Author Topic: [MOVED] Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts  (Read 1645048 times)

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Offline gnifTopic starter

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Re: Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts
« Reply #225 on: March 31, 2013, 05:42:25 pm »
It should be noted that this mod was originally performed not to get a high performance Quadro or Telsa card, it was done to unlock additional features such as Mosaic support which does indeed work.
 

Offline Neo_Moucha

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Re: Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts
« Reply #226 on: March 31, 2013, 05:59:05 pm »
reefjunkie:
it is important to completely uninstall previous nvidia drivers from system before installing other version
have you done that?
if not - check driversweeper from guru3d http://www.guru3d.com/content-page/guru3d-driver-sweeper.html

also as somebody already stated - if you can find application profiles in driver setting instead of games profiles, the driver should be fine, can you check that?
 

Offline reefjunkie

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Re: Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts
« Reply #227 on: March 31, 2013, 06:29:10 pm »
I will check... Thanks for the tip.
 

Offline blanka

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Re: Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts
« Reply #228 on: April 01, 2013, 07:25:04 am »
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                                                                             
« Last Edit: April 01, 2013, 07:34:16 am by blanka »
 
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Offline verybigbadboy

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Re: Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts
« Reply #229 on: April 01, 2013, 10:41:02 am »
Hi all again ;)
I successfully modified SPARKLE SXS4501024D5SNM GeForce GTS 450  1GB to Quadro 2000
board is reference nvidia gts 450 http://www.ixbt.com/video3/images/ref/gts450-scan-back.jpg
upd:
gpu passthrough works fine.

Initial values are:
indexmeaningresistance
13 byte value Dnone
23 byte value C35k
34 byte values 8-fnone
44 byte values 0-725k

device / resistors table

device nameR1R2R3R4
gts 450none35knone25k
Quadro 200035knone5knone

furmark: http://www.ozone3d.net/benchmarks/furmark_192_score.php?id=120616
« Last Edit: April 01, 2013, 01:03:52 pm by verybigbadboy »
6'7''
 

Offline InitialDriveGTR

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Re: Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts
« Reply #230 on: April 01, 2013, 05:14:58 pm »
........Apparently the same chip is used on some ASUS motherboards, if I can locate one I will be in contact :).

That sounds promising, even I have a "dead" ASUS motherboard (failed BIOS update, no boot, otherwise all OK), let me think what model it is... I think P5K PRO or something like that.

The chip the card uses is a PEX8747 (see: http://www.plxtech.com/products/expresslane/pex8747). Some boards I read somewhere are using it to expand the number of PCIe slots on it.

Edit: The ASUS P8Z77-V Premium uses it and it seems it is not using a heatsync! Perhaps I have misdiagnosed the fault, I will have another go tomorrow and check things on it to see if I missed anything obvious.

Submitted a quote for the part through avnet on one of our BOM's... If it's < $50 I'll get it on order.
 

Offline victorngcm

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Re: Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts
« Reply #231 on: April 01, 2013, 06:39:01 pm »
It should be noted that this mod was originally performed not to get a high performance Quadro or Telsa card, it was done to unlock additional features such as Mosaic support which does indeed work.

So if I mod it to a K5000...Does it support Maxiums? Or I mod it to a Tesla K10...will be function  like a tesla card?
 

Offline smiddereens

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Re: Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts
« Reply #232 on: April 01, 2013, 11:32:36 pm »
Has anybody had any success modifying a GT 640 (GK107-based) to a GRID K1 or Quadro K2000?
 

Offline winjet1

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Re: Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts
« Reply #233 on: April 02, 2013, 08:04:01 pm »
Hey I know this is off topic so please don't flame.

I was able to, by the grace of god and not my soldering skills, change my 680 into a GRID K2 (mini).  If anyone is doing this for virtualization reasons check this VMware thread out for help.  I can now report that I am sharing my 680 among multiple Virtual Machines.

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/415887?start=30&tstart=0

Please everyone else donate something if this has helped you out!
 

Offline InitialDriveGTR

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Re: Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts
« Reply #234 on: April 03, 2013, 02:53:19 am »
Hey I know this is off topic so please don't flame.

