Nvidia clockblock: vBIOS (unblocked in 353.00)

I believe that it should be the responsibility of the OEMs to release an updated vBIOS that can be an optional update for users that have already been negatively affected with a locked vBIOS. I hope they do that.

 

Nvidia have dug a deep hole for themselves this year! Quite amateur of them really! They really underestimated enthusiast users and their knowledge and understanding of the hardware...they will try it again very soon though no doubt about that.

 

Well, that's the end of that chapter. All's well that ends well. Jolly good.

Sent from my Nexus 5

 

I still wouldn't believe anything until you actually see them implement what they say.

 

Yep, we need to wait till the end of the month to see what has happened: NVidia released drivers, unlocked vBIOS from manufacturers (Clevo / Alienware).

 

Well hopefully thats the end of whatever nVidia was trying to do to lock down there GPU's.
I have also heard that OEM's did it on there own so maybe the blame lies elsewhere but in the end we get what we want so it's all good .

 

what driver is everyone using?
345.20?

 

That or 344.75 which is basically the same thing

 

New driver releasing around March 17th:

 

Geez, this guy huh..?

I had to reply

 

I don't think attacking ManuelG personally is going to do us any favours. I think we should aim our anger as NVIDIA as a whole, not make personal attacks. Just my opinion.

 

I do have to agree ManuelG is a bad PR Rep. His replies are always vague, never a straight answer. His replies rarely give me any sense he cares or will do something.

 

They must be vague. Why bind a company as an agent that has legal ramifications on the principal? This is the game played, just get good reading between the lines!

 

No, there is no need for personal attacks - that solves nothing. But the time for pleasantries is over. People who speak on behalf of Nvidia need and deserve the opportunity to take ownership for what they say and do.

That involves, making good on their promises, being accountable for their actions both good and bad.

The mere face I am responding ManualG means I believe he isn't simply a flunky Nvidia gimp chained to the desk copying and pasting canned responses. Am I giving him more credit than he deserves? That remains to be seen.


If we don't hold people like ManualG aka @pidge under the scrutiny of their own words, then what's the point of even bothering with discourse in the first place?


How does one get angry at Nvidia as a whole by the way? Not intentionally being antagonistic. but you could elaborate.

 

I love how he totally ignored your valid questions in his response. And one wonders why we have trust issues with this guy...

@TBoneSan I admire your tenacity, but I think it's hopeless. He is a tool. Nvidia has been very anti-consumer lately and probably gives zero cares that someone with such a slimy reputation is working its customer service and interacting one-on-one with paying customers.

How does one communicate with a giant faceless corporate entity like Nvidia "as a whole?" Do you have a direct line to Jen-Hsun Huang? No? Then the only way we can do it is through incompetent reps on forums and social media like ManuelG.

 

Anger can be vented against NVIDIA as a whole through the very act of abstaining from attacking any one employee individually. Attack the policies enforced from the management, not the innocent underlings who are just doing exactly as they are instructed from above. That's all I mean.

Just my opinion is all.

Sent from my Nexus 5

 

If information can pass from upper management down to the stooges, then consumer feedback can travel up the ladder in a similar manner.

 

If he's on nVidia's payroll I wouldn't exactly call him "innocent'.

 

I think TBoneSan has an excellent point. If ManuelG doesn't know then he needs to approach someone who does and post an accurate statement. He should be held accountable. Attacking him doesn't help, no, but I don't think that's what TBoneSan has done. He's basically saying we want honest and factual responses not some made up nonsense.

 

Awesome post @TBoneSan and to build on what you and @HTWingNut just posted, he needs to be held accountable. Confrontation with the facts (such as making promises and not following through with them) is not a personal attack against @pidge. It is being held accountable for doing what you said you would do. If he had come back and said " my hands are tied because blah, blah, blah" or " I cannot comment based on instructions from my superiors" we could certainly respect that. At least he would have given us an impression of caring and trying to do what he said he would do.

Want more evidence of lameness? Check the dates on the profile. Draw your own conclusions, but I think it sucks.


Date: August 8, 2014 - Pidge from Nvidia has asked that user experiencing problems with the 880m list them here

 

Way ahead of you, I'm already planning on when I'm dropping the internets.

 

Not true. Corporations are filled with bureaucracy and middle men who stop anything getting done, and then you have the yes men, who are literally there to just pad someone dudes ego. No chance in hell any single one of us, even with our petitions will affect any member of upper managment at nVidia, the sooner we realise this the sooner we can be more effective with our approach as a whole.

 

I don't believe that, and the fact that NVidia turned around their stance on clock-blocked drivers is testimony to the fact that they are capable of listening to the community - whether that be negative forum chatter, petitions or social media.

