Author Topic: [MOVED] Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts  (Read 1645013 times)

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Offline gordan

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Re: [MOVED] Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts
« Reply #500 on: August 01, 2013, 10:39:55 am »
I'll try it as soon as my GTX680 is re-modified. I am still waiting for the correct resistors. My last attempt went a bit wrong, I ended up modifying the ID from 0x1180 to 0x1182 instead of 0x11A0, due to an epic brainfart.
 

Offline gordan

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Re: [MOVED] Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts
« Reply #501 on: August 02, 2013, 07:15:02 am »
Hmm... It would appear Nvidia don't list the Mosaic utility available for anything older than Windows 7 any more. :-/
I don't suppose anyone has a link to the XP64 version?
 

Offline Jager

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Re: [MOVED] Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts
« Reply #502 on: August 05, 2013, 01:00:43 pm »
Vacation is over and i had a change to look two Quadro machines at work. One is Win7 with quadro 600 and other is XP32bit with Quadro 2000. Both machines have Workstation tree and possible to chose different stereo modes at manage3d setings. Whole manage 3D settings is different as you can chose 3D profiles for professional programs. WinXP machine do not have Mosaic setup at Workstation tree, only "view system topology". It seems that changing those resistors do not affect what features will be enabled. It only allows to install quadro drivers but those drivers look features from vbios? and enables only features that is supported in vbios not by product name/ID. I did some bios Hex editing and changed subsystem id to correspond K5000 but still no help. So there will be need for some serious vbios hacking and this is area that i have no experience. Maybe K5000 bios could be modded to support these hard modded cards?
 

Offline gordan

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Re: [MOVED] Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts
« Reply #503 on: August 05, 2013, 06:01:53 pm »
I don't know about the other cards, but I have tried flashing a Q2000 BIOS onto a GTS450. You have to doctor the device ID straps to override the hardware straps accordingly, but it works well enough to boot up. I never tested more thoroughly than that since I didn't see the point. If I planned to keep it I would have doctored all the clock speeds and memory timings to match the original BIOS. There was no effect on performance, over and above what was caused by the drop in clock speeds to Quadro levels.  I didn't notice any extra features, but I wasn't looking (was testing on XP).
 

Offline Jager

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Re: [MOVED] Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts
« Reply #504 on: August 06, 2013, 09:59:03 am »
Did some more testing. Flashed my GTX670 with K5000 BIOS. GTX670 shader count, memory size and board ID is different so it was quite clear that this will not work. Interesting thing was that when i flashed back to GTX670 BIOS something left behind from K5000 BIOS. Size is now 129kb instead 96kb that GTX670 normally have, K5000 bios is 221kb. When i first opened GPU-Z it recognized GPU as GK104GT and bios as "modified" but after some time without touching bios it showed up correctly. Funny thing is that now i have <workstation> options in nvidia control panel but only "change ECC state" and after looking bios with hex editor it clearly show that those extra 33kb included EEC option(this code is after 670 normal bios code). So it is now quite clear that BIOS for modded one is needed to get this thing actually behaving like K5000, this soldering is just for name change without some hardcore BIOS editing. 
 

Offline Soulnight

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Re: [MOVED] Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts
« Reply #505 on: August 06, 2013, 08:47:40 pm »
Did some more testing. Flashed my GTX670 with K5000 BIOS. GTX670 shader count, memory size and board ID is different so it was quite clear that this will not work. Interesting thing was that when i flashed back to GTX670 BIOS something left behind from K5000 BIOS. Size is now 129kb instead 96kb that GTX670 normally have, K5000 bios is 221kb. When i first opened GPU-Z it recognized GPU as GK104GT and bios as "modified" but after some time without touching bios it showed up correctly. Funny thing is that now i have <workstation> options in nvidia control panel but only "change ECC state" and after looking bios with hex editor it clearly show that those extra 33kb included EEC option(this code is after 670 normal bios code). So it is now quite clear that BIOS for modded one is needed to get this thing actually behaving like K5000, this soldering is just for name change without some hardcore BIOS editing.

And could you try to edit the bios witn right shader counts, etc? And flash it again?
Thx :) Your work is appreciated!
 

