260M Quadro softmod?

Hi everyone..

At some point I considered replacing the 260M for a Quadro. Probably a bad idea RE Wattage. But was thinking about the old SoftQuadro idea..

Can Hardware accelerated lines be enabled on the G92b?

Most of my apps use DX for previews nowadays so it's generally not a big deal but was qrious anyways..

Thanks in advance for any feedback you might have

 

its the same chipset as the FX 2800M (g92m) however less pipes on the fx. same wattage (75watts), similar specs. if your thinking of replacing the geforce for a quadro this one would be the one to consider if you are concerned about wattage... in terms of performance however...

reluctant to try as my laptop is working just as i want it too, and don't have any software to even test afterwards... (3dsmax, autocad etc)

*update*
sorry i didn't see the FX 3700M, that looks "almost* identical to the 260m, also 75 watts, however there's MORE unified shaders (128 as opposed to 112 on the 260m). memory speed slightly different as well

here's a link to all 3 cards for spec comparison

http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-260M.14559.0.html
http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-Quadro-FX-3700M.14962.0.html
http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-Quadro-FX-2700M.15218.0.html

 

I have tried something similar already but with no success.

I was looking to flash a 280M BIOS into my two 260M BIOSes thinking the cards would be recognized as 280M.

for this I used two 280M BIOSes one donwloaded somewhere and belonging to different laptop and the other one provided in this site by someone owning an M17x.

for experinece, I know these things never work on laptops, but I am ALWAYS open to testing.

so I tested first the 280M BIOS belonging to an M17x and to my surprise, the resulting deviceID turned out to be of a Quadro FX3700.

the equivalent Quadro for the 260M is the FX 3700M, but after flashing the 280M BIOS, for some odd reason, the card was recognized as FX 3700 (the desktop equivalent without the "M" for mobile).

I decided to further test the video card and since I first flashed the second 260M my laptop was still not bricked.

I have experinece in this, cause many years ago when I was into 3DSMAX and autoCAD I would turn all my desktop video cards into Quadros because of the performace gain for those softwares. I would do this either with a hardware mod by soldering a resistor into the board or vis soft mod.
I did this mod from the very first Geforce 1 (the 256 annihilator) to geforce 4, until nvidia started to implement prevention methods for this mod to succed therefore in some cases the mod would be partial resulting into a 50 - 60% quadro equivalent to a complete 0% quadro equivalent, except for when you flas the bios and the card is being recognized as quadro by it's deviceID but it is still a geforce in all it's glory.

sorry for the description but it was necessary for you to understand all the steps and process that I went through to understand if the mod was possible or not.

as I was saying, as soon as I logged into windows I checked with Rivatuner so see what the deviceID of my video card was and to my surprise not only I saw that it was 061a, but the actual stream processors shown were 128 and not 112, so it was really reporting a real mod, things changed though as soon as I installed the drivers for it. once I rebooted the system it was reporting 112 stream processors, and that's to prove that nvidia has a way to recognize fake cards and to turn them back to what they really are with the drivers.

I then decided to flash my first geforce 260M and that's when I bricked my laptop, though I was 99% sure it was going to brick it

the only reason I ddi it anyway is bacause the M17x-R1 sports an amazing 3 videocards in it, and the integrated video card is the very first one that is being considered by the mother board once enabled. so all I had to do was to unplug the power cord from the laptop and turn it on on battery, this would force the laptop to enable the integrated card as it always does when running on battery, therefore allowing me to continue with my testing.

so I installed drivers for the first card as well, and they were both recognized, no yeow exclamation marks in the device manager, GPUZ reporting they were Quadro FX 3700 cards.

but they were simply dead cards, there was no way for me to allow the cards to display any signs of activity, so I decided to flash another 280M BIOS I found on internet and this time the card was recognized as a 280M (mobile this time) and thought maybe this time I really did it.

but unfortunately same scenario here, zero activity for the cards. they were reported though as 280M with only 112 stream processors enabled.

right now I sot of gave up, cause obviously I am running tese test all on my own but didn't want to post this information because I don't want anyone to screw up their laptops trying things with no experinece in what they are doing. but I decided to post it now casue someone else opened this thread for me

my conclusion is that I think it is still impossible to turn geforces into quadros.

but right now I am trying to test all the 260M BIOSes I can find. most of them come with different BIOS revisions and versions. I am basically trying dfferent versions (hopefully NEWER versions) that would allow me to notice any gains in performance.

so far I have tested two BIOSes and ran benchmarks for them and the results were always different.

if anyone is willing to collect all 260M BIOSes they can find around, I would love to test them for the whole community and report the results.

right now I am looking for anyone who has a BIOS version newer than this one: 62.92.96.00.09

you can check that out with GPUZ very quickly. if you do, please I would appreciate if you could dump the BIOS with GPUZ and give it to me.

thanks reading this,

**EDIT: the BIOS version I am looking for is not the one I wrote down above, that one belongs to a 280M BIOS that I flashed in my 260M card keeping the ROM STRAPS of the 260M but only changing the adapter board firmware version.
I am looking for anything that is above (newer than) this version: 62.92.89.00.0A
My apologies for my mistake

 

Here's 62-92-96-00-0a (260M from Alienware AP M15x)

Thanks for the feedback and the information.

I was wondering, if you flashed the 260M to think it's quadro, then would hacked quadro drivers be able to use the card with full quadro glory?

 

this is GREAT! thanks very much

I will flash it tomorrow and will conduct some tests.

I knew that sooner or later somebody was going to upload a newer BIOS.

I tried to convert the 260m into quadro but without success. the cas is being recognized and all that, but it's literally dead as seen by windows. zero activity on the video card. I had to reflash the 260m bios to make it work again.

thank you!

 

How do you flash the Bios? Using the old oprom replacement technique?

 

Ah I found the nvflash tool..

 

A warning to anyone trying to mod their 260M or other card with a different board ID.. If the card you are modding is the only gpu in your system (IE no motherboard GFX, cpu GFX or dual GPU system) then you really SHOULD NOT explore changing the IDs on the card. It will brick it..

Just don't bother cos it doesn't work.. I found out the hard way