 

It's press. It's a public company, so image is very important. Seems to me the only time AMD/NVidia do anything is if you ask blogs and well known reviewers to post about the issue. Users protesting doesn't seem to make a difference. Seems these two companies will only do something if they believe what is occuring will hurt their image and affect their investors/stock holders.

That's my impression.

 

We didn't make them do anything.They simply made it seem like we did, with a reply, and then carried on doing exactly what they have planned to do, coming from upper management. The PR for this company is not as troubling for them as we would think, most their press releases are about things that we wouldn't give a damn about, and that is what drives their public trading on the NASDAQ150

 

Hey woodzstack didn't you mention a while back during the 880M fiasco you or someone you knew had the power to change search results rankings so that unfavorable ones came up first or something?

 

Which is the main reason why I've signed the petition linked in your signature, although my personal interest in laptop overclocking is non-existent.

Good luck.

 

What do you mean they carried on doing what they're doing? If they're gonna lift the clock block on drivers then that's great, that's supposed to happen this month. Also, the clock blocked vBIOS are supposedly gonna be lifted too, the OEMs have confirmed this with notebookcheck.net. I'd call that a result for the uproar we have created in forums & petitions, etc. I don't really see what you mean?

 

What he means is that nVidia was not pressured into it at all. There was a minuscule amount of "bad PR", with most reporting websites/news sources claiming that they "have no idea why anyone would bother overclocking a laptop anyway" and how "why would you destroy your hardware like that?" etc. Having absolutely no idea that with stock vBIOSes it's not possible to destroy a GPU with overclocking in any way that is invalid at stock clocks.

In other words, we didn't make them do anything. Look at the 970 issue. Look at them doing tests, giving official press announcements, stating how they'll never let something like that happen again, etc. Lots of PR damage control over lying. The clock thing? Who the hell cares? I e-mailed people at nVidia who were in charge of drivers and the mobile side of things at least four times and I didn't so much as get an automated reply.

They did not care, do not care, and just figure they'd let this slide for us for no reason. "Ok fine, have your stuff." and that's the end of that as far as they're concerned. It's a victory for us, but it's not like they're going to take the mobile market more seriously from this point. Believe me when I say, we did not create any uproar. Only 684 people signed that petition. Hence why I very much claim that the enthusiast market for notebooks is "dead". The people who could help don't care and the people who care have no voice. You think if this kind of thing happened and someone like myself or Mr. Fox had the same kind of pull that Linus or Anandtech or Tom's Hardware did, they'd be sweeping this under the rug? We'd probably have more than a couple videos each showing that being responsible about it is on the end user, and showing what overclocks can do, and far less the temps we'd be getting while gaming in those machines. Audiences who don't know anything don't listen to the random guy in a comment section, but you can bet if their GTX Titan SLI with 4930K @ 4.2GHz gets trounced by Mr. Fox's LAPTOP in a video with 300k+ views from a respected hardware information source they'd open their eyes in admiration rather than close their eyes in contempt. Hell, it might get more people to look for the enthusiast machines even. But we didn't have that, and never will have that at the rate things are going.

Basically, we should just be glad we have back our stuff, but don't kid yourself that a large sea of angry consumers or truly bad publicity was the cause.

 

So why did they rescind it

 

Because it likely costs them nothing. But you of all people should know what the reaction from the PC gaming community was like when we asked for help. We had no uproar. It was more than likely a very obnoxious squeaking at them. The difference in PR relations between the 970 fiasco and the clockblock fiasco shows that clearly.

 

They didn't do much for the 970 issue either. The CEO issued a statement which amounted to nothing more than "yeah we messed up, we'll make sure to not get caugh... I mean make the same mistake next time. And this was a FEATURE dammit!"

Wouldn't exactly call that a victory either.

 

Neither were real victories to me, but the PR damage control they undertook with the 970 was... existent. There was nothing but silence until they decided to change their minds about laptop OCing. Two weeks of people commenting about it (not exactly bashing it in the case of tech websites) until they were like "ok, we'll restore this in a driver family next month. K bye."

And not even any official statement or blog post or anything. Just a comment on that thread on the forums. It's like night and day for me. I suspect if AMD had something in the power class of the 980M for $200 less (even if it was hotter) and users began actively returning machines for AMD stuff, or nVidia GPU sales screechingly halted after the PR broke open, they might've done some more.

But as with everything, no real competition means no real care. Intel doesn't care about quality mobile CPUs with their TDP locked, BGA-only crap, and nVidia definitely isn't interested in bringing things for us... such as on-the-fly SLI switching. Gsync on eDP panels. Actual working DSR in non-optimus machines. Desktop capture via Shadowplay when optimus is not detected in the machine. Shadowplay being delayed so long in the first place, when (even on unsupported drivers) NVENC worked via OBS.

Hell, if they can adjust the nVidia Control Panel for Optimus or no Optimus, I don't see why they can't simply add features when no optimus is detected.

