[MOVED] Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts

[BusyBerlinBear]

Hi Guys.  This is my first post here so please be gentle! 

I'm sorry if this is not the right place to be posting this, but it looks like there's a load of people here that know what they are talking about when it comes to NVidia cards.

I have a Dell Alienware  NVIDIA Geforce MXM B GTX 770M 3GB Laptop Video Card HW6C9 which looks like someone tried to reprogram the BIOS and in the process knocked two components off the board.  Neither are identified and I could really do with some help identifying the missing components so I can replace them.

I have a heat station with a narrow nozzle so I shouldn't have a problem soldering the offending components back on, but really need to find out what they are or find a good reference that can point me in the right direction.

I know it's not the latest card, but it would be nice to get it up and running.

Thanks in advance.  Any advice would be really appreciated.

I am assuming I am looking at the BIOS chip here BTW and apologies for the bad photo.  It's as close as I could get with my crappy phone.

[alex_wilky]

hi, @gotofbi!
I got a great result - exactly the same as I wanted to get. If possible, tell us more details: what physical card was on the host, whether it was subjected to software or hardware alterations, what was done on the host where proxmox is installed, what packages are installed.
And of course I want to know what setting was made in the Windows 10 guest system. Thanks!

[colokarl]

Hi Guys.  This is my first post here so please be gentle! 

I'm sorry if this is not the right place to be posting this, but it looks like there's a load of people here that know what they are talking about when it comes to NVidia cards.

I have a Dell Alienware  NVIDIA Geforce MXM B GTX 770M 3GB Laptop Video Card HW6C9 which looks like someone tried to reprogram the BIOS and in the process knocked two components off the board.  Neither are identified and I could really do with some help identifying the missing components so I can replace them.

I have a heat station with a narrow nozzle so I shouldn't have a problem soldering the offending components back on, but really need to find out what they are or find a good reference that can point me in the right direction.

I know it's not the latest card, but it would be nice to get it up and running.

Thanks in advance.  Any advice would be really appreciated.

I am assuming I am looking at the BIOS chip here BTW and apologies for the bad photo.  It's as close as I could get with my crappy phone.

This looks like some resistors missing and i think the chip above is something Power/Voltage related.
Looking @pic i attached it seems to be one resistor and one diode (i might be wrong).
Now for the exact type of components, i don't know.

The picture is of ebay and you could try asking/ bother a seller to measure the resistor, but that Value might be off as this is a closed Circuit he would measure against.

Try to get one off of ebay which is defect, remove the missing components and solder them onto your card is my best guess here.

Cheers

[colokarl]

@gotofbi - cudos !

offtopic:

Guys,

i virtualized 8 x 1060gb with kvm and they work pretty well.

One thing bugs me though, one of the cards is only delivering 1/3 of performance (KH/s) when running hashcat benchmark.

Anyone have a clue what might be causing this ?

[alex_wilky]

i virtualized 8 x 1060gb with kvm and they work pretty well.

More details: the card has not been modified? Is pci-passthrough or vGPU made?

[colokarl]

i virtualized 8 x 1060gb with kvm and they work pretty well.

More details: the card has not been modified? Is pci-passthrough or vGPU made?

It's pci-passthrough - kvm can hide to the guest that it is a virtualized machine.

[alex_wilky]

It's pci-passthrough - kvm can hide to the guest that it is a virtualized machine.

Maybe the reason is that the PCI-Express slot with this card is x1/x4 instead of x8/x16? Try to rearrange the cards between each other in the slots and see if this reduction will remain or not.

[cresset]

I am interested in the solution of kvm and vgpu. Can anyone guide us which file should be patched?
I am working on nvidia-vgpu. It uses flexlm embedded and binary file (****64) format....so it should be doable

off topic,
With hint and help of mcerveny, I made it work on KVM.
I dont have magic script and its all accomplished with binary patch so I cant release.

Can you please elaborate little bit what need to be patched? is it the driver nvidia-ml or nvidia-vfio-vgpu or nvidia-vgpud in case of kvm?
i didn't understand which part of nvidia driver was patched by mcerveny?

[Serj_82]

Hello!
I want to try to make from Nvidia GTX 690 - Quadro K5000, as it is written in the instructions.
I took the video card to the workshop, I thought everything would be simple, but no ...
I got this question: what TYPE of resistor should be applied? Because, supposedly, knowing the parameter of the resistor (15K and 20K) is not enough.
Did anyone succeed in this manipulation with the GTX 690?
I ask for help, and thanks in advance!

