Gadgetory

someone posted on my MSI twin frozer - golden edition gtx 465 in the comments that many of these could be unlocked - gtx 470 so my curiosity was naturally piqued one of the reasons that most GTX 460 5s can't be unlocked two gtx 470 is that the gtx 465 does not have the same number of ram chips as the gtx 470 even though it does use a 470 reference PCB but what i found out by removing the 10 or so screws from the back of the Twin Frozr 2 limited edition cooler here is that this gtx 465 does have 10 ram chips instead of being missing - like a normal 465 so the next thing i'm going to be doing is putting the cooler back on it and seeing if i can actually unlock full gtx 470 performance from the gtx 465 and i should put that in quotes because it does have 10 ram chips golden edition limited edition video card i put the card back together and did a quick Vantage run at just stopped clocks stock voltage just to see sort of where we land and I'm going to try following the unlocking procedure which I will show you in a couple minutes to see if we can unlock gtx 470 performance from the Twin Frozr golden edition alright well the first step in our slightly unusual video card BIOS flashing procedure it's unusual because we're going to have to force the BIOS flashing utility to overwrite some parts of the cards firmware that you normally wouldn't even when you're updating a BIOS so because we want to change it from being a 465 to a 470 and we're going to overwrite with a 470 BIOS so we have to do things a little bit differently so the first step is to use this command and the flash - - erase EEPROM and then we press Y to confirm now it is very very important you do not reboot your computer at this time because you have erased do you basically just erased without replacing firmware from the card so the next step is going to be NV flash and we are going to put in some additional commands here and then let me just double check what I've gone and named the file so I'll just leave this camera here for you to look at and apparently it is mashing the spacebar which is a bad thing now okay there we go okay seventy rom so this is the part where we're actually going to flash the GTX 470 firmware onto our 465 so PCI device ID override detected yes we do want to do this so we're going to type es in all caps overriding GPU mismatch yes we want to do that as well and overriding the board ID is only needed yet we are we are overriding the board ID because we want a 470 now bear in mind unless you check that it has ten RAM chips and even then this won't always work I take no responsibility for you breaking your card because that can happen in fact it's quite possible that I have bricked this one so we're going to go ahead and remove my flash drive and reboot and find out if we're going to make it back into Windows I hope we do maybe I'll let you stay along for the ride okay first step is going to be getting it to post it posts that's good it has to get a lot further than that though so in theory this is a GTX 470 now so what I'm going to do is I'm going to run some Vantage benchmarks on it and see if the score actually improves now by unlocking it to a 470 not only do we actually get to use those additional two chips of ram so instead of being a 1 gig card this is now I believe it's a shoot 1280 or something like that so 1.2 something gig card so there's that and we also unlit unlock some additional memory bandwidth and as well as a couple of other functional units on the GPU itself so we should get quite a significant performance boost out of this and for nothing for no additional cost so yeah this is a very interesting thing that MSI has gone and done by producing a gtx 465 that is basically just a 470 it's a wolf in sheep's clothing mind you it's not really sheep's clothing when you go and put like that beefy crazy all copper cooler on it ok so we're into Windows so the graphics card sort of sort of works I might actually need to reboot here in order to get it to be detected properly so maybe just bear with me oh no there it is ok NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 so I'll be back in a minute and I'll show you the full result that it looks like it worked well let there be no doubt this is a GTX 470 now you can see gpu-z brings up all of the information here so it is now a 1.2 8 gig card rather than a 1 gig card it has a 320 bit bus width rather than a 256 bit bus width and it also has let me see yeah it has an ID that says GTX 470 I ran Vantage again we score 17,000 886 marks so that is a very very significant boost over the 14,000 and change we scored before there it is confirmed it takes about 2 minutes to do the flashing process as you saw and you get a wack little more performance so this card actually looks like a tremendous value thanks for checking out my video blog don't forget to subscribe for more tech tips and unboxing videos