9600GSO to 128SP 8800GT???

[Luka_Aveiro]

The guys at hardspell have managed to flash a cheap 9600GSO to a 8800GT (tho a 128sp GT).

They took a Galaxy GSO that has 8 ram chips on the PCB - this means that the 9600 GSO card they had was actually a 512MB card physically, although the 9600GSO is a 192bit bus card with a 384MB of ram readable by the bios (thus with only 6 ram chip adressable by default).

Since the card had 8 ram chips in sted of 6 it seemed it can be flashed to unlock the rest of the memory and the rest of the shader processors, and by doing that they got a 10% improvement in 3DMark2006.

The article with far fewer details is here.

What do you think? If it's for real, for 100$ we can actually purchase what effectively is a 8800GTS 512MB (128sp) or why not a 9800GTX... looks too good to be true.

Source

Anyone can confirm this? Very very interesting.

[op1e]

9600 is g94 chip, 8800gt is g92. You will have to research and see if the shaders and vram might be unlocked using a 9600gt bios. Also would be helpful to find out if your card uses reference PCB (like evga/BFG) or a different board layout like the Palit/Gainward. Have a cheap pci card handy and be ready to flash back (back up your stock bios with nibitor).

[Menhir]

no a 9600gso is renamed 8800gs based on a g92...

so it could be possible

[oohms]

That would be very cool if true... Back to the good old 6800 days

[RAW-Raptor22]

thats pretty sick, lets see if its true.

[Menhir]

did anyone tried to flash a 8800gts bios onto a 8800gt?

[CraptacularOne]

did anyone tried to flash a 8800gts bios onto a 8800gt?

Why would anyone want to do that? Downgrading your card isn't the idea behind flashing the bios

[hstuehmeyer2000]

Why would anyone want to do that? Downgrading your card isn't the idea behind flashing the bios

he said did anyone try to flash a 8800gt with a 8800gts bios

[horrorwood]

did anyone tried to flash a 8800gts bios onto a 8800gt?

Yes it does not work, you have to force the drivers to install and there is no difference.

[AliG]

But do you actually get the extra shaders? I'm pretty sure that was tried a billion times with the g80 gts and gtx and people were unsuccessful because nvidia physicially modded the shader clusters to make sure they wouldn't work

[ineedaname]

But do you actually get the extra shaders? I'm pretty sure that was tried a billion times with the g80 gts and gtx and people were unsuccessful because nvidia physicially modded the shader clusters to make sure they wouldn't work

Well in the article they did do a bench and compared with a 8800 gts 512 and they were head to head which would suggest the shaders were really unlocked. Dunno about the gt vs gts tho. I think this case is more about this specific card.

[onelivestarfish]

I was under the impression that the shaders were laser cut to prevent them from being unlocked aka 6800 cards.

[ghost_recon88]

In the USA, no Galaxy 9600GSO Overclocked cards can be obtained (unless you buy them overseas, and have them imported here which ends up costing more then a 8800GT). For US overclockers, your best bet is the Leadtek PX9600 GSO EXTREME GeForce 9600 GSO, as it has the same clocks as the Galaxy Overclocked. While the clock speeds might not mean much, its the only GSO that lines up spec-for-spec with the Galaxy one. We need one brave soul to buy one, and see how many RAM chips it has

[bryanyeo87]

The mod works... to some extent, toke me 6 cards to be experimented with. They do artifact in 3d apps, like having a raining effect, but the boost in FPS at the same speeds is apparent. extra voltage did no help at all.

tested and verified. although galaxy stopped shipping the 8 chip cards(which only exist in OC editions) since mid of this month. It is now replaced with the 6 chip, making it physically impossible to unlock the extra ROP and memory bandwidth.