[HMN]

Hi,

has somebody tried this change?

It looks crazy that the funtions of the Quadro or Tesla can be enable by just change a couple of resistors in the board.



http://videocardz.com/40218/nvidia-g...-and-tesla-k10
http://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/ha...-counterparts/


Thanks-

[wyldckat]

Greetings HMN,

Thanks for sharing! This is a pretty interesting and rather expensive hack, mainly because it can go so very wrong .
NVIDIA probably hasn't bothered complaining much about this so far, because it's such a risky hack. And as the first link indicates, this isn't the first time that NVIDIA uses the same GPU in a crippled form to differentiate from their professional versions.

From what I can figure out, hacking the hardware directly isn't illegal, but hacking the drivers is... which is rather weird...

I read most of the thread and the following posts seem rather intriguing:

• http://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/ha...4602#msg204602
  

  the parts are identical, changing the Device ID just makes the binary blob advertise the additional features to the system, and enables them. It does NOT affect the clock speeds, and will not make the card faster for general day to day work unless you are using the specialised software that takes advantage of these 'professional' features. Changing the ID does not affect the clock speeds as they are configured by the BIOS which we are not touching.

• http://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/ha...4766#msg204766
  

  Possibly, I have been thinking on how they could prevent this in the future and there is some methods they could use, but I will not mention them here simply because I do not want to feed them information . Needless to say though, if they use them, then the next generation of cards will be impossible to mod without resorting to hacking the binary drivers, which without a doubt encroaches on leagallity issues.

• http://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/ha...5008#msg205008
  

  I wish, I tried this first, the binary blob interrogates the card directly ignoring the kernel reported ID

• http://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/ha...7486#msg207486
  

  I have done this with Xen, but like amigo, never with NVidia, only ATI. Have a look here: http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Xen_PCI_Passthrough.

• http://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/ha...7550#msg207550 - on this post, some other forum member managed to hack the Xen virtualization software and report the cards as other models and it seemed to work! This would be a considerably less expensive hack!
  Er, no wait... http://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/ha...7795#msg207795 - it required some soldering as well
• http://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/ha...8518#msg208518 - no BIOS changes are necessary.
• one guy removed the resistors from a Playstation 3... http://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/ha...0155#msg210155
  • Wait... this post indicates that there was no performance improvement when using the hack.
  • A bit below it there is this post: http://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/ha...0369#msg210369 - it indicates that it might be a configuration profile issue on the driver controller.

I kept reading up to page 26 (out of 40) and did not find any performance improvement to be reported from these hacks. So I gave reading on it.

So, it looks like the hardware hack is only sort-of aesthetic. The original author wanted to enable the 3 monitor "mosaic" system on Linux (which works on Windows without the hack), which was constrained on the drivers for the GTX 690 card and for that the hack worked just fine.

The other feature that seems to be unlocked is the ability to work on virtualized environments, which seems to allow one to have a Windows inside a VM using the modded card as if it were a real machine. And it looks like ATI provides this off-the-self without the need for said hack .

Best regards,
Bruno