Offline gordan

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Re: [MOVED] Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts
« Reply #506 on: August 07, 2013, 05:12:00 pm »
That is indeed interesting - does the ECC toggle actually work? Does the memory amount shrink by 1/9? If so, any chance you could PM me a link where I could download the before+after BIOS for analysis?
« Last Edit: August 07, 2013, 05:17:24 pm by gordan »
 

Offline Jager

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Re: [MOVED] Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts
« Reply #507 on: August 08, 2013, 08:04:15 am »
That is indeed interesting - does the ECC toggle actually work? Does the memory amount shrink by 1/9? If so, any chance you could PM me a link where I could download the before+after BIOS for analysis?

Otion do not work. I can enable it but after restart there is still small star next to checked checkbox that says it will be enabled after restart. It definetely tries to enable on boot because screen blanks way that it wont normally do.

I did some testing with tridef and it seems that outputs on dualprojection is synced after all, this is also card without mods. So i think it is nowadays navite behavior    also with Geforce up to 2xSLI. Now i just need to find another way to enable Dual passive stereo and buying K6000 is not an option :)
 

Offline Soulnight

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Re: [MOVED] Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts
« Reply #508 on: August 08, 2013, 08:20:40 am »
TRidef doesn't support Nvidia SLI... You would instead need a beast: GTX 780 :) Is it nice to play with tridef games in passive 3d 1080p 60hz?  :P How do you know it is synchronized for both projectors?
« Last Edit: August 08, 2013, 08:29:01 am by Soulnight »
 

Offline Jager

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Re: [MOVED] Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts
« Reply #509 on: August 08, 2013, 10:51:40 am »
TRidef doesn't support Nvidia SLI... You would instead need a beast: GTX 780 :) Is it nice to play with tridef games in passive 3d 1080p 60hz?  :P How do you know it is synchronized for both projectors?

To be honest 1080p 60hz is not that great because framerate. Tridef also support dual projection only for DX9. Many of my favorite games do not work as well with 3D vision+helix mod. It is quite easy to tell when 3D is out of sync, maybe i do side by side video to confirm this...

Too bad 670 to K5000 was "fail", but i will keep looking. Maybe nvidia inspector's stereo settings could help and there is 3d vision hacks etc...
 

Offline Soulnight

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Re: [MOVED] Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts
« Reply #510 on: August 08, 2013, 11:34:16 am »
TRidef doesn't support Nvidia SLI... You would instead need a beast: GTX 780 :) Is it nice to play with tridef games in passive 3d 1080p 60hz?  :P How do you know it is synchronized for both projectors?

To be honest 1080p 60hz is not that great because framerate. Tridef also support dual projection only for DX9. Many of my favorite games do not work as well with 3D vision+helix mod. It is quite easy to tell when 3D is out of sync, maybe i do side by side video to confirm this...

Too bad 670 to K5000 was "fail", but i will keep looking. Maybe nvidia inspector's stereo settings could help and there is 3d vision hacks etc...

The best and only solution for 3d vision dual projector passive 3D is still this demultiplexer for 3000$ which is 3D vision ready for 120hz 1080p 3D gaming and where you can use any nvidia cards:
http://www.mviewtech.com/listen.asp?ProdId=111025104433
http://www.dhgate.com/product/ma2p202-dvi-single-channel-active-to-passive/144319832.html
 

Offline gordan

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Re: [MOVED] Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts
« Reply #511 on: August 09, 2013, 02:13:24 pm »
That is indeed interesting - does the ECC toggle actually work? Does the memory amount shrink by 1/9? If so, any chance you could PM me a link where I could download the before+after BIOS for analysis?

Otion do not work. I can enable it but after restart there is still small star next to checked checkbox that says it will be enabled after restart. It definetely tries to enable on boot because screen blanks way that it wont normally do.

A before+after BIOS check would still be handy if it is different.
The other possibility, if you used a 3rd party VBIOS flash package, is that it also brought with it a FPGA blob with it and it somehow flashed that onto the card via some less documented means, and when you downgraded the BIOS that wasn't reverted.

If all your video outputs work fine, I see no reason to not use a Quadro BIOS - but you will still need to modify the straps in the BIOS to match the hard-straps you need to override (if any) and you may also want to change the clock speeds and timings to the GeForce spec.
 

Offline Jager

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Re: [MOVED] Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts
« Reply #512 on: August 13, 2013, 06:11:48 am »
That is indeed interesting - does the ECC toggle actually work? Does the memory amount shrink by 1/9? If so, any chance you could PM me a link where I could download the before+after BIOS for analysis?

Otion do not work. I can enable it but after restart there is still small star next to checked checkbox that says it will be enabled after restart. It definetely tries to enable on boot because screen blanks way that it wont normally do.