I was able to, by the grace of god and not my soldering skills, change my 680 into a GRID K2 (mini).  If anyone is doing this for virtualization reasons check this VMware thread out for help.  I can now report that I am sharing my 680 among multiple Virtual Machines.

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/415887?start=30&tstart=0

Please everyone else donate something if this has helped you out!

Been using mine with Windows Server 2012's Hyper-V RemoteFX. It's pretty cool being able to remote desktop in to a virtual machine and then play GTA IV on a 2007 Macbook Pro lol
 

Offline gnifTopic starter

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Re: Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts
« Reply #235 on: April 03, 2013, 02:59:43 am »
Hey I know this is off topic so please don't flame.

I was able to, by the grace of god and not my soldering skills, change my 680 into a GRID K2 (mini).  If anyone is doing this for virtualization reasons check this VMware thread out for help.  I can now report that I am sharing my 680 among multiple Virtual Machines.

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/415887?start=30&tstart=0

Please everyone else donate something if this has helped you out!

Been using mine with Windows Server 2012's Hyper-V RemoteFX. It's pretty cool being able to remote desktop in to a virtual machine and then play GTA IV on a 2007 Macbook Pro lol

This is pretty sweet! I will have to have a go at it as I hate rebooting into windows for the odd game. I had never heard of the GRID K2 nor what it could do until members mentioned it in this thread.
 

Offline amigo

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Re: Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts
« Reply #236 on: April 03, 2013, 03:30:19 am »
I've been researching soft straps for the past few days and there's a way to change the Device ID without soldering.

Problem is that I could not find full information about the strap bits and so what I could piece together so far is that you can change the last two digits to a certain extent.

If you have a 0x1180 (GTX 680) you can go up to 0x119F (range: 1180-119F), basically you can change bits 0-4.

I do not know if/where the bit 5 is to take it above 9F into As and Bs for the 3rd character. I am not sure if that bit is even present in the soft straps but seeing there's a resistor for it, I'm hoping it must be somewhere in there...

Anyone with some insight into soft straps, bit 5 and beyond please post. :)
« Last Edit: April 03, 2013, 03:32:07 am by amigo »
 

Offline gnifTopic starter

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Re: Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts
« Reply #237 on: April 03, 2013, 03:43:46 am »
I've been researching soft straps for the past few days and there's a way to change the Device ID without soldering.

Problem is that I could not find full information about the strap bits and so what I could piece together so far is that you can change the last two digits to a certain extent.

If you have a 0x1180 (GTX 680) you can go up to 0x119F (range: 1180-119F), basically you can change bits 0-4.

I do not know if/where the bit 5 is to take it above 9F into As and Bs for the 3rd character. I am not sure if that bit is even present in the soft straps but seeing there's a resistor for it, I'm hoping it must be somewhere in there...

Anyone with some insight into soft straps, bit 5 and beyond please post. :)

Did you actually test this or is it based on the soft-strap information documented here:
https://github.com/pathscale/envytools/blob/master/hwdocs/pstraps.txt

I tried this first and had no success, Linux would ignore them, and we know that in previous generations that the NVidia driver would compare the soft to the hard straps and if they differed enabled 'unstable code' that was designed to cause random hardware faults.
 

Offline InitialDriveGTR

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Re: Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts
« Reply #238 on: April 03, 2013, 04:22:16 am »

This is pretty sweet! I will have to have a go at it as I hate rebooting into windows for the odd game. I had never heard of the GRID K2 nor what it could do until members mentioned it in this thread.

What the GRID K2 cards are essentially aimed at is the ability for a person to connect from a system on a say an ultrabook, where hardware is not capable of very high end graphics, to a server, and supply a much higher performance than the local hardware is capable of by itself. You can connect to a virtual machine being hosted on a server with a GRID K2 and use the discrete graphics card in things such as say Solidworks. Where I work we have our servers for our engineering department with GRID K2 cards, we used to use Dell desktops/Laptops with high end quadro cards, but now instead of dropping 3 - 4K on a laptop that might fail after a year or two, everyone gets a cheapo laptop configured to use a virtual machine. This works very well on our gigabit ethernet network too.
« Last Edit: April 03, 2013, 04:25:32 am by InitialDriveGTR »
 

Offline gnifTopic starter

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Re: Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts
« Reply #239 on: April 03, 2013, 04:28:31 am »

This is pretty sweet! I will have to have a go at it as I hate rebooting into windows for the odd game. I had never heard of the GRID K2 nor what it could do until members mentioned it in this thread.

