Gadgetory

what's up pc fans james - since here and today we're going to do a video that i said for a long time i wasn't going to do but i'm doing it now because apparently i give in to peer pressure don't do drugs so with the new enthusiast x99 platform launched on the horizon here I've decided that I am in fact going to go ahead and put my third 70-80 into my main rig that way I can just have a massively overkill underutilized system because well I don't know if I'll ever have another chance to actually do this so here is my third 780 right here it's coming right out of the test bench behind me and guys I'm committed now the graphics of block has the waterblock has already been ordered for this thing and well the cables have already been done and I've I'm pretty much dedicated I'm committed we're doing this so this is my EVGA 780 SC with the ACX cooler on here and this is what we're going to be BIOS hacking and / volting to get better over clocks now obviously we're only gonna be able to go so far because of the fact that we are still air-cooled but I'm preparing for the water cooling that this is going to be going on now this video right here is going to come with an awful lot of disclaimers the reason for that is that you can very easily turn this into one of the most expensive doorstops you could ever own trust me I've already done it so what exactly is BIOS hacking and / volting well it's just like it sounds going to be loading a custom BIOS on here custom rom and we are getting which is going to allow us to remove many of the fail-safes that are built into these graphics cards to keep you from blowing them up I can't just blame her enough guys do this at your own risk I did one video in the past where I showed people how to use a tree disk or whatever it's called and how to clean up old files on your system do you have any people wipe their C Drive and blaming me for it yeah so disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer your own risk now there's a whole list of disclaimers that we're going to be talking about here before I even move forward because guys I'm not going to be responsible for you guys blowing up your cards I'm just documenting the process I'm going through on my card which works with my model and my bias your results will vary I guarantee it disclaimer number one can't go without saying enough I've already said it your own risk disclaimer number two I can't guarantee it's going to work with your card you have to basically go and find the right BIOS yourself loading the wrong BIOS on the wrong card will brick it I've done this already and I could not flash it back even with the help of EVGA and the custom BIOS ROM maker it's actually the first card he said he was ever stumped on on being able to flashback so guys you can permanently ruin your card disclaimer number three I will not be providing you guys any links to any of these tools if you guys cannot go and find the tools yourself you are probably not capable of doing this hack reliably so if you guys are smart enough to be able to go and find these tools based on what you're seeing on the screen chances are you have the beginning capability of actually performing these but I will not be linking you if you want to send me hate for that too freaking bad I'm not giving you guys the tools to ruin your cards and simply showing you how I'm doing it with mine and disclaimer number four you must have adequate cooling do not think that you're going to BIOS hack and over volt your air-cooled card and get good results guys this is designed for people who are on water cooling now what I'm going to be using it for today is just getting it ready for my water cooler so with that said let's go ahead and get this bad boy stuck back in the system and let's go ahead and get started transition now while we're waiting for the system to boot up here let's go ahead and talk about a couple of other things I'm sure many people are already asking when will this work on another graphics card can I do it on my 290 can I do it on my 280 my 770 my sevens I don't know guys I'm doing the 780 because that's what I have I'm sure there's options out there for these other graphics cards I don't know if they'll apply to you you have to do the leg room you have to do the research and figure it out yourself all right so we're going to turn into the computer here we're going to load up Valley Valley benchmark and I'm going to show you guys first off the reason why we are doing this now if we head on over here and we just go ahead and run the benchmark here for just a couple of moments we'll go ahead and show you guys one of the reasons why we're going to do this now NVIDIA has stated that the gk110 video card which is the 780 the Titan the Titan Titan Z Titan black a lot of lot of titans out there are capable of 1.2 1 2 volts from the factory but a lot of card implement implemented tato deters implementers have actually hard limited some of them to one point one five zero volts and that happens to be the case here on this graphics card so I've gone ahead and I've loaded this long enough just