A before+after BIOS check would still be handy if it is different.
The other possibility, if you used a 3rd party VBIOS flash package, is that it also brought with it a FPGA blob with it and it somehow flashed that onto the card via some less documented means, and when you downgraded the BIOS that wasn't reverted.

If all your video outputs work fine, I see no reason to not use a Quadro BIOS - but you will still need to modify the straps in the BIOS to match the hard-straps you need to override (if any) and you may also want to change the clock speeds and timings to the GeForce spec.

gordan, send PM with before after bios. I use latest nvflash(dos) to flash bios.

I also have 8800GT lying around so i flashed it to "FX 3700", same thing. With modded 8800GT bios no Quadro features are actually enabled, just name change also with this. Is there any Quadro mod ever made that actually enables quadro features? How nvidia actually look these features. When doing 3D it is possible to change 3D modes that are not listed in cp when alt-tab and edit registry key. Is there possible to do injector that enables features? ECC feature that i have now is somehow left behind in bios and maybe nvidia is looking just some flags in bios and enables feature even it is not actually possible to do with card. Many quadro features are possible with Geforce as in Linux u can do Mosaic etc with geforce too.
 

Online JohanH

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Re: [MOVED] Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts
« Reply #513 on: August 13, 2013, 11:20:08 am »
I also have 8800GT lying around so i flashed it to "FX 3700", same thing. With modded 8800GT bios no Quadro features are actually enabled, just name change also with this. Is there any Quadro mod ever made that actually enables quadro features? How nvidia actually look these features. When doing 3D it is possible to change 3D modes that are not listed in cp when alt-tab and edit registry key. Is there possible to do injector that enables features? ECC feature that i have now is somehow left behind in bios and maybe nvidia is looking just some flags in bios and enables feature even it is not actually possible to do with card. Many quadro features are possible with Geforce as in Linux u can do Mosaic etc with geforce too.

Are you claiming that there is no gain of changing the ID from Geforce to Quadro? I thought that it at least would improve restricted driver features in Linux, i.e. namely mosaic with more than two displays, and 3dvision, which both currently is only possible with Quadro cards. That's why the author started this thread in the first place.

Edit: I see there is now support for base mosaic in latest linux drivers (not sure which versions). And to the comment about 3dvision (note to myself): it is a DirectX thing only. Basically there is 3D support in linux with OpenGL, but not using the nvidia driver. The Quadro 3D support seems to be something different. So actually you are right. There is no point in converting to Quadro for these features alone.
« Last Edit: August 13, 2013, 11:55:13 am by jukk »
 

Offline gordan

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Re: [MOVED] Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts
« Reply #514 on: August 15, 2013, 08:59:29 pm »
Got your PM. Will look at disecting the files soon. I will reserve judgement until after I've had a look through that. My suspicion is currently leaning toward just checking the device ID in the BIOS (as opposed to only the straps). On a K series the cards have UEFI crypto stuff in the BIOS, so it is more difficult to change the BIOS other than the straps (unless you just completely rip out the UEFI headers and the trailing certs and other garbage). Since most of the hacks focus on the device ID (as opposed to what the BIOS things the device ID is), it is possible this is overlooked.

Nevertheless, a Quadro BIOS should be very easily modifiable to suit using the existing tools (or just manual hacking) - mainly just a case of tweaking clock speeds and timings. In some cases it will work out of the box: e.g. my GTS450 cards work just fine with a Quadro 2000 BIOS. Unfortunately, this does not restore the missing GL functionality. There are three possibilities here:

1) That functionality is laser-cut out of the GPU - no hope of restoring that.
2) Pin shorting on the GPU to disable the feature (e.g. caps across pins - plausible, but I've not been able to establish a pattern here, all GTS450 cards I have had were mutually different in that regard, and different from the Quadro 2000 as well.
3) Secondary firmware somewhere that initializes an FPGA somewhere to do the normally crippled GL stuff properly.

My suspicion is that 1) is the case since the Quadro and GeForce GPUs have different part numbers stamped on them, and this likely happens before they are fitted to the PCBs.

I don't think there is a Mosaic utility for Linux, but I could be wrong - you can set up multiple displays using xorg.conf anyway (e.g. when you're using an IBM T221). I don't remember seeing any driver options for adding spacing between monitors, but I haven't looked. I certainly haven't noticed any difference in features between a real Quadro 2000 and a fake one (other than the fact that one works for VGA passthrough in Xen and the other does not). And while we're on the subject, on a GTS450, modding to a Q2000 does improve performance of some SPEC tests (Maya goes up by about 40%, although it is still well short of a real Q2000 score on it). On a GTX580/Q7000, there is no difference in SPEC performance whatsoever before/after the mod (in both cases the mod consisted of strap and BIOS device ID changes, nothing else). In the GTS450 case a real Q2000 BIOS made no further improvement - in fact it made the scores worse due to the lower clock speeds being set.
 

