BIOS Flash - Overclock Your Graphics Card in Five Minutes

[muk]

While graphics drivers and third-party utilities allow you to overclock your graphics card's GPU and memory, pixel shader clock speeds can only be increased through the card's BIOS.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/11/23/overclock_your_graphics_card_in_five_minutes/index.html

 

[fjabad]

you can overclock the pixel shaders without nibitor

Rivatuner allows this:
http://www.guru3d.com/newsitem.php?id=5958

 

[emp]

As stated above, this was poorly researched, since for a while people have been able to OC shaders without a bios flash (Since Rivatuner 2.04 I believe). Good reading for those that are completely oblivious to Graphics card OC'ing, however it's worthless to even consider putting it into practice.

 

[nukemaster]

you can overclock the pixel shaders without nibitor

Rivatuner allows this:
http://www.guru3d.com/newsitem.php?id=5958

Thanks..... much more easy then bios anyway.....THANKS!!!!

guess that what i get for never updating my riva....

 

[Luscious]

From 13.7 to 15fps??? Sure, it's a free solution but not worth the effort IMO. Did you "notice" that or did you need to run fraps?

How about we see the difference the shader numbers makes on a pair of overclocked water-cooled 8800 ultras or a pair of 3800 CF cards?

Better off saving your money IMO if you're struggling with an 8600GTS to get better fps or are one of those trying to run Crysis with the eye candy. The money you plunk down on a second card today for CF/SLI might buy the next best card a few months down the road, something with more performance. THEN you can save for the better 2nd card, do a little OC, get a good cooling setup and smile when you run your first benchmark.

 

[homerdog]

How could Tom's not know that shader overclocking is now supported by Nvidia with its recent drivers? Typos are one thing, but blatant misinformation is unacceptable.

 

[randomizer]

BIOS OCing ftw!

No more resource hogging programs starting up.

EDIT: The throttle clock speed is not just the clocks that the card goes to when it gets too hot. It is also the clock speed that the card uses as a "stepping stone" between 2D and 3D clocks, and can have an impact on stability when changing either the 3D or 2D speeds.

Would have been nice if they explained what each of the temperature thresholds mean, even though their card only has one. So, here they are:

Critical: This is the temp you reach when you pull off the cooler or stop the fan while running 3DMark06. When this temperature is reached, the card is drastically slowed down to bootup clock speeds, until the next reboot.
Throttling: When the card gets a bit too hot, the card throttles to cool down. This is the temperature at which this happens.
Fan boost: At this temperature, the driver forces the fan to run at 100%.

Normally, Fan boost < Throttling < Critical.

Also, why did they change the number of active performance levels?

 

[xciter]

Pretty lame article. First, Riva tuner and powerstrip sucks and second the flashing could be done in winows. At least you could added some voltmods, so it doesn`t look so cheap.

 

[emp]

Seriously guys... just take the article off your website or bury it by releasing more Car or holiday stuff articles, because it's really not helping your credibility or reputation to put out this kind of article for everyone to see.

 

[masteryoda34]

I highly doubt anyone could pull off a bios flash from start to finish in 5 minutes.

 

[Can Not]

Yeah, um, I did the rom parts in 5 minutes, that was cool, but finding a bootable DOS disc for XP when you didn't have one already lying around is hell.

 

[randomizer]

Pretty lame article. First, Riva tuner and powerstrip sucks and second the flashing could be done in winows. At least you could added some voltmods, so it doesn`t look so cheap.

Flashing in windows, not cool. I would prefer not to have video drivers and other services possibly screw up the flash. Volt mods would have been good to though. I think that if somebody tries this, they will mess it up though without a good explanation of what everything does. I wonder how long it took them to write this, when I did an article on it, it took me around 3 hours.

 

[SK711G]

HAHAHAHAHA 5 minutes pfft

 

[itotallybelieveyou]

bios flash in 5 minutes???

 

[randomizer]

20+ mins: If you are a noob and don't already have a boot disc
10 mins: You've done it before and you are quick.
5 mins: You are 1337

 

[ganpachi]

So wait, what's the REAL benefit of doing a bios flash? Has anyone actually benched flashed versus software overclocks? I want to know real world data before I void warranties and what not.

I mean ntune is taking what? 5 megs of my ram right now out of 2000. that's .25% of my ram and virtually NO CPU cycles. It's a hard sell, try and make it.

 

[randomizer]

Yea but ntune is poop software. Also, there are limits to how far you can overclock with software. BIOS overclocking is (theoretically) limitless, or at least the limits are ridiculously high or low. Also, because the software limits are derived from the values read in the BIOS, if you increase the BIOS values, the limits (both min and max clocks) will also increase in the programs, allowing you to test higher clock speeds in windows without screwing your card big time. Though chances are you aren't going to push beyond the max values anyway, at least for core clocks, maybe memory though.

Also, there is no way that I know of that you can overclock other than via the BIOS if you don't use windows (correct me if I'm wrong).

For some cards (mainly older ones), a BIOS flash can unlock pixel pipes as long as it's the same core.

And then there's e-peen.

 

[SoiledBottom]

Hi all


mvktech.net has a nice guide to bios flash your cards using nibitor and nvflash

 

[randomizer]

It's dated though. But much more in depth than this. I wrote my own article on this as well as for ATI cards, and used mvktech's article to find some of the info on nibitor as it wasn't really available anywhere else.

 

[Can Not]

20+ mins: If you are a noob and don't already have a boot disc
10 mins: You've done it before and you are quick.
5 mins: You are 1337

Wow, you are mistaken. Having a DOS boot disc laying doesn't make you pro, that makes you old school.

When you don't have a floppy drive, it takes FAR more than 20 minutes to find a boot disc... I stopped searching after an hour. The ONLY thing difficult about this process is getting into DOS mode on XP.

 

[Mirth]

Wow, you are mistaken. Having a DOS boot disc laying doesn't make you pro, that makes you old school.

When you don't have a floppy drive, it takes FAR more than 20 minutes to find a boot disc... I stopped searching after an hour. The ONLY thing difficult about this process is getting into DOS mode on XP.

Yeah. It's really difficult to check the "Create an MS-DOS startup disk" option when formatting a floppy!

 

[x_2fast4u_x]

Lmao im only 16 however my first system was 98 lmao i can re-install 98 with a dos-boot disk in aobut 5 min (not including install time...) so i got a boot disk.. only problem is i dont got a flopy reader on my computer

 

[homerdog]

That's the problem I have, no floppy drive. Can anyone point me to a good guide to making a bootable flash drive? That would make my life a lot easier.

 

[ls2hsv]

What about just overwriting the old bios with an OC'd version instead.
IE. Evga (basic no OC) BIOS overwritten with Evga (OCC Superclocked) BIOS....

Should this work? Seems like it would in theory...

 

[randomizer]

Assuming it used the same memory, that would work perfectly fine.