[colokarl]

smd type 0402, at least on all the cards i did

[Serj_82]

smd type 0402, at least on all the cards i did

Thank you so much! The card was correctly identified in the system as Quadro K5000? Any special drivers needed?

[colokarl]

i havent done a quadro mod, only grid, but this worked and so should quadro mod.

[Serj_82]

Good day!
Topic starter (gnif) answered me that he used 0603 packages.
Now I'm confused, which type is it - 0402 or 0603?

[colokarl]

I guess they both will do th job:

http://www.resistorguide.com/resistor-sizes-and-packages/

anyway, order both sizes and compare to stock ones, they're dirt cheap. i wont take the cards out to have a closer look, but for me i used 0402.

[krutav]

Wow this thread is quite old!

Well a few days ago I decided to buy a cheap 660 Ti for $65 (Asus 660Ti-DC2-2gd5) in order to try out some of these mods here and learn more about graphics cards for virtualization purposes. I thought I would share some of my findings:

1. Modding into a quadro did not provide any performance benefits whatsoever. (SPECViewperf score was pretty bad especially in SNX) Mosaic and other workstation specifc features did not seem to show up in the Nvidia control panel, and even if they did show, they didn't work.

2. Modding into a grid K2 card, I was unable to get vGPU working in ESXi 6.5, but it might be possible in XenServer. I don't plan on bothering with vGPU on this old hardware anyway. If it is possible on newer consumer cards like the GTX 1060 that would be really cool to experiment with.

3. Using the card as-is unmodded works just fine with VMWare Horizon and I was able to get my 3 monitor thin client setup working with NVENC support. I tested this out with both the 660 Ti and a 1060 6GB along with an HDMI Dummy plug. Modding into a grid K2 allows you to bypass the need for any dummy plugs in horizon. This means that any consumer card should work just fine. There will be a file you need to install in order to get NVENC support if it doesn't already work with Horizon, however. Feel free to PM me for more info on this.

4. I found some old ATI FirePro v5700s and they pretty much destroyed the GTX660 Ti in certain SPECviewperf tests. 

5. There are some surface mount components near the die on the GPU package and they had some different values... I wonder if changing those can enable some features.

6. I would have been better off just buying a cheap card like a 1050 for $40 more and get better performance in Blender and Premiere Pro 

Huge thanks to everyone on this thread for all the contributions to this modding experiment. It was a pretty fun experience modding this card into all kinds of things. Well now that I have a card sitting around, I'm always interested in more cool graphics card experiments!

Mods done:
660 Ti -->  K5000, Grid K2, Tesla K10, 670

[krutav]

Hello everyone,

I had an interesting thought today:

What if you could solder more VRAM onto cards?

Seems like a pretty ridiculous idea but the amount of VRAM on a graphics card is usually set by some resistors, where? I have no idea. But it does seem possible since these VRAM chips are really cheap and I happened to have a handful of a different GDDR5 chips in quantities of 256mb - 1Gb. Since the thread is about modding cards into their professional counterparts, one thing that's present on professional cards is a far higher amount of VRAM, so by the looks of it, I think it is very possible to add more VRAM on a graphics card!

This can potentially work on cards newer than kepler since a lot of cards have 3rd party variants with a larger size of VRAM.

Thanks,
From Krutav Shah

[szolnoki]

Hi,

Have you already solved the issue between Dell R720 and GRID K2?

[krutav]

Hi,

Have you already solved the issue between Dell R720 and GRID K2?

AFAIK, the GRID K2 works properly with the DELL R720 as it is the x79 chipset and usually does not have a problem with this. Check BIOS for any settings that can help you to get the card working, such as 4G decoding for example.

[gotofbi]

Hi,

Have you already solved the issue between Dell R720 and GRID K2?

AFAIK, the GRID K2 works properly with the DELL R720 as it is the x79 chipset and usually does not have a problem with this. Check BIOS for any settings that can help you to get the card working, such as 4G decoding for example.

I couldnt make it work on R720 and gave up on modded K2 to work with R720.
Maybe its problem with Mod or I dotn know but it never worked on my R720.
After all, I need vGPU with KVM support and K2 cant support that feature.