What the GRID K2 cards are essentially aimed at is the ability for a person to connect from a system on a say an ultrabook, where hardware is not capable of very high end graphics, to a server, and supply a much higher performance than the local hardware is capable of by itself. You can connect to a virtual machine being hosted on a server with a GRID K2 and use the discrete graphics card in things such as say Solidworks. Where I work we have our servers for our engineering department with GRID K2 cards, we used to use Dell desktops/Laptops with high end quadro cards, but now instead of dropping 3 - 4K on a laptop that might fail after a year or two, everyone gets a cheapo laptop configured to use a virtual machine. This works very well on our gigabit ethernet network too.

So does that mean that multiple users can share the same video card across multiple VMs? or just a single VM? And how well does it work with games, etc? It would be nice to be able to share my high end card out for my daughter to use instead of having to buy her a high end card also.
 

Offline InitialDriveGTR

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Re: Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts
« Reply #240 on: April 03, 2013, 05:33:54 am »

This is pretty sweet! I will have to have a go at it as I hate rebooting into windows for the odd game. I had never heard of the GRID K2 nor what it could do until members mentioned it in this thread.

What the GRID K2 cards are essentially aimed at is the ability for a person to connect from a system on a say an ultrabook, where hardware is not capable of very high end graphics, to a server, and supply a much higher performance than the local hardware is capable of by itself. You can connect to a virtual machine being hosted on a server with a GRID K2 and use the discrete graphics card in things such as say Solidworks. Where I work we have our servers for our engineering department with GRID K2 cards, we used to use Dell desktops/Laptops with high end quadro cards, but now instead of dropping 3 - 4K on a laptop that might fail after a year or two, everyone gets a cheapo laptop configured to use a virtual machine. This works very well on our gigabit ethernet network too.

So does that mean that multiple users can share the same video card across multiple VMs? or just a single VM? And how well does it work with games, etc? It would be nice to be able to share my high end card out for my daughter to use instead of having to buy her a high end card also.


Edit: I think this is the kind of off topic that deserves it's own thread:

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/things-to-do-with-a-proffesional-nvidia-graphics-card/
« Last Edit: April 03, 2013, 05:56:38 am by InitialDriveGTR »
 

Offline athanor

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Re: Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts
« Reply #241 on: April 03, 2013, 09:48:21 am »
Hi everyone, new to this forum so go easy on me !!

Great work on the mods been done on the GK104 chip - I want to have a look at my GK110 chip now  :-/O .. might be I should wait until the K6000 card for the device ID + drivers but might settle to try for a K20X

I have attached some pictures of the EVGA Titan card - thinking of looking at the resistors near what I think is the eeprom - am I on the right track ?
 

Offline gnifTopic starter

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Re: Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts
« Reply #242 on: April 03, 2013, 09:57:44 am »
Hi everyone, new to this forum so go easy on me !!

Great work on the mods been done on the GK104 chip - I want to have a look at my GK110 chip now  :-/O .. might be I should wait until the K6000 card for the device ID + drivers but might settle to try for a K20X

I have attached some pictures of the EVGA Titan card - thinking of looking at the resistors near what I think is the eeprom - am I on the right track ?

The resistor from pin 6 looks exactly like a hardware strap, and if you follow the trace you can see the alternate position for it, so yeah, I think that's them, but only testing will tell.
 

Offline amigo

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Re: Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts
« Reply #243 on: April 03, 2013, 12:33:46 pm »
Did you actually test this or is it based on the soft-strap information documented here:
https://github.com/pathscale/envytools/blob/master/hwdocs/pstraps.txt

I tried this first and had no success, Linux would ignore them, and we know that in previous generations that the NVidia driver would compare the soft to the hard straps and if they differed enabled 'unstable code' that was designed to cause random hardware faults.

