Gadgetory

it's a cryptocurrency mining experienced let's call it a downturn let's be honest a huge crash in 2018 so there is no shortage of great deals to be had on graphics cards that were used for cryptocurrency mining on sites like eBay but one class of cards that there appears to be no use for other than to melt them down and salvage the gold and other valuable elements is crypto specific cards like this one from gigabyte this is AP 106 it's actually very similar to a gtx 1066 pin power dual fan cooler except for oh one small problem it doesn't have any display outputs and not only that but the drivers have been locked down by Nvidia so it can't be used for gaming because these were designed only for cryptocurrency mining but could this card be used for gaming well Chinese site Taobao has a seller who says they can and is selling them with a modified firmware that they claim will work 67 US dollars that is under a third the price of a gtx 1066 gig will it work well I'll be damned if I know but I'm sure gonna find out Oh after this message from our sponsor thermal take thermal takes 8,500 has a modern minimalistic design and brushed aluminum panels with dual hinge swing tempered glass doors check it out today at the link in the video description so we're not gonna go through the whole process yet because we won't know anything that old by the way Anthony's gonna be joining me for this video hi he arranged the whole thing which was apparently like a big hassle getting this thing yeah apparently the seller wouldn't actually ship to Canada I don't know what the reason was not sure it's legal or whatever but anyway long story short Dennis had to contact on the directly and in order to get it shipped they had to put it down as a computer mouse but it's here and it seems to be exactly what we were expecting it's as advertised including all the dust and grime that's built up on it from presumably months of cryptocurrency mining in a dirty warehouse somewhere anyway back to what I was saying before we're not ready to rock on that just yet because we won't know how it compares to a regular gtx 1060 unless we go ahead and run one so this is a run-of-the-mill EVGA GeForce GTX 1060 superclub okay it's not quite right of the mill so we're gonna run just a quick shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark so that we have a before to compare to our after now we don't need to run a whole suite of benchmarks because we're not comparing cards across different architectures different brands or even different GPUs these are both running the same graphics core on them so all we need to know is did they cripple it in some meaningful way or is it all just a software lock and we need to get our drivers installed for this puppy speaking of which both the cars should be six gigs so we should be looking at the the full coup de coeur count so I've installed driver version 4 16 . 16 which is from October and I'll explain why I did that a little bit later on but we're gonna go ahead and fire up shadow of the two raider we're running at 1920 by 1080 and at all hi except I turned off motion blur because it's stupid so here we have it average FPS 68 okay you can oh you can see the specs of our testbench here so this is kind of a best-case scenario for the 1060 we've got a 9900 K in here and our minimums were Oh Wow oh yeah 56 okay that makes more sense so minimums of 56 that's very playable here comes the Chinese mining card yeah isn't that a great question you guys probably couldn't hear that because Brandon was like kind of mumbling come on over here Brandon how are you going to plug it in if it doesn't have bio so we're not saying that this technique is gonna work for everyone because if your motherboard does not have graphics outputs and your CPU doesn't have an eye GPU built into it you will not be able to do this but remember how we got free sync running off of an Nvidia card before bypassing the GPU power through the other card that interfaced with the display well with the modified driver the theory is we'll be able to do the same thing here not with free sync mind you but with the performance of our graphics card being passed through the output of our onboard graphics this is a technology that didn't really have any reason to exist on desktops on their own but it's kind of a carryover from laptops that have onboard graphics that they run when they're trying to save power and then high-performance graphics that they switch to in games so button because the feature exists well we can take advantage of it here so we're gonna go ahead and install our 416 dot 16 drivers at least we're going to try is this supposed to work I didn't solve that driver there's a different driver that we need to install but if this works then did it work if this works then I'm a little confused I mean this drivers theoretically already installed on the system no okay so we do have a problem it's showing up as P 106 100 in device manager instead of GTX and 60 well let's go ahead and let's let's try but this is not supposed to work so I may have jumped the gun here yet like yeah it's showing up as a P 106 but the driver fully installed okay Nvidia control panel is there but it's in display settings that I would switch to it correct right under GPU or graphics graphic settings down at the bottom there graphics settings there we go okay so let's browse for an app options here we go high performance safe okay oh so it doesn't pick up a P 106 as a high performance GPU option well what happens if we pop open the Nvidia control panel here you are not currently using a display attached to an NVIDIA GPU all right Anthony come on in here what do we need to do okay and talk to the camera so okay I'll move here oh that's just yep okay okay okay okay what do I need to do there's this little folder on the desktop that you missed which is fine because it's like in this honeycomb pattern which is great it's called mining and in there is the actual driver we need it is modified but if you try to install that right now yeah chances are it will error out okay so we need to disable secure boot okay so that we have to restart for now the benefit of secure boot is theoretically that it prevents malware from attacking your pre boot environment is that about right yeah but there's been an exploit on that so so this is the boot options menu in the advanced on the bias it's going to change depending on what motherboard or computer you have but long story short we're gonna go into key management yeah then we're going to go to is it clear secure boot keys and it'll be like do you really want delete them yeah we do so now if we go out it's disabled I remember the first time I encountered this I was just absolutely furious because it doesn't even register as a change to the BIOS nothing like I was so mad I was like what do you mean that's how you disable it I don't want to delete them forever necessarily like it's not really a very clear terminology anyway ya know and you can put them back it's it's it's ridiculous anyway long story short you can turn it off it's perfectly fine you can put it back if you want but we need to turn it off for now