GTX 670 Unlocking

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Sn0_Man

Gawd
Joined
Mar 23, 2012
Messages
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Is it possible to unlock a 670 to a 680? I mean, they are the same silicon right?

Sure, the 670's are hypothetically the 680's that DIDN'T make the cut, so it shouldn't work, but I can't believe nobody has tried it. Especially people with 680 PCBs...
 
Last I checked I think the die is laser cut. Only benefit I see would be starting clock.
 
I personally would not buy a 670 with the thought that I could get a 680 because of the following:

1.) GK104 yields are terrible.
2.) The GTX680 and GTX690 are relatively rare compared to the availability of the 670.
3.) Because of 1 & 2, the supply situation is nowhere near like what AMD had with the Radeon 6950/6970.
4.) I would assume the disabled part is fused off or laser cut.

If you buy a 670 I would say that you should be happy to get 90% of the performance of GTX 680 for 80% of the price. Even if they could be unlocked, you'd have better luck winning the lottery then finding a GTX680/690 bin chip on a 670 due to the well documented issues with manufacturing GK104.
 
Not to mention if you overclock the GTX 670 you can get that 90 percent to just about 100.

I'm not going to bother waiting for the GTX 680 when I can get virtually the same performance for hundred dollars less and right now.
 
I don't think it's possible to unlock any additional shader units or whatever, but I have read that some people flashed a 680 BIOS onto their 670 and recorded a performance increase.
 
Pretty sure Nvidia doesn't allow this - they fuse or cut the die, it's not just a BIOS change. And given the low stock situation of GTX 680s, I'm thinking any chip that could possibly work as a 680 would be sold as a 680.
 
I have a sneaking suspicion that the 670s have damaged cores much like the Phenom X3s did. NVidia, looking for a way to cut their losses, found a way to re-purpose all of the defective 680 and 690 GPUs by bypassing their damaged cores and selling them as lower cost alternative.
 
Fair enough. If the cores are physically altered then that is that. I just hadn't seen any mention of it anywhere. I'll probably still try flashing my GigaByte 670 to the 680 bios to test performance but I'm not expecting much.
 
You will probably see better performance because of the higher power limit, voltage and clocks. But you could achieve the same thing by overclocking.
 
Sn0_Man said:
Fair enough. If the cores are physically altered then that is that. I just hadn't seen any mention of it anywhere. I'll probably still try flashing my GigaByte 670 to the 680 bios to test performance but I'm not expecting much.
Click to expand...

BIOS would just change the stock clock speeds would it not? Let us know how it goes. I'm curious if it enables a higher power target % or not and any other changes. Also I thought the Kepler BIOS were digitally signed? How do you get one?
 
there are two types of 670's, one built on the 680 board and another built on a new board. the full length boards clock well.
the cores, unless part marked differently are not laser cut. it could be a resister on the circuit board or the bios could be programed to detect bad cores and disable them, but i bet the first.
we need side by side pictures of the full length 670 built on the 680 board and the 680 to see.
 
They are lasered off. People have already tried the flash also for ones on the 680 pcb.
 
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