so that we can actually see where we are going here on the voltage and if we look right here see one point one six two volts and it bounces up and down it started one point two and then it came down they went up and they came down and went up it came down and that's a problem for overclocking right there that's sort of sort of a V group thing it also has to do with the fact that you've got your power limits on the graphics card which is set to 106 percent power limit and when we do a custom bios and a custom over volt it's going to actually allow us to kind of remove all of those limited limiters and we're just going to pump the voltage into it non-stop now that's why the cooling is actually a major major issue blower style coolers guys don't do this please it's just it's not going to work you're going to throttling anyway due to heat and water cooling is actually fantastic now if you do have a custom PCB something that has better MOSFETs better caps and and better VRMs chances are you'll be able to do even more voltage than the 1.3 volts which the BIOS will allow us to achieve and your overall results will be better so I'm even taking a risk by doing this on a reference PCB but you know I digress I like to take risks the way I've always been all right so you guys can see there we actually had some some limiting right here on the voltage and as that voltage goes up and down it does affect the max overclock now the max overclock stable I was actually able to get on this graphics card as you can see it was 1228 which is where it started but as the voltage drop so did the core and it dropped all the way down to 1202 now twelve hundred megahertz overclock it's not a bad overclock whatsoever in fact that's a fantastic overclock but we want more power that's the way I work it's free power and I'm going to take advantage of it damn it so the first thing we're going to do here is we're just going to go ahead and close out all this stuff we're going to open up my over my hacking tools here and the BIOS that I'm actually using is the Skynet BIOS now there's some BIOS out there they're available from other people like s7 it's f7 some other guys out there I'm just want to use the same BIOS on all three of my cards so I am using the Skynet BIOS no relation to the Terminator I don't think hope not into that I've just given three new graphics cards to the network from Skynet so before we move forward we're going to load up techpowerup as gpu-z this is a program that allows us to take a look at our BIOS it also allows us to backup our BIOS and that is very very important you must save your BIOS you can see here we're running 8080 31 0 80 that means it's a B one revision GPU just means it's a newer GPU you might see 80.000 or 3a there's a bunch of different bios out there so the important thing is you need to make sure that the BIOS that you are using matches at least the first numbers on your BIOS now guys like Skynet he actually puts in readme files or text files with his BIOS and will tell you specifically where they've been tested and where they're compatible so that is the most important thing loading the ROM BIOS you're effed now right here next to the BIOS version you will see there's this little save BIOS we're just going to go ahead and save that it's going to take a second here because it's got actually export it and we're just going to go ahead and save this into my hacking tools hacks never want to do it yeah nope we're going to do it in our 780 folder here and I'm going to name this gk110 now I'm going to put 823 201 4 because that's today's date so I know pretty much when I save that BIOS it's now been saved and there it is right there so we now have our BIOS to revert to if something goes wrong now in most cases you can flashback you can get it recovered with a Windows boot disk but sometimes it doesn't work as I know firsthand alright so the book the BIOS that we're actually going to be using for this is the Skynet BIOS EVGA SC revision 4 here's the readme and as you can see right here it works with BIOS versions 8080 and this one's to 108 II we're on a 3-1 it just means there's a slightly newer factory BIOS but this is a perfectly capable BIOS and compatible because of the 8080 that's kind of the most important thing okay guys there is some files that you're actually going to need there's three files here you can see I've got NV Flash MB flash 32.6 and NV flash 64.6 so we're going to go ahead and we are going to copy these three files and we are going to start a new folder here and we're just going to call it I don't know we'll call it third 780 that way whoa that was my 780 so that I know exactly which files I'm using for this card right here even though they're all the same I still like to keep it exactly parsed out so I know of my three cards which files they actually derived from now we're going to go ahead and also cut the stock rom that we just saved out of there we're going to save it into that folder so that it's all in the same place and lastly we need to go into our appropriate BIOS it's up to you to figure out I'm not telling you