivers for mobile chips from their own website. I doubt anybody bothered to ever hack a laptop maker's version, since those are inevitably several versions behind the nvidia official drivers. What usually happens is that nvidia drivers get hacked to allow installation on mobile chipsets. All they do then is to add the IDs for the mobile chips to the INF files so that the installer will detect it as a supported chipset, I don't think they substitute IDs in such a way that it would detect his GT and call it a Go. I doubt anybody bothers with hacking drivers from any manufacturers to make them work with other brands, since for one thing they're usually nothing but an older version of nvidia's own drivers, and nvidia's own drivers can be used on any card anyway.

 

[aka1nas]

Sometimes the Beta drivers that are leaked early are from the Laptop manufacturers websites. Then it's the non-mobile IDs that get added to the .inf's

 

[dedejean]

no sir, i used the 91.33 driver, as well for other official versions snce 76.45 onwards.

Inno3d already emailed me... saying
"The wrong identification issue is due to the unified bios of geforce 6600 series VGA card. It can be said as a bug but it won't affect the performance and stability of the card."

Sounds fair to me.. as long as it doesnt affect performance!

 

[Lord Evermore]

I don't know if "fair" quite is the word to use, but as long as you got the chip and the features you paid for, great. If it turns out at some point that nvidia's drivers DO work differently depending on what GPU they detect, you're screwed.