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Hacking Nvidia's Drivers!

2019-02-03
okay come here c'mere c'mere c'mere okay so this is our mining GPU that we're using for gaming in spite of its complete lack of any video outputs but you've seen this before and the last time we left you guys we weren't recommending these things even though they're like 75 bucks for the equivalent of a GTX 1060 because the only drivers we had for them were modified by some Chinese driver modification team and we had no way of knowing exactly what was inside them but today all of that changes first and foremost we are going to manually modify and videos drivers ourselves making this completely safe to use second while we're at it we're gonna kill in videos telemetry that they build into their drivers and third we are gonna run this in SLI with one of these which is like what what running a real gaming GPU with a mining one in SLI they're not even the same part number oh ed while we're at it the ten sixty doesn't even support SLI but we're gonna do it and you know what else we're gonna do tell you about our sponsor last way with glass wire you can instantly see your current and past network activity you can detect malware and block badly behaving apps on your PC or Android device and you can get it for 25% off at the link in the video description with offer code - okay so here's the situation right now we're not quite starting from scratch but pretty close so we've already disabled driver signing and you can see how to do that in our previous video here where we use the the modified Chinese driver but other than that we're looking at a pretty bone stock configuration here so our P 106 mining GPU is installed in our system but the drivers for it are not loaded in any way we're in a in a completely blank state and we are running entirely off of the onboard graphics that are built into our CPU here so Anthony's back hi before we go any further I want to lay out what our ideal scenario would be here because in our last video we weren't just relying on a driver of unknown origins it was also a little bit on the older side so in a perfect world we would want our p 106 mining card here to behave exactly like a dt x 1060 because hardware wise they're the same thing so that means gaining support compute support and even n banc video encoding support and all of that while being able to run the very latest drivers however we've run into some challenges and we are gonna have to make a few compromises here so what do we got well first of all we won't be able to run on the latest drive or at least not right now the way it works right now and we're just getting a code 43 error every time so either nvidia has changed something or they patched it or whatever either way we're stuck with for 16 point 34 aside from that as far as I know it's not possible to get anything to work so so you're stuck with quick sync which fortunately you're gonna have to have because you're running your onboard graphics anyway in order to even get a display output from this thing or x264 so with that out of the way Anthony's going to start by downloading our own fresh version of that 416 series driver and then taking the Chinese one and the Nvidia one and comparing what the difference is between them so that we can replicate the modifications that the Chinese team has made that allows the driver to be installed without copying over anything that could be nefariously hidden inside it so I'm using notepad plus plus and the reason for that is it's free it's pretty great actually it's got a huge and of our features including this compare feature which we can access via this plugins section here we just type in compare and I've already installed it so it's in here but yeah once you have that just go to you load up your first file go to plugins compare set as first to compare I've already done that now I will load up the other one which is this Chinese driver plugins compare compare so here we have a full listing of everything that is different between these two drivers so as we can see these lines here have been modified so where it used to say section 110 it now says section 108 which is actually the same if you look at these device IDs once e06 is actually the gtx 1060 1c0 seven is our p 106 they have different sections in the vanilla driver but in the chinese driver they do not that is the primary thing we're going to be changing here okay now the final one of these sections here we'll notice that it actually says that it's 109 instead of 110 it's dropped down a number the same is true over here so we'll just follow here so it'll be 107 Creech basically what we're doing is we're copying the same config from our 1c 0 6 which is our GTX 1060 so we want section 1 0 7 for all of these things now what we're doing here is basically just tricking the driver into thinking it's compatible we're not actually changing any of the functional files of the driver installation is that correct that's right and if we go down through the rest of the comparison here there is nothing different really so then it's possible that our Chinese driver was totally clean yeah possible but I mean we don't know about the exe s the INF is perfectly fine we can make some additional changes while we're here though telemetry isn't it convenient that they just listed under env telemetry yeah for those not familiar telemetry is a feature of a software or driver that reports back on your usage to the manufacturer and a lot of the time this is stuff that you can opt out of but a lot of the time it's just baked right in so there you go we asked our compatibility check yep let's go ahead and install it of course we do not want GeForce experience also don't care about 3d vision because we don't actually have anything that we can connect it to and hopefully we will get the same exact thing we got the other day but we did it for ourselves on a fresh driver hey there we go alright so that's it if nothing else we now can say confidently that if you pick up one of these mining cards and use this method on this particular driver you will be able to play games mmm yeah that that monitor doesn't really have a shield on its yeah the biggest criticism we had last time is that we didn't actually show the Intel integrated and how poorly that perform oh really yeah oh it would be worse than this a lot worse yeah this is Deus Ex mankind divided running at 1080p at greater than 8 frames per second so it's working now the thing is even though we're having trouble moving on to the latest drivers which would give us support for things like oh I mean I guess freesync doesn't matter because you'd be you could actually have freesync running off of Intel's onboard graphics yeah you could never mind depending on whether or not your onboard graphics supports reason okay but still there are good reasons to be running the latest drivers now we're not saying it's impossible we're just saying that when we applied this same method to the latest drivers even checking line by line we weren't successful so it might just be down to people who are a little bit better versed in their driver modification and Wizardry to figure out what the additional things that nvidia has changed whether just through the course of changing things to make them better or to specifically block this in order to make that work either way at the very least using a slightly older driver we have a working gaming system on the cheap but that's not where we stop