Guest erico Posted October 22, 2007 Posted October 22, 2007 I am a bit curious as to how effective what you are attempting to do will be in terms of the life of the GFX card. The prime difference between the Geforce 8600GT and the 8600GTS is the GPU chip. GeForce 8600GT features G84-300 chip and the Geforce 8600GTS features G84-400 chip. Technically they are almost the same chip but the number of stream processors are not the same and the clocks are higher on one chip(G84-400) than the other. Funny what a $50 difference can buy. I wish that I had spent the $50 for the better card. Oh well. This thread is interesting though...hehehe...I could be wrong but tweaking your vid card's BIOS strikes me as way more kamikaze than overclocking your MOBO with a modded BIOS. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
radodrill Posted October 22, 2007 Posted October 22, 2007 I could be wrong but tweaking your vid card's BIOS strikes me as way more kamikaze than overclocking your MOBO with a modded BIOS. It's basically hard OCing it vs software OCing; not much different from OCing the CPU in the BIOS. I test the OC with a software OC; then I flash the known stable speeds to the GFX card. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest erico Posted October 22, 2007 Posted October 22, 2007 OK..interesting. So far what I have been doing is using RivaTuner, which is capable of doing both hardware and software OC but of course not resident in the GFX card BIOS. I am not that experienced at it yet. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
radodrill Posted October 22, 2007 Posted October 22, 2007 RivaTuner, which is capable of doing both hardware and software OC Rivatuner is a software app and wouldn't be able to OC on the hardware level; this can only be achieved through the BIOS. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest erico Posted October 22, 2007 Posted October 22, 2007 Rivatuner is a software app and wouldn't be able to OC on the hardware level; this can only be achieved through the BIOS. BIOS (Basic Input Output System)is a software application as well, it just happens to be coded on an EEPROM rather than on a HDD or other storage media. Rivatuner does hardware tweaks through a driver level interface. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest erico Posted October 22, 2007 Posted October 22, 2007 It's basically hard OCing it vs software OCing; not much different from OCing the CPU in the BIOS. I test the OC with a software OC; then I flash the known stable speeds to the GFX card. So when you do this are you always using the original GFX card BIOS file? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
krazypoloc Posted October 22, 2007 Posted October 22, 2007 BIOS (Basic Input Output System)is a software application as well, it just happens to be coded on an EEPROM rather than on a HDD or other storage media. Rivatuner does hardware tweaks through a driver level interface. Wrong..... I think Rad is well aware of A+ acronyms. Here's another one for you. ROM (Read Only Memory). Thats where the image file of your GPU resides, and CANNOT be written to through a driver interface. Thats why its called hard coding, if your OS, or drivers had access to your GPU's hardware level configuration there wouldn't be many graphics cards left because OS's and drivers are very buggy and unstable. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
krazypoloc Posted October 22, 2007 Posted October 22, 2007 So when you do this are you always using the original GFX card BIOS file? Technically you can use different brand/model flavors, but be very careful when using anything other than a pretested BIOS image. My card is an EVGA, but I reflashed it with a BFG image to change the clock speed, as well as get rid of some pesky bugs that my EVGA BIOS had. It should be noted that I further modified the BFG BIOS before flashing it to my GPU. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
radodrill Posted October 22, 2007 Posted October 22, 2007 Wrong..... I think Rad is well aware of A+ acronyms. Here's another one for you. ROM (Read Only Memory). Thats where the image file of your GPU resides, and CANNOT be written to through a driver interface. Thats why its called hard coding, if your OS, or drivers had access to your GPU's hardware level configuration there wouldn't be many graphics cards left because OS's and drivers are very buggy and unstable. Ditto; the EEPROM is hard coded and that's exactly why the system restarts when you make changes in the BIOS. Technically you can use different brand/model flavors, but be very careful when using anything other than a pretested BIOS image. My card is an EVGA, but I reflashed it with a BFG image to change the clock speed, as well as get rid of some pesky bugs that my EVGA BIOS had. It should be noted that I further modified the BFG BIOS before flashing it to my GPU. Yeah; I often just tweak the clock speeds in the original BIOS, but in some cases I download the BIOS for a faster clocked version of the same card and tweak from there. With my new 8800s; they were the OC version, but I downloaded the BIOS for their OC2 and clocked it op to the speeds of the BFG 8800 GTX OC WCE (since I had the same hardware after installing the DD waterblock). Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
krazypoloc Posted October 23, 2007 Posted October 23, 2007 Word Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zapablast05 Posted October 23, 2007 Posted October 23, 2007 I am a bit curious as to how effective what you are attempting to do will be in terms of the life of the GFX card. The prime difference between the Geforce 8600GT and the 8600GTS is the GPU chip. GeForce 8600GT features G84-300 chip and the Geforce 8600GTS features G84-400 chip. Technically they are almost the same chip but the number of stream processors are not the same and the clocks are higher on one chip(G84-400) than the other. Funny what a $50 difference can buy. I wish that I had spent the $50 for the better card. Oh well. This thread is interesting though...hehehe...I could be wrong but tweaking your vid card's BIOS strikes me as way more kamikaze than overclocking your MOBO with a modded BIOS. Hey, cracking CPUs, modding GPU and mobo BIOS's is the new thing now! I do it carelessly because I take extreme precautionary steps . Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zapablast05 Posted October 23, 2007 Posted October 23, 2007 Ususally when you flash the BIOS of the card to another cards BIOS, you might unlock SP's and stuff. More potential. It's not only making your card more stable for overclocks, but gives a bit of a performance boost. My original BIOS was a Foxconn 8600GT 256MB which wouldn't take a core speed faster than 545MHz, so I flashed it to an XFX 8600GT XXX and now I have a stable clock at 620MHz with the shader clock at 1450MHz and the memory at 800MHz. Yeah, I get a little artifact here or there, but games to hiccup or crash. Besides, if you know what you're doing when you're going to flash a GPU BIOS, you always know to back up the original. And you always change the voltage on the new BIOS from 1.2V to 1.32V, it doesn't hurt to raise your PCI-E voltage in your BIOS either, just as long as it's not a rediculous ammount . Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Please sign in to comment
You will be able to leave a comment after signing in
Sign In Now