Video card hacking - Make your GeForce a Quadro etc.

[Rubycon]

A while ago I remember people were doing this.
Do they still do this? How effective is it?
Turning a $400 video card into a $1600 one sounds interesting.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

It used to be as simple as flashing one bios to another. If I am not mistaken, Nvidia has wizened up to the practice and put an end to it.

 

[gorobei]

just did some browsing, it is still possible.

TechARP has a running article on it. 8800 series are currently being modded. it seems to be as simple as rivatuner and selecting the quadro drivers. performance gains in the additional 90% range depending on app. real quadros 2x the performance of softmod quadros.

unfortunately no use to me as maya gets worse performance with the mod.

 

[zagood]

There are a lot of RivaTuner threads about it at forums.guru3d.com with both positive and negative results.

 

[gorobei]

yeah, i remember getting a gf2 mx to mod into a quadro way back when. lol.

there's no gain in gaming performance, and most of the boost comes from rendering wireframes(aa on the lines, faster camera translates). which is why most of the specperf scores get the boost on cad and 3dsMx.
don't know if you still need those custom drivers/profiles from autodesk to get the top performance out of the quadros.

 

[aigomorla]

i thought they killed that on the 7000 series..

 

[Seggybop]

It's been mostly locked out on newer nvidia cards (I've only seen a patch that unlocks direct3d for 3d studio max on 8800 series), but it's easy to do on ATI cards.

There are rivatuner patch scripts to force the FireGL / FirePro drivers to run on normal Radeon cards up to the 4k series. You can find them at the guru3d rivatuner forum. I used a 3870 and a 4850 modified this way for a while with no problems, and the speed boost is huge.

No patch yet for the 5k series because there isn't a FirePro card using those chips yet, but it's pretty likely that a script will be made once they release one.

 

[PsiStar]

Autocr@p == gaming cards.

If you want "manly" work in real CAD, Pro/E or SolidWords get an OpenGL card which are not necessarily $1600. Google "solidworks video card benchmarks" & start at the top. Especially in SPECopc Viewperf 10.0 Solidworks & the Nvidia Quadro FX 1800 shines. For $140 for that card, I would have a different computer for gaming & ebay the GeForce.

I suggest the SW benchmarks as they are one of the few that check h/w out.

@Ruby ... Not that you are "manly" in any way!!!!! Just a sexist figure of speech you know.