Offline Jager

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Re: [MOVED] Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts
« Reply #515 on: August 16, 2013, 07:41:23 am »
gordan, at least latest beta geforce drivers for linux contains support for mosaic. Here is line from driver notes --> "Added support for configuring SLI Mosaic and Base Mosaic in the "X Server Display Configuration" page of nvidia-settings".

I think many of the quadro features are supported hardware level on geforces too. Mosaic utility for example reports sync=1 for GTX670 vanilla but not for real Q2000 on XP.

Maybe some skilled coder could do injection/hook hacks to enable those missing features...
 

Offline gordan

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Re: [MOVED] Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts
« Reply #516 on: August 16, 2013, 01:55:30 pm »
If the feature is indeed dependant on something in the BIOS, I think you're better off working on a BIOS mod based on the Quadro BIOS, and hope it's not crippled in hardware in some obscure way (more obscure than the strap resistors).
 

Offline arghalhuas

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Re: Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts
« Reply #517 on: August 26, 2013, 07:46:02 pm »
Really thanks for the efforts of gnif and verybigbadboy
However, since I have a EVGA GTX670 with the same PCB layout like GTX660Ti
So I need to find the modification by myself and here is the result.
For the 4th digit, as everyone already knows, it is right on the position of resistor 1 and 2.
Depend on which card you have and you can remove resistor 1 and change it to tesla(40K), grid k2(40K) or Quadro(15K) on resistor 2.
For the 3rd digit, it is the tricky part.
As the low byte on the top side of the PCB with resistor 4.
You don't need to do anything for Tesla K10.
However, if you need to change it to a Quadro K5000 or Grid K2
You need to remove resistor 4 and install resistor 3 "MANUALLY" since no place for resistor 3 any more in the PCB of GTX670 and GTX660Ti
As you can see in my attached  bottom side photo for the "rework".
You need to connect to EEPROM pin 6 with a 20K Ohm and pull up to VCC.
My rework is quite ugly but it works fine!
Please be careful and take your own risk for modifying your card!!

Summary
GPU Name         Resistor 1 / 0-7 4th byte                  Resistor 2 / 8-f 4th byte                 Resistor 3/ 3th byte (high)       Resistor 4 / 3th byte(low)           
GTX 660Ti          20K                                                  None                                               None                                         25k                                                                             
GTX 670            None                                                10K                                                  None                                         25k                                                                             
tesla k10           none                                                40K                                                  None                                         25k                                                                             
quadro k5000    none                                                15k                                                  20K                                            none                                                                             
grid k2              none                                                40K                                                  20K                                           none                                                                           

Should this work with a GTX 670MX? Can this one be turned into a K5000M?

I bought a laptop with a 120 Hz screen, which is compatible with 3D Vision Pro. The problem is that, with Linux, 3D Vision Pro only works with Quadro cards but not with GeForce ones. That is why I might be interested in trying to make a Quadro out of my GeForce...
 

Offline mvrk

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Re: Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts
« Reply #518 on: August 27, 2013, 01:42:44 pm »

Yes, running Crysis in a VM on a Quadrified GTX480 (Quadro 6000) on my 2nd T221 and there is no tearing whatsoever. Nor was there any tearing on my other T221 with the 8800GT card, but there is massive tearing visible with the Radeon 4850.


Hi, i've got a Nvidia Geforce GTX 480 and i would like to transform it into a Quadro 5000 so i can use it with VMware Horizon View vSGA.... can you post the howto to modify the the GTX480 into a Quadro 6000 please? Or is already on this forum and i missed it?
« Last Edit: August 28, 2013, 06:59:09 pm by mvrk »
 

Offline mrkrad

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Re: [MOVED] Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts
« Reply #519 on: September 01, 2013, 02:13:15 pm »
yeah second the svga driver for esxi - can the driver be hacked? Also how come the earlier FX3800,4800,5800 (noted to have multi-os support) are not workable with esxi vsvga api-intercept protocol.

I'm guessing the grid K1/K2 can do real SR-IOV in the future but it seems that the nvidia driver is doing api-intercept with some sort of virtualization driver similar to how they can combine multiple gpu's with internal gpu.

