Flash 8600m GT to 8700m GT

Anyone crazy enough to try it? I know its risky as not all 8600M GTs will do 625mhz but would it work? I'm sure the 8700m GT bios gives a slight voltage bump to support the higher clocks...

 

In before "zOMG guys I bricked my card and now I don't know what to do" thread.

 

hehe

I'm waiting on somebody else to try it

 

Perferably someone who bought it from BB, and is still within the return period

 

YOU CANNOT.
You can name it however you want, but you will never touch the speeds that a 8700M GT does.
People can OC it beyond your wildest dreams and get close to 7k points with a good CPU, so a 8600M GT will never get there...

 

Isn't the 8700M just an 8600M clocked at 625/800?

 

With the temperatures I get with my 8600gt at stock clocks there's now way I'll overclock the core 125mhz and increase the voltage. That's asking for a 130° meltdown party.

 

My 8600M does 650MHz no problem. The problem is though, mine is the POS DDR2 version. :/ I can only get my memory up to 500MHz.

 

No,it's not. Just because they're built on the same core does not make them identical, because the 8700M GT features better parts for lowering temps and it's more fitted for larger laptop,being bigger and having better cooling.

 

Yeah besides you can't use a different cards bios. You often can't even use different revisions of your own cards bios. You can increase the voltage, I have before and it didn't change my max clocks for the dd2 8600.

 

At higher voltage, dual-rank 128bit bus (don't ask me what it is...). higher power consumption too...

 

I could hit around 8700M clocks in XP. However when I try them in Vista it starts artifacting. =/

 

Did you bench it in 3dmark? It should get ~4.8k @1280x1024

 

I got 5.3k.

 

post some screens of the OC and 3Dmark

 

Posted them some time back. These were using 169.04 drivers.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=239827

I tried again with 174.74 drivers and got 5302, but I didn't think anyone would be bothered if I got 50 points more with new drivers.

I had to lower my overclock speeds by about 5% in Vista down to 570/865, as the original overclock speeds arn't stable anymore for some weird reason.

 

about the 8600->8700 flash...

No. Absolutely not.

The 8700 gets more voltage, is generally packaged in better cooling, uses hand-picked chips, and has a slightly different memory interface (they call it dual-rank 128-bit, it most certainly doesn't put it anywhere near 256-bit, but 8600m at 8700 clocks benches slightly lower)

You cannot flash the cooling and better voltage hardware.

You can overclock to 8700-ish speeds, but the result is generally one hot tamale. And then the 8700m owner will overclock even higher.


One warning about comparing the 4700-4800ish x205-9349 stock 3dmark06 score with the macbook pro... (note with newer drivers that x205-9349 base score should be higher as well)

3dmark06 gives roughly 200-250 per grade of processor in the T7xxx series and thus the 2.4GHz Penryn 8300 in that penryn is giving somewhere around 600 extra points for processor alone over the older T7100.

Note that 8700m users with Penryns are scoring well over 6k now OC'd at 1280x1024. (apparently there are reports over 7k)

6k isn't too hard to imagine giving my score and add the T7100->Penryn8300 bias we already discussed. (it'd be well over 6100)

This isn't to say OC'ing to 8700m speeds isn't a good idea IF you can keep it cool, but quite frankly I don't know how you can stand those 1530s at over 90C on the GPU. The small casing is nice for some things but is not the nicest for gaming on when at those speeds. Maybe with a cooling pad and external keyboard...

Maybe I am just spoiled...