[krutav]

Yeah GRID K2 only works up to xen 7.1 and ESXi 6.5 so if you don’t have those then you are stuck with pass through.

[telvenes]

Hi,

Like the thread you started here. I thought I was smart when I bought an Nvidia P2000 card that would support vGPU which it obviously does not. Anyone have managed and hack this short to and get more vGPU?

Or may have some recommendations on cards that I can install in my PowerEdge R620. Preferably low profile since its what R620 is but not important.

[bayx]

What exactly you need? I have 2 1070 one with OC and with different
Ram Modules (micron and  samsung)

I got an ASUS P104-100 mining specific GPU which has the same PCB and specs as an ASUS GTX 1080 TURBO (other than maybe CUDA cores) and thus could be flashed into a GTX 1080 or 1070 GDDR5X in case there really are only 1920 CUDA cores on board. The reason anyone would want to turn it into a 1080/1070 is beacuse P104 is SERIOUSLY BIOS limited. PCIe is dropped to 1.1 (PCIe 3.0 hardware), VRAM is limited to 4GB (8GB installed) and video output is disabled (even though this card has video output ports). The device ID of a 1080 is x1B80 and P104's is x1B87, so I just need to find the resistors that determine the 4th symbol and then test what resistances equate to what values.

I don't know if something has changed in the meantime, someone on the LTT forum said they transplanted an entire P106 chip onto a GTX 1060 board and it didn't work unless there was a P106 BIOS flashed, basically it behaved like straps don't exist or are somehow the same for both cards. Maybe that's not correct and strap modding would work, but if it is correct maybe it's baked into the chip or some other component, I simply don't have a way of knowing because I couldn't find any info about that on Pascal.

Here are the docs I found: https://buildmedia.readthedocs.org/media/pdf/envytools/latest/envytools.pdf

I would like to know how device ID is determined on Pascal, if it's same as it has been before. What's the easiest way to identify which resistors are used for the 4th value of device ID? I know there is probably an answer in this thread but it's so massive my eyes fell off reading it...
I would also like to know about any secondary strap functions that could have been changed on the P104 (in case video output is disabled via straps I would need to change that too).

I really hope nothing has changed and that a simple strap mod would unlock it's full potential. Also if anyone has a GTX 1070 with GDDR5X memory please PM me your GPU BIOS and GPU-Z screenshot, so I have everything I need in case it does only have 1920 CUDA cores on board (which it most likely does).

[bayx]

Is it possible to change 1070 to P4000?

[krutav]

Hello everyone, I just want to say that Maxwell and above GPUs have PCI straps embedded on the chip so good luck trying to modify that. If you really wanted to try, you can fire up a KVM and set a passthrough for your card, but you will need to set some options, which include changing the PCI straps of the VFIO GPU and the vBIOS. Here is how I did it on my Proxmox KVM server:

args: -device 'vfio-pci,host=02:00.0,id=hostpci0.0,bus=ich9-pcie-port-1,addr=0x0.0,multifunction=on,romfile=YOURVBIOS.rom,x-pci-vendor-id=0x10de,x-pci-device-id=0x11bf,x-pci-sub-vendor-id=0x10de,x-pci-sub-device-id=0x0965' -device 'vfio-pci,host=02:00.1,id=hostpci0.1,bus=ich9-pcie-port-1,addr=0x0.1'

Note that you will need to change the PCI SUBSYS and PCE Device ID based on what card you have. For example, a grid K2 is 0x11BF, so I set that. Please also specify the correct romfile which you can get from techpowerup vbios collection. You will also have to change your PCIE root port, which you can find with LSPCI command. Mine was 02:00

Let me know if you had success. I had with a Kepler GPU (660Ti) because that's what is in my system right now, will have to pull out a 1080 later.

Oh and one more thing, I wrote a reddit post about the new vGPU killer which you all can use. It's the new Windows GPU-P paravirtualization and partitioning of GPUs. (Windows 10 Pro and Enterprise 20H2 update) https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/jym8xz/gpu_partitioning_is_finally_possible_in_hyperv/

Thank you for reading!

[bayx]

Dear Krutav,
thx for your idea, only for understanding i can install a KVM (Kernelbased Virtual Machine) where i can
Install a vbios from any device (example quadro P4000) and configure it to to start a vm with windows 10 and i have a quadro k4000 after in system, right?