Gadgetory

- [Man] Here it is right here. This is NVIDIA's P106 graphics card that was made specifically for crypto currency mining. And the reason why crypto currency miners I guess wanted to buy these up, was because they were cheaper than the gaming graphics card variants, the GTX 1066 Gigabytes. Not only that, from the factory they had a pre-optimized bios for crypto currency mining. And so, this made it more efficient, plus it was cheaper. I guess the appeal was there initially. But, now it comes to resale time with the crypto currency bust being upon these graphics cards. And was it really worth those crypto currency miners to get this sort of variant, and if so, can these be used in gaming PC's? Lets find out. (upbeat music) Welcome back to Tech Yes City. And right here I have a Zotac P106 mining graphics card, with no display-outs. It's got 6 Gigabytes of DDR5 memory, and the same dye as a GTX 1066 Gigabyte, with 128 streamed processes. However, there is a big difference, This doesn't support DirectX 12, and it also doesn't have the PCI-Express 3.0 support built in. So it is a cut down version in more ways than just the display connectors. NVIDIA have also aggressively locked these at a firmware level. And this is going to be the precursor to the later part of the video, where I've already tried my hardest to flash a GTX 1066 Gigabyte bios, even from the same board partner, Zotac. And it just was met with failure after failure. The closest I got was loading up a, I guess, edited version of NVFLASH off Reddit, and in particular only one version of that would enable me to get passed the subsystem ID mismatch. And even then, after those two checks, I then still got met with a board mismatch error. So, basically flashing these things to anything other than another P106, is impossible. At least from what I gather. But apparently there is a seller on Taobao, and uh we will quickly interlude with a little bit of a rap tune, for that pronunciation. (rap tune) That are selling these graphics cards for around 400 Yuan. Which would be around about 60 USD. Which is actually what I paid for this when I was over in Vietnam. I paid 1.3 million Dong, which I guess would be around 60 USD, or 80 Australian Dollars. And so immediately the appeal for this graphics card at the price range, seems, and I put a big emphasis on seems, very good at first. Imagine getting GTX 1066 Gigabyte performance, even for half the value of that of a used GTX 1066 Gigabyte retail version. That is what it seems like at face value. Until I started going through all the steps. And if you want to do this, then perhaps you may wish to get one off the seller on Taobao, instead of getting this one right here. Because, this one I had right here, I couldn't flash it again, I came into problems. But when I followed the step-by-step guide, and the first thing you need to do in order to get this working properly, is reset your computer, click on that option, and then go into advanced settings, and then click into start-up your computer with advanced options. And then upon rebooting your computer, you can then select option 7, either via pressing the 7, or F7 key, and this will ignore driver enforcement. And so you can then use the custom driver that is posted on the internet. I only managed to get this driver off a person who speaks Chinese on the Linus Tech Tip forums, who actually uploaded it to Google Drive. So, big thank you to that individual. He also posted up the REG Edit hack. So, once you've restarted your computer after doing that ignore driver enforcement, you can then install the hacked driver, and then also the REG Edit hack after that. And essentially what this does is it will utilize the GPU's main source of power, and combine it with the motherboard onboard graphics. And then essentially use that output on your motherboard to then play games whilst utilizing the power from the graphics card itself. It's actually designed for laptops, via NVIDIA's Optimus technology. Except there was just a few big problems with this when I started doing this, and I did get it to work initially, and I thought wow, this might actually work. But after that, it started coming into problems where I tried out Rainbow Six: Siege and it wouldn't boot because it detected an unsigned driver. And then I tried to load up DOTA 2, and this was really crazy because it just crashed. And then when I tried to load it up again, the performance was really bad. And then I went back into the application settings, where the preferences are, and I no longer had the option to select the graphics card as the high performance mode. So essentially Steam must have done something where it detected it and locked it out. So for me, this was very unsuccessful. In that I thought I got it working, but it just didn't work in the end. And then I've been going through some of the comment sections as well, in relation to this P106, and it seems like a few other people are having issues with their games. Not to mention the future validity of this method, I mean you are using an unsigned driver. And, whether people want to keep freely hacking those drivers for future reference, after they've sold off all those P106's, is another story altogether. So, I think maybe the Taobao seller who is selling this particular model, they do claim in their listing that the Gigabyte version is able to work better than the other version. So perhaps they've loaded up some sort of custom hack on the graphics card itself. And they're able to get it detected as a normal GTX 1066 Gigabyte, that would explain if they got theirs working fine. But you've still got that unsigned driver, which will cause problems, especially in competitive multiplayer titles. So moving through the steps with this Zotac P106, it was unsuccessful and it is a shame. I mean ultimately, I would have loved to have seen maybe one display out on this graphics card. And if you then could hack a GTX 1066 Gigabyte bias into these, then there's no reason after that why it wouldn't work just like a normal GTX 1060. For instance, when we looked at the RX470 in the previous video I have done, where I actually flashed a normal RX470 bias onto that mining card, that then worked like an RX470 in games. And it's going to have no problems going into the future whatsoever. So ultimately when it comes down to this method, I can't recommend it, at least with the sample I have here, which is the Zotac version. Perhaps the Taobao sellers have theirs working successfully, with more games. And they have more consistency. But at least with what I've got here, I can't recommend this, and for the price it sort of makes sense, it is coming very cheap in terms of what they're selling those graphics cards for, compared to what other GTX 1066 Gigabytes are listed for, even on the website itself. So ultimately when it comes down to it, the P106's, initially when I heard about them, I didn't advise anyone buy these, even if they were crypto currency miners. Because this was the problem I did foresee in the past. I mean, if there's a crypto currency bust, and then these things can't be used for gaming, then they're essentially worthless now. I mean they might be good to someone who's re-soldering and tinkering graphics cards that are GTX 1060's and have legit problems, where they might have a dead memory bank and they're re-soldering, but even then, those people aren't going to be paying much at all for these cards. If there are people out there who can solder on display outputs to these, and then manage to somehow put a custom bias from a GTX 1066 Gigabyte on here, then that may be a good work around. So there may be some more to come with the P106's. But as it stands, buying one of these in it's current form, and trying to do this method, I cannot recommend it at this stage. And I guess when it came down to it, using it in the real world, and digging deeper, and trying many different things, it just became more of a pain in the A. And I hope you guys have enjoyed this video today, if you did, be sure to hit that Like button. And I'll catch you in another tech video very soon. Also, if you want to crack yourself some merch on there then, link's in the description below as well. And I'll catch you in another tech video very soon. Peace out for now, Bye. (upbeat music)