 

Offline opoeta

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Re: [MOVED] Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts
« Reply #520 on: September 03, 2013, 05:29:37 pm »
Good afternoon, I'm thinking of turning my GTX770 in K5000. But the suppliers here in Brazil, I can not find the resistors. For example the 40K resistor here only has 40K2, can I use this resistor will give or difference?
 

Offline opoeta

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Re: [MOVED] Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts
« Reply #521 on: September 04, 2013, 11:33:07 am »
Good morning, I tested successfully mod my GTX770 in K5000. How was not finding the resistors, used Trimmers 50k ohms, like these,
And I configured one for 15K and one for 40K, the board used was a Zotac GTX770 AMP!

Follows the model of plate tests and referrals. Subsequently do more stability testing. If anyone needs the bios I upload.

http://www.zotacusa.com/geforce-gtx-770-zt-70303-10p.html

 

Offline Soulnight

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Re: [MOVED] Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts
« Reply #522 on: September 07, 2013, 04:13:23 pm »
Nice mod on the GTX 770! Did it was exacty like on the gtx 680?

And more importantly: what did you gain from making the mod? Do you have any new functionnalities?
 

Offline gordan

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Re: [MOVED] Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts
« Reply #523 on: September 07, 2013, 08:32:34 pm »
Small update guys.

I finally got around to playing a little more with my GTX680. Soldering 0402 components manually is an absolute bitch even with solder paste, a decent magnifying lamp, good eyes and steady hands.

Findings:

1) Removing both resistors (so all 0-4 resistor locations are empty) results in device ID of 0x11BF, i.e. Grid K2 - which is what I was aiming for anyway. From there on I can soft-mod to K5000 or GTX680MX if required (or anything else with IDs between 0x11A0 and 0x11BF).

2) In K2 mode, the card works for VGA passthrough on Xen. Sort of. Almost. It works find at up to 1280x800. If I select any res higher than that, it fails. As far as I can tell, the monitor is told to go into sleep mode. Tested with 320.49 and 320.78 drivers. Has anyone else found this? I haven't done any BIOS modding yet, but did anyone else see a similar issue? Is this something Nvidia did in recent drivers to cripple modified cards when running in a VM? I tested the K2-ified card in another bare metal machine with the same monitors, and in all cases there it works fine. But on my VM host, when passed through to a VM, it works great up to and including at 1280x800, and the screen just remains blank at higher resolutions. Talk about bizzare.

This is an interesting finding - my soft-Quadrified GTS450 (Q2000), GTX470 (Q5000), and GTX480 (Q6000) cards work just fine under the exact same conditions. I wonder if this is some kind of an obscure compatibility issue between Grid and Qx000 cards in the same machine since they have different size memory apertures - something could be getting confused.

Until I can get this resolved, modifying of my GTX690 is on hold.
 

Offline gamezr2ez

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Re: [MOVED] Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts
« Reply #524 on: September 08, 2013, 04:13:00 am »
1) Removing both resistors (so all 0-4 resistor locations are empty) results in device ID of 0x11BF, i.e. Grid K2 - which is what I was aiming for anyway. From there on I can soft-mod to K5000 or GTX680MX if required (or anything else with IDs between 0x11A0 and 0x11BF).

Did you add two 40k resistors in the correct locations? If you did not, this could be the cause.

verybigbadboy notes he has some stability problems when they are not on.
I do not have these stability problems (but I did add them on for good measure a month back).
You may be having problems because of this that neither one of us experienced. Try adding the resistors.

In K2 mode, the card works for VGA passthrough on Xen. Sort of. Almost. It works find at up to 1280x800. If I select any res higher than that, it fails. As far as I can tell, the monitor is told to go into sleep mode. Tested with 320.49 and 320.78 drivers.

I am running Xen 4.2.2 with no patches (save a SLIC table I added in to active Windows to). The unofficial nVidia patches do not have to be used, but the did work for me if you wanted to do GPU passthrough without the cirrus card. My current graphics driver is 320.00. Both the Geforce and Quadro/Grid drivers give me the same performance. I have not upgraded to test the new ones. Try that revision and see if it helps.

Soldering 0402 components manually is an absolute bitch even with solder paste, a decent magnifying lamp, good eyes and steady hands.

Toaster oven is the way to go. Heat gun if you are in a hurry. I use the iron to touch up and desolder. Occasionally I will use it to do one 0402. Any more than that it gets throw in to the toaster over nowadays.
 


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