what the appropriate one is for me I happen to know it's ask iOS by a Skynet bios EBG 8sc revision 4 here is the file here it's got a very long kind of a file name I don't really care for that file name so we'll be changing that we'll move it over here into there as well we'll go ahead and paste it and we'll just sort of change the name of that to Skynet SC BAM so now we have two roms in this folder we've got Skynet SC and gk110 8:23 2014 so now we've got our programs that we need ready to go and the next thing we're in do is actually run our Flash utility that's the part we've got to kind of reach down and grab your nuts and see exactly how brave you are when it comes to performing this because that's where it's either going to pass or fail now the easiest way to open up the env flash program is just to shift right click in the folder and then do open command window here there's also keyboard commands you can do that I just like to do that and as you can see right here it takes us into a command prompt that's right there in that folder now there's actually a command line we're going to type right here and this is the part where this is actually really important so we're going to run env flat we're going to run env flash I've never gotten used to typing on this keyboard - or space - for - space - five this is actually a list of commands for override BIOS protection override you know that the boot image may not match in fact even though they're made on the same BIOS platform or level if you will or I guess backbone it still says hey this BIOS doesn't match if you do this you're probably going to brick your card it's sort of an invidious failsafe so these are actually overriding that and that's where it gets a little bit scary and then you're also going to do space - six and then we're going to put in the name of our BIOS which is Skynet SC got wrong now we're going to hit enter it's going to tell us here you want to replace the 8080 3102 80 with 80 80210 80 so really we're kind of rolling it back slightly but you can actually see here that the the actual note I remember this is called right here I think this is the image is actually identical so you have to hit Yes to confirm it says the display may go blank for on and off so basically gird your loins hold on tight it's now actually storing the firmware BIOS image onto the wrong now here's the funny part I didn't fart I swear it's my chair okay maybe I farted okay so now it says we're done it's verifying update it's successful now here's actually the freaky part because we're booted into the old wrong or the previous room ROM image even though I had bricked my card in the past it still worked until the reboot and then the reboot when it actually loads that ROM image is where we got a blank display and absolutely no recognition of the actual graphics card whatsoever in the system so it may still be displaying an image right now but it could actually be bricked for all we know so now what we're going to go ahead and do is we're going to verify that the ROM actually took effect go ahead and restart and let's just hope I didn't brick looks good it's five hundred dollars down the drain every time it happens guys and if you've got a more expensive video card it would be it worked alright so as you can see the image actually took now that's only the first part of actually BIOS hacking and over volting your graphics cards now the graphics card has a BIOS on there that's going to no longer do GPU boost 2.0 it's no longer going to have a turbo or a boost frequency at all so when I run into a game it's going to run at the default in this BIOS it's actually one thousand six megahertz not the 940 one and it's not going to ramp up at all so that's actually what we want we want full control over what the graphics card is doing GPU boost 2.0 great idea for massive overclockers like me terrible idea so you guys remember we actually had that fluctuating voltage before and without doing any hacks to msi afterburner because actually to get the next part of this you need to hack msi afterburner so that it no longer V group that voltage we're going to go ahead and take a look at our settings here now the first thing I want you to notice here is do you remember how 106 percent was actually the max we had before on the TDP or the power limit we now have 150 allowed to us so that's one part of the BIOS hack it allows us to tell the GPU it's okay to use a lot more power than you recommend so we're six percent over power protection I guess now it's our protection but over power limit on the graphics card is now 150 percent so basically we went from about a 330 watt over power limit to a 450 watt allowance on the graphics card now you see why the cooling is very very important okay so these are all of our same settings before but take a look at the voltage right here you see this we are now sitting pegged 1.2 1 2 volts and the reason for that it's sitting there pegged is I have the Nvidia power right now set to instead of being on adaptive it's actually set to prefer maximum performance if you set that to adaptive then