how to flash a nvidia card?

sbohdan · Post by **sbohdan** » Mon Oct 10, 2005 3:27 am

could anyone give me the steps how to flash a nvidia cards bios? thanks.

Post by **Illuminati** » Mon Oct 10, 2005 12:14 pm

This looks like a link that will get you started:

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm? ... 633&page=3

I also think I may have made a post about it in this forum too... if I find it I'll post the link here too.

sbohdan · Post by **sbohdan** » Mon Oct 10, 2005 10:59 pm

thanks a lot.

Mavke · Post by **Mavke** » Wed Oct 12, 2005 10:57 am

If you need more help on what can be flashed you better check MVKTech which is a site dedicated to this and which has over 1000 BIOS's available.
MVKTech Website

Post by **Illuminati** » Wed Oct 12, 2005 11:06 am

Mavke wrote:If you need more help on what can be flashed you better check MVKTech which is a site dedicated to this and which has over 1000 BIOS's available.
MVKTech Website

Yep... the tutorial I mentioned also references this site.

sbohdan · Post by **sbohdan** » Wed Oct 12, 2005 11:03 pm

I was thinking of saving my own card's bios and than tweaking (voltmod and such) it to be on the safe side for now. I'm getting a 6800LE and hope to open the rest of the pipes with riva tuner. if I succed in that then I will get the thermalright SI-97 CPU cooler and mod it to cool my gpu so that I could OC. I'm getting the card next week.

thanks for all the help.

sbohdan · Post by **sbohdan** » Sun Oct 16, 2005 2:54 am

ok, so I did get the 6800LE from innovision, but this is with the GDDR3 256mb memory (just like the 6800gt- it actually looks like a GT in disquise- exact same PCB) . I was really excited but also worried if I could open the remaining 8 pipes and if yes then would there be any artifacts. and behold the moment of truth: after opening the pipes with Rivatuner and reboot checked again and yes, yes, yes! the 8/4 changed to 16/6 pipes and vertex shaders

! still suspitious checked with 3dmark05 and my score at default speed went up from 2900 to 4346 points with no artifacts whatsoever! after little OC (gt speed of 350/1100) I got 5010 points- still no artifacts! and all this with little effort. this is a 72% increase so far which is more then I hoped for for the price of the LE . I was thinking of a little volt mod with Omniextremeedit to give more stability to my card and be able to OC more and so I got 2 bios's from MVKTech that are for inno3d6800GT agp, one is rev 1 and the other rev 2.

question nbr.1: does it matter which rev I use for the flash?

After loading the gt bios to omniextremeedit I noticed that the gt bios has only 1.3V for the GPU in 3D. I did read an article on opening the pipes and volt mod about a 6800LE with 128mb ddr ram (mine is 256mb gddr3). there the original voltage for the GPU in 3D was 1.4V and was supposed to be changed to 1.5V. I'm little bit puzzled, because of this difference

.

question nbr.2:could it be that the GPU voltage is different because of the ram on the card?

I also checked the ultra's bios from inno and that is 1.4V . I was trying to get my own cards bios with a little app called dumpbios but I'm getting a file with a .bin extension instead of .rom and I can't load it to omniextremeedit to check the voltage on my card.
question nbr.3: anyone knows how can I find out about my own card's GPU voltage?

Of course before I would get to voltmodding and extreme OC, I will do the extreme cooling mod with the thermaltake SI-97 cpu heatpipe cooler being fitted on the 6800's GPU! I will be using the OP-1 silent slim fan from zalman on the SI-97, but even like that it looks like almost all of my PCI slots will be occupied. heck, I guess I will be using my onboard sound

Edit: the max OC with stock cooling and no voltmod is 380/1120 which gives a score of 5309p. in 3dmark05. I guess this is it for now till I get the SI-97

sbohdan · Post by **sbohdan** » Mon Oct 17, 2005 3:31 pm

ok, so I visited MVKtech forums and after getting tremendous amount of help and reflashing my card with different bioses 5 times, checking and benchmarking, finally I have a full-blown 6800GT

. I flashed my card with 6800GT bios, which I voltmoded before. trying OC I was able to go up to 425/1120 but that wasn't stable enough, because of heat issue( still having stock cooling) so I dropped it to 401/1100 which still gave me 5630 points in 3dmark05!

the only thing now that prevents me from reaching 6k is the heat, so my next project is getting the thermalright SI-97 and modding to fit my card and then...

will post back on those results. for now I'm pretty happy with my card passing ultra speeds allready, for the price of the LE

here is some comparison I've been looking at while monitoring my progress:

http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/dig ... 4-agp.html

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/ ... 05_10.html

TX_Renegade · Post by **TX_Renegade** » Mon Oct 17, 2005 3:57 pm

Holy crap! I didn't understand a word of that!

Can't wait to learn how to do all this stuff.

sbohdan · Post by **sbohdan** » Mon Oct 17, 2005 4:02 pm

that's understandable. a couple of months ago I didn't eighther

which part is unclear?

TX_Renegade · Post by **TX_Renegade** » Mon Oct 17, 2005 4:13 pm

The OCing apect of chips and vid cards (which I didn't even know you could OC vid cards prior to visiting this site). I have no idea what 401/1100 refers to. I thought maybe it was a voltage/speed figure but that doesn't make sense to me. So much to learn.

Kerii · Post by **Kerii** » Mon Oct 17, 2005 4:24 pm

TX_Renegade wrote:The OCing apect of chips and vid cards (which I didn't even know you could OC vid cards prior to visiting this site). I have no idea what 401/1100 refers to. I thought maybe it was a voltage/speed figure but that doesn't make sense to me. So much to learn.

The numbers are refering to the GPU-core/memory clock speeds in mhz.

If the voltage was actually that high, I don't think sbohdan would be able to visit us anymore.

Actually, the OCing aspect is pretty simple, it basically involves installing something like (for nVidia cards) nTune (official software from nVidia), RivaTuner (advanced 3rd party tool), or NGO drivers (ditto, sort of). There's also Omega Drivers.

Then after installing, you just go into the display settings and mess around with sliders. Incrementally moving them higher and higher until they start failing the stability test.

I have myself an eVGA GeForce 6200 that needless to say is a piece of crap compared to what most people have here, but with a little OCing, I managed to push the speeds from 300/500 to 460/560, and it runs most my games fine.

And then there's the voltmodding aspect where you raise the voltage, basically feeding it more power so it can run even faster, but at the risk of frying your card. I've personally never done the latter, but only because my motherboard is proprietary and doesn't let me.

sbohdan · Post by **sbohdan** » Mon Oct 17, 2005 4:30 pm

410/1100 refers to the speed of my vid cards GPU (processor) and the memory speed consequently. by raising the voltage the GPU is getting, you are able to raise the overclocking threshold. at the same time more volts mean more heat- thus better cooling is required. there are quite a few ways to overclock a vid. card. there are applications that can do that like riva tuner, powerstrip, coolbits and nvtweak for nvidia cards or ati tool for ATI cards. my favourite is NVtweak since it just makes a one time registry modification that opens additional features in the control panel (including overclocking) and does not have to be running all the time like powerstrip or riva tuner. you can read up on all the details in this and other forums and will be able to raise your cards performance in no time enableing you to eighter play at resolutions you couldn't play before or just simply being able to play the newest games that are pretty demanding on your graphics hardware.