okay now we're back in the PowerShell we're gonna try that command again so it's BC edit / hello / windows still hasn't figured out how to not take the focus away from a window that I'm actively working on how is that even possible it's very rude anyway / set test signing on completed successfully yay now we need to reboot what this allows you to do is install drivers that have not been signed so that means that they may have been modified it might be corrupted it might cause instability in your system so it's not generally a good idea but it is required in this case one thing I am doing here is I'm going to disable Windows Update and there's no particular reason other than it annoys me when it tries to reinstall the driver so I'm just gonna go ahead and do that you should probably turn it back on afterwards if you're doing this now you're gonna go to the vice manager we're going to delete this driver that we installed earlier yeah do we have to DD you it or is that good enough I think this is good enough we can DD you it it's probably best practice to ddu it but yellow anyway for those not familiar DD you is a third party driver removal utility that's actually freaking awesome go check it out if you ever have a stubborn driver issue and feel free to throw some support those guys way they've been at it for a very long time it's a really useful tool I've used it many many times here is so this is what happens normally you would get an error saying that the driver is corrupted or modified or something like that but now go ahead you can still explain it okay but now what it came up with is this software is unsigned so it just came up with a warning because you're you've got test signing mode on it means that you're basically four window over all windows knows a driver developer so you're installing that driver anyway again if you see that under normal circumstances you should probably not do that but it is required here do we have any way of knowing that this driver is not installing malware in the system no okay yeah I haven't actually looked at it so to be clear what we're doing here we are actually not recommending that you try it at home graphics drivers installed so we'll just close that now we want to do is look at this it still looks like P 106 but if we go into driver it'll say not digitally signed here okay so that's what we expect that's what we expect this is the not signed driver it's running so now we go into our display settings shadow the Tomb Raider shadow the Tomb Raider oh we might need a reboot yeah I came up with the methodology here about two hours ago and when show started three minutes ago oh that's what we're like 1,000% seat of our pants right now so we DD you'd at this time which it turns out was probably a necessary step and we're ready to go again so we're going into here and there it is high-performance GPU and vidya P 106 100 so let's make that the default and shadow the Tomb Raider here we go remember guys it's like after 70 US dollars okay that's the important part of this I'm so excited right now it's worth remembering that this card was basically destined for the recycling bin exactly like it could not game there was no possible way well could it be used for compute other than game bar other than mining yeah but it's a 1062 class PP you so like it's not even worth the PCI Express slot you put it in for that kind of a thing yeah but here it is maybe a new lease on life and just so you guys know there's no there's no smoke and mirrors here's our HDMI cable there it is going into the bottom of our monitor and directly into the back of the motherboard there is nothing on this card that is looking pretty good actually that might actually have been higher than the superclone oh that is looking real nice gaming on a graphics card with no outlets feels good well we missed the moment when it came up but that's fine we've got our result and actually this is as good as I would have expected so we fell for FPS short in our averages and then for our minimums we only fell 3 FPS short now you will see a slight difference in performance when you're running the compute or the the the rendering of the game on one GPU and then outputting it via another one and this is pretty much consistent with what I would expect from either that or the difference in clock speed between a super clocked and just a regular 1060 cart so it worked yeah pretty sweet but we are not saying at all that we would recommend this so Anthony there weren't really instructions from the seller on Taobao where did you end up getting the driver you used shockingly enough from our forum there are actually a lot of different forum posts about this long story short there was one person who included a dock and a link to a Google Drive folder with all the stuff we need it which was great thank you very much with all that said that is not a recommendation for any of you to go download that because there's no way of knowing when you're installing an unsigned driver if anything has been changed other than the things that they said they change unless you're qualified to go through and examine exactly what it is they changed in which case you could just go and do it yourself so right now there's really no path to avoiding the scrap heap for these P 106 and if I recall correctly there were gtx 1070 equivalents as well yeah I think so cards so really the onus is on Nvidia to do something about it because while I'm not expecting them to run out and make this a supported use case for any motherboard with onboard video there's no reason that this couldn't work if they weren't specifically locking it out so I'm not asking them to support it I'm just asking them to not specifically disable it because this is a serious waste problem literally thousands tens of thousands of these parts just useful for absolutely nothing anymore when gamers could be gaming on them now the next stage is getting ourselves one of those fancy solder alignment things that rossmann has and putting like an HDMI port on it I wonder if it would work I can't think of any reason it wouldn't like does it have the the actual chips port I'm sure there's I don't think these guys modified their boards very much so all that's left now is to thank PIAA for sponsoring this video private Internet access lets you use the internet privately it allows you get around government censorship access geo locked content and even do things you might not think of like save money on flights so you can set your VPN to make it seem like you're shopping for tickets from somewhere else they've got tons of great features they don't log user data they've got servers and I forget how many countries it is but it's like hundreds or thousands of servers or something like that whatever I'm sure all these talking points are being shown to you guys it's freaking awesome and it's affordable so check out bia today at the link in the video description so thanks for watching guys if you just liked this video you know where that button is but if you liked it hit like get subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like that one and our community forum which you should totally join