it will actually come down and ramp down when you're doing idle tasks but for the sake right now of testing our overclock this is what we've got going on now I also want to point out the temperatures do you see our idle temps have jumped up quite a bit that's because we're pumping all that voltage to our graphics card so again I can't stress enough how important it is to actually have adequate cooling so now let's go ahead and load up our valley benchmark and let's see how much more megahertz we've actually gained now nothing's going to change right here in fact the mega Hertz are probably going to show lower because previously when you did an overclock you were actually you're adding kind of an offset megahertz on top of the boost but now it's going to actually be a one-to-one so if I say give it a plus 100 it's a plus 100 megahertz to the base clock if that makes sense where before it was a plus 100 to the GPU to boost ratio so it's actually changed the way we overclock the cards entirely temperatures are sitting at 65 degrees Celsius right now 66 it'll probably hit 85 after all of its loops that's where I have it set to but the cool thing is temperatures are good volts are still sitting at the stock 1.21 to max allowed by Nvidia which means we can now crank this thing so our we went to eleven hundred and twenty-four megahertz which is actually about seventy eight megahertz slower than before so now is where we're going to actually start tweaking so we're gonna leave our memory at zero and we're going to go ahead and bump this up we'll do plus 200 to see where we get apply it save it if you guys don't know how MSI Afterburner you guys will have to figure that one out on your own we'll go ahead and rerun Valley benchmark and we'll continue to repeat this process until we crash will back off and find where our max overclocks are so keep your fingers crossed that we actually gain something because that's the entire point of this if we don't get anything this was all just for naught we voided our warranty for absolutely no reason whatsoever and that's not cool we have finally found our max overclock here on the stock bolts of 1.2 on 2 volts on air and that is a twelve hundred and sixty-six megahertz core clock now that's pretty fantastic now some of you may be saying well that's only 60 megahertz higher than you had before remember all we're doing is forcing the card to go to its max safe voltage determined by Nvidia thereby taking a VJs BIOS out of the equation of saying no only go to 1.15 and we also are doing it on a fan controlled graphics card which does eat into the amps and bolts a little bit in terms of that power setting so it's allowing us to go to that one point two one two volts because of the 150 % TDP max that is allowing us to actually take the fans out of the equation now if we take a look here as you can see while that was actually running we got our one point two one two bolts all the way across if you can't read that it actually says one point two one two volts and as you can see we're done and we're out of the 3d mode it ramped back down to the 0.875 and our max core right there actually shows 1254 so there's a little discrepancy in valley but we got about a fifty megahertz 50 to 60 megahertz overclock on top of the stock voltage now you can get a lot more out of this in fact I'm pretty confident that this graphics card will probably reach thirteen hundred megahertz maybe even 1350 once we start bumping it up to one point two five and even one point three zero but I can't even consider doing that until I'm actually on water because then I'm just asking for trouble my max temperature had actually gotten up to 79 degrees Celsius which is not bad at all considering where air cooled but it's not I'm not going to give it any more voltage whatsoever until it's on water so there you go guys that is how to BIOS hack and over volt technically it's not over bolted to do an over volt you would actually have to run a hack into MSI Afterburner which is going to be a separate video if I even bother doing that there's some custom code you have to change inside of MSI Afterburner that will allow us to get past that plus points or that plus six to millivolts setting on there so until we do that or you can go EVGA precision 15 which will allow you to go up to 1.3 volts in there as well so you're going to have to actually have an overclock program that's going to allow you to do over volting in your graphics card so there you go guys again I'm not going to be able to tell you guys where to get these tools you guys we have to go and find them yourself make sure you run the right bios it will void your warranty and all that stuff but you can regard it back to stock if you need so guys I hope this has helped you and very least I hope it entertained you do this with your own risk guys and tell me your results if you actually do it and get a good result so I'm gonna get the heck on out of here follow on Twitter if you guys have any questions and as always we'll see you in the next one maybe it'll be a next ninety nine overclocking video ok cool