 

Heck, they should get some of those features working for Optimus machines too. It can't be that hard for a multi-million dollar corporation! I see no reason why DSR couldn't work with Optimus, for example.

4K screens make DSR redundant but we're nowhere near the stage where everyone is comfortable moving away from FHD displays yet (for perfectly valid reasons).

 

DSR requires nVidia to handle the display options as far as I know, so it cannot work with Optimus. It's like how you can use downsampling on nVidia GPUs easy with custom resolutions but AMD users have to use a different method and Intel users can't.

Inb4 Octiceps jumps in and proves me wrong XD

 

Nah man . It's GeDoSaTo or nothing for downsampling on Optimus machines.

 

Honestly Jen-Hsun's statement felt like a slap in the face more than anything else. "This was a feature you unappreciative imbeciles, can't you understand I was giving you an extra 500MB of vram?"

Would I call that PR damage control? Well I suppose yes since he's going on the offensive for this one.

 

Jen-Hsun's lawyer probably told him to write that

 

I still disagree, NVidia didn't do a 180 on their decision for no reason, it makes sense to listen to your consumers and I believe that's what they've done, they wouldn't have done the 180 otherwise. I just see it as simple as that.

 

I think alot of this is what Nvidia will let us believe. They can happily pose as the savior after manufacturing the crisis. We feel like winners, they get to look like champions, everyone is happy for now.
They can choose their battles and this one probably wasn't worth the effort.. At least, not how they haphazardly set it up to be implemented. Who wants to bet they'll have drempt up some new form of hardware nannying for the next gen of cards...?

 

That's entirely my point. Making huge changes without telling people and then staying silent for a week and a half when called out then quietly POSTING "yeah, ok, here have it back whenever we feel like it" on a forum is hardly a battle won. It just doesn't harm them to give in, so they gave in. That's pretty much it. They didn't promise anything, and we could be owned by their next line without a doubt.

 

So, I stumbled across two web pages suggesting NVIDIA is actually screwing with desktop OC too! The first will speak to the shunt resistors built into the board as a physical limiter, the other is stating that NVIDIA baked voltage/TDP limiters into the desktop vbios as well:
http://overclocking.guide/increase-the-nvidia-power-limit-all-cards/
https://forums.geforce.com/default/...erclock-to-stop-voltage-throttle-/?offset=105

This was off of a preliminary search for possible causes of limited voltage on maxwell cards when their is enough voltage to the system generally.

EDIT: With what they are doing to desktop cards, now maybe you can gain some legitimacy in some of their forums by pointing to NVIDIA power gimping cards in the vbios for desktop (probably for rebadging purposes)! Show that all consumers have the same NVIDIA fight!

 

Wow, that's an easy hardware mod to increase the power limit - if I had a desktop card I'd definitely try that - it's an easily reversible hard mod too!

(EDIT: assuming the guy who created the mod knows what he's talking about, I'm not an electrical engineer so can't verify that part, but it does look like an easy & reversible mod)

 

Although we are using vbios with the power limiter removed, I wonder whether this may be holding back the 900m series further. But the larger point is this: desktop guys say they had no bone in the fight with Nvidia locking down our OC. Here is proof Nvidia was also encroaching on their right to OC!!! Nvidia is slowly trying to lock down everyone, desktop and mobile. You now have proof and fodder...

 

well figure out soon enough, if the 980M is power limited by the lack of VRMs / mosfets, once @Meaker gets his modded gpu back and fully tests it

edit: aaaah, are you the one helping him out prema? i figured something like that

 

Computex can't come fast enough.

 

If the additional mosfets don't help, look for bridging shunt resistors to overcome the limitation.

 

I doubt that will make a difference, if additional mosfets don't make a difference that means there's no power limitation on the card, shunting current won't help

 

If my understanding is correct, the mosfets will allow for more current to be processed and handled. The shunt resistors, when presented with a specific amperage, will cause a 75+mV reduction. This means that, although capable of handling more current, the resistors would reduce voltage, possibly causing crashes and instability. The idea is to bridge the shunt to remove the voltage reduction. Now with that being said, I have more research as to whether these shunts are needed for voltage going to a specific component or not. But just because you have a greater ability to handle current by additional mosfets does not mean that shunt resistors cannot have an effect of voltage regulation on the card.

 

If they indeed change something, its because they intended to change it, that is what I mean. I really believe this. I have worked for a few extremely large corporations, and whenever they said they were going to do something and acted this way, it is because it was already going to happen, or they simply say this and do nothing. When they ignore you and go silent, is usually when you are asking them to do something they did not already intend on doing. They run their company. Not us. Maybe Dell run them abit, maybe Intel does too, they're all very close partners in silicon that flex upon each other give and take this and that, since they are so closely connected, but I do not think we influence them very much,if at all.