A lot of credit is due to Bharat Sankhlecha of UG4. This guy's knowledge of laptop internals is amazing. After he opened up my laptop and removed a shit load of dirt(it was like a huge fur ball sadly no pics ) my laptop started working properly. Apparently all the crap inside wasn't allowing proper cooling.
My GPU i.e. the Geforce Go 7800 is made from chips rejected from the manufacturing process of Go 7800GTX chips. The GTX has 32 pipelines and is one of the most powerful mobile GPU's out there(Only a 8800 M was ahead of it) . Those chips that don't have all pipelines functioning properly are then "locked" i.e. the number of active pipelines is reduced to 16 by bios locking. So despite pipelines being present on the chip they aren't used. Unlocking is rather dangerous. It involves opening up the laptop, taking out the card and flashing it's bios. Emboldened by opening up my laptop once I opened it up again took out my card and flashed it with the bios of a 7800 GTX.(A heart stopping moment coz a wrong step and your card is fubar) Below is the effective transformation.
Pipeline : 16 to 31 (There was just one bad pipeline!! Yippeeeeee)
Clock core : 250 Mhz to 365 Mhz
Memory clock: 1.3 Ghz to 1.58 Ghz
Fan always at full right from startup
Idle temp 68 to 79
A driver reinstall followed. What better way to see how your card performing then crysis :)
I set the settings to low(the 7800 has got just 256 MB of memory so there is no way I can turn on the pretty stuff!) and the res to 1920x1200! Well I must say crysis looks gorgeous even at low specs at this resolution.
The results: I got a very respectable 27 FPS !!!(min 17- when staring out into the open,max 38- when in rooms or smaller environs, avg 27.6) Wow that is some going for a laptop GPU. Add to that the fact that I am definitely bottlenecked by my processor (I have a 1.7 Ghz core duo OC to 1.9Ghz) and RAM 1 Gb@667, this is quite some going. The load temp has skyrocketed to around 88~90 C. I need a new cooling solution otherwise my card will burn out. There were a few artifacts courtesy the 1 pipeline that is bad. But it was rather limited. This is a mighty performance for a laptop purchased in April 2006.
For those gasping in horror (read Playboi :P) I told you I'd do this someday :P
PS1: DO NOT try this at home. Flashing GPU bios's is not something you want to do!!
PS2: Wow! people who made crysis rock. It is just the most beautiful thing I have seen run on a computer.
PS3: Congratulations and the thanks of a billion people to Anil Kumble
PS4: Not doing any active research for the last 2 weeks :(
4 comments:
Dude, you told you about this LONG time back. I thought you had already done that...
I didnt know you were chickening till now :P
@ anon above
If you are who I think you are then I had told you about somebody else doing this and I would Consider doing it. I would hardly call it chickening out :D What I have done is rather extreme
Why now??
1. Until crysis/warhead/farCry2 came along I was never compelled to look for better gfx.
2.Ambient temperature is low now. Love winters :)
3.My card was then under warranty and flashing the GPU bios would have needed me to open certain sealed parts of the gfx card. Warranty would have been void.
4.didn't really do any serious gaming for the last year and a half :(
so nVidia rocks :)
hey thats awesome! its really sad that the lappy guys do suck stuff, really wats the logic behind it. I though they will just underclock it which kinda makes sense, but locking some shader pipelines stinks!
congrats man, hav fun on it. Crysis on 1080p res is amazing, min settings is ok. I know how that game makes power-systems weep on such resolutions.
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