I did test on a smaller card (8600GT) as a proof of concept. It is a very delicate operation because setting up wrong straps will hose the card (I know - I did it).

To recover you need to short CE# and Vss pins on the card's EEPROM during boot, then unshort them before running nvflash, to recover from the bad flash.

I am going to conduct a few more tests just to be sure.

The references I used to collect the needed information were the link you posted above; this thread: https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/489965/cuda-programming-and-performance/gtx480-to-c2050-hack-or-unlocking-tcc-mode-on-geforce/1 and couple of other places for random other details.

I've also looked at dozens of ROMs comparing their soft strap configurations and what not. Most manufacturers do not modify the Device ID in ROMs but here and there you can find them doing it (ASUS for example). You just need to find the same card model with different Device IDs (usually with models with various VRAM configurations)...
« Last Edit: April 03, 2013, 12:36:52 pm by amigo »
 

Offline gnifTopic starter

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Re: Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts
« Reply #244 on: April 03, 2013, 12:36:16 pm »
Did you actually test this or is it based on the soft-strap information documented here:
https://github.com/pathscale/envytools/blob/master/hwdocs/pstraps.txt

I tried this first and had no success, Linux would ignore them, and we know that in previous generations that the NVidia driver would compare the soft to the hard straps and if they differed enabled 'unstable code' that was designed to cause random hardware faults.

I did test on a smaller card (8600GT) as a proof of concept. It is a very delicate operation because setting up wrong straps will hose the card (I know - I did it).

To recover you need to short CE# and Vss pins on the card's EEPROM during boot, then unshort them before running nvflash, to recover from the bad flash.

I am going to conduct a few more tests just to be sure.

The references I used to collect the needed information were the link you posted above; this thread: https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/489965/cuda-programming-and-performance/gtx480-to-c2050-hack-or-unlocking-tcc-mode-on-geforce/1 and couple of other places for random other details. I've also looked at dozens of ROMs comparing their soft strap configurations and what not.

I can confirm that changing the software straps does not change the device ID in the 6 series.
 

Offline amigo

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Re: Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts
« Reply #245 on: April 03, 2013, 12:38:59 pm »
I can confirm that changing the software straps does not change the device ID in the 6 series.

The fellow from that NVidia forum post modded a 480 and 580 with this process. I wonder if NVidia caught up to this in 6xx...

EDIT: If you change the Device ID in the straps, obviously you need to change the ROM as well...
 

Offline gnifTopic starter

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Re: Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts
« Reply #246 on: April 03, 2013, 12:40:00 pm »
I can confirm that changing the software straps does not change the device ID in the 6 series.

The fellow from that NVidia forum post modded a 480 and 580 with this process. I wonder if NVidia caught up to this in 6xx...

That is what I have said, they did, it does not work in the 6 series, I spent many hours testing this method before restoring to hardware hacking.
 

Offline amigo

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Re: Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts
« Reply #247 on: April 03, 2013, 12:45:04 pm »

That is what I have said, they did, it does not work in the 6 series, I spent many hours testing this method before restoring to hardware hacking.

Humbug....well, Fedex is coming today with my 0402 resistors and some larger EEPROMs. :D
 

Offline gnifTopic starter

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Re: Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts
« Reply #248 on: April 03, 2013, 12:46:11 pm »

That is what I have said, they did, it does not work in the 6 series, I spent many hours testing this method before restoring to hardware hacking.

Humbug....well, Fedex is coming today with my 0402 resistors and some larger EEPROMs. :D

Why the larger EEPROM? are you going to try and install the quadro/tesla bios?
 

Offline amigo

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Re: Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts
« Reply #249 on: April 03, 2013, 12:57:56 pm »
Why the larger EEPROM? are you going to try and install the quadro/tesla bios?

Yes, since I have a GTX 680 4GB its shader/memory configuration is the same with the higher model cards.

I hoped for the soft straps because I wanted a way of finding a resistor configuration that combined with the soft straps could take a card from GTX to Quadro and back just by changing the soft straps.
 


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