today for our next trick we're gonna run this thing in SLI now we're still gonna have to deal with that same driver compatibility limitation because one of the cards in our system is one of these P 106 mining cards but what it at least demonstrates is that from a proof-of-concept standpoint this can work so you might think that this process is as simple as throwing a real gtx 1060 into the system and then again forcing our driver to install remember it's an unsigned driver now so you got to do that process manually but as we're about to discover it did not it did not oh hi mark whatever the point is there's no SLI option here whatsoever so now what some kind of weird thing off the tech powerup forum yeah what are we doing so it's a program called different sli auto it's currently in the downloads folder but you guys will have the download and extract that for yourselves and we don't actually want to run the program okay that would be too easy yes it used to work but it doesn't anymore so no so you'll want to go to see windows system32 driver store and now we want to sort it by date we want to copy the NBL DD and it's the driver itself yeah I couldn't find it earlier either okay just in a sea of env pasted into the different sli auto folder now you'll want to open up in hex editor I downloaded hxd it's free should be there on the desktop you got it you want to search for the strip for the string of values seven five zero five zero f ba oh I already had it there okay cool there it is so we want to change that so you'll want to go to the beginning of that and type in yeah C seven four three two four zero zero zero zero two zero zero zero zero the hard part's over okay so we want to go back to the folder you got that driver from we want to take the folder name itself copy that and this is probably also already Auto populated but if you go back to the different sli auto folder right click and install that CMD go to edit see where it says the env design apps that up there you want to replace that in every sin every instance so you can use the replace function in notepad for that yeah all right so then we want to restart into safe mode oh lordy okay so that work yeah sure all right next you're going to want to go into that holder again different sli auto and run install that CMD as a minister well I guess it's the same thing and it's a funny way you know what let's just do it okay boom reboot now for changes to take effect yep so what have we done here sign the driver really supposedly it doesn't actually work okay that's something that we can do though something that requires a lot more but Singh around that we don't really want to do right now it does that copies the modified driver that we change the bits around in yeah to the proper locations in Windows yeah and well that's really about it and then just to clarify for the viewers out there changing those hex values have we done anything unsafe to our system have we potentially compromised it not compromised no but who told us to change those values well it's actually a guy on the tech power up forums okay by the name of pretentious yeah there we go that's the name yeah he's got a little script that he runs that takes about an hour or two to find where exactly the string that we found yeah is in each driver release and he just updates it on the forum it's pretty great basically what it does yeah is it disables the check for SLI as far as motherboard compatibility and you know the inter GPU compatibility so to be clear you guys aren't gonna be running in RTX 28 ET i and a gtx 1030 in sli at least not to any positive effect but over here in a case where we have two GPUs that we know are identical other than nvidia deciding they're not our expectation is that we would actually be able to achieve an improvement in performance so here it is the sli option is there in the driver we're gonna go ahead and enable it and bippity floppity No Oh keyboard light just went off as it turns out that SLI mod will not work with the peep 106 unfortunately whatever maybe it's the fact that it doesn't have outputs maybe it's the fact that they have two different Levi offices that are you know for whatever reason right now does not work if we could force the card to take a different B by us that might work but I haven't medial to get that to work either I mean we can still run gtx 1060 s in sli I guess that's still fun all right so what we've done here is we've manually installed our driver again moved our HDMI cable over to this GPU and we're gonna go ahead and enable our other device which got automatically disabled somewhere along the way it's kind of like a precautionary measure Hey SLI enabled on the gtx 1060 where's my deus ex at now beaches I'm actually not sure what the skins would be like here now the thing here is that there's nothing particularly amazing about running graphics cards in a multi GPU configuration without a bridge running between them in fact AMD has been doing it this way for several generations now NVIDIA though has stuck to their guns saying that the available bandwidth over the PCI Express slots is not enough to handle the inter card communication and has even gone as far as to upgrade the original sli link to the new envy link standard that you'll see on there our TX cards with that said even though we won't be able to speak to necessarily you know micro stuttering and how this solution effects something like that we can see if we could at least get an FPS improvement with this configuration and we'll know pretty shortly here yeah a benchmark only takes 90 seconds hey wow that's a pretty nice little improvement there isn't it yeah so once again our experimenting with Nvidia graphics cards video does come with some caveats this isn't necessarily a configuration we'd recommend SLI is in most cases not as good an option as simply getting a single higher powered graphics card so I don't even know necessarily disagree with Nvidia disabling SLI by default on their lower end cards it's just something that was kind of fun to do and interesting to show you guys just how simple it is for manufacturers to lock down and or enable functionality at least from a sort of hex editor perspective now the QC that would actually go into ensuring that this would be an adequate solution for their users that's a completely separate story and maybe part of the reason that manufacturers won't allow functionality that they otherwise could but I'll let you guys be the judge of exactly why it is that this is locked out you guys can leave a comment down below you know what else you can do down below check out our sponsor fresh books is the super simple to use small business accounting solution for freelancers and the self-employed it's a simple way to be more productive more organized and to get paid faster you can create and send professional-looking invoices in less than 30 seconds you can set up online payments with just a couple of clicks to get paid up to four days faster you can see when your client has seen your invoice to put an end to the guessing games and if you have any trouble you can reach out to FreshBooks is award winning customer support where you won't get any phone trees or escalations nothing like that just answers so visit fresh book Stockholm slash tech tips and enter Linus tech tips and the how did you hear about our section to get your 30-day free trial so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that 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