Nvidia BIOS edited...... your thoughts?

Marcus_X

Marcus_X

Expert N00b
Hi all,

A long time ago in a galaxy far away..............

*euhrr -> edit*

A long time ago I've posted here about overclocking my new 6800gt ( It was just in the shops when I bought it, so do the math and you'll figure out around what time that was)

I asked everywhere for support when it seemed my card; an XFX brand 6800gt wouldn't let me overclock it, not even a single MHz! Even ItallionStallion who posted the "nVidia Graphics Card Overclocking (tut with pics)" topic couldn't help me any further. At that moment I left in shame thinking my card had bad memory chips which didn't allow me to oc it at all, never.......

This week I thought; "What the hell I'll flash my 6800gt and see what happends, if it fries it's fried and I'll buy something else" after reading about flashing a 6800GT to a 6800Ultra in another forum. I decided to edit my gpu bios with a program called NiBiTor, I made a backup of my old bios with NvFlash, and started on forcing it to higher clock speeds

When I loaded up the extracted bios my default clock speeds came up as 350 core / 1000 memory. (I bought a Zalman VF700-CU before I tried to oc the 1st time) I messed around with other bios's and actually flashed my card to a 6800Ultra making Windows XP recognize it as a 6800Ultra too. It seemed ok, but after playing Battlefield 2 for a while my whole screen turned static and I had to hard reboot my computer and load the default bios again. Knowing the clock speeds of an 6800Ultra now, I loaded up a copy of my original backup and changed the speed of core and memory to those, I left the voltage to 1.3 since only real 6800Ultra's run at that voltage. And after rebooting my 6800GT was clocked at Ultra speeds!

I've been playing for more than a couple of hours and didn't notice any artifacts or extremly high temperatures (67 degrees celsius max stressed; my Zalman VF700-CU running on normal mode instead of silent)

Can I say I succesfully overclocked my 6800GT now? Or can I expect strange things to happen in the near future. It's only been the 1st day I've playtested it. There is no difference in doing it this way than flahing my card to a 6800Ultra with the same speeds right?

Expert thoughts and advice on this?
 
I haven't fiddled around with editing my video card's BIOS before, so I can't give much in advice, outside of what you did as a precaution.

Still, like NF mentioned, there's easier ways to do so, and the Coolbits mod is about the easiest to do.
 
I know about Coolbits and I've tried it before, RivaTuner also. Every single time I set higher clock speeds testing failed afterwards. This occured with both programs.

What NiBiTor allowed me to do was modify the stock clock speeds set in the gpu bios and afterwards use Nvflash to load the newly created modded bios into the gpu again, forcing the card to run on those speeds without having to test them afterwards.

67 might be high, it's pretty warm in the room (attic) too with the current temparatures outside, the sun finally shows it face around here too. Before overclocking it would run at 57~58 degrees when idle, and max 62~63 when stressed. This all with an aftermarket cooler. So my guess is, without it my temperatures would be around the same as they are now. I can't really remember what temperatures the gpu was running on stock cooling =\

After 2 days of testing I still haven't seen artifacts in any game I played.

Greetings
 
you might be fine, is it the nv40 core? they're pretty solid

make sure if you do any flashing, you have a regular PCI card to flash it back if you mess up !
 
I decided before flashing I would buy a new card if I fried this, but I didn't have a spare PCI card to correct things in case I screwed up, thank god I didn't.

I don't exactly know what type of core this card has, it's an XFX 6800GT 256MB AGP if that would help you to tell me it's got a nv40 core.

I did take note of the temperatures being a little high, so I bought a can of duster and some new thermal grease to clean the whole thing and the rest of my computer while I was at it, my GPU now runs at 52 degrees idle, strange to see such a large temperature drop. It made me wonder if I've installed it incorrectly last time.

The thermal grease I bought is from Titan, Titan Thermal Grease with Nano technology to be more precise, and it promises greater heat conductivity than normal thermal grease, maybe it's really that good!?
 
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