HOWTO: Edit your G92 based card's BIOS for fan speed adjustments

NoxTek

The Geek Redneck
Joined
May 27, 2002
Messages
9,300
<- THIS HOWTO IS CONSTANTLY BEING REVISED AND EDITED ->
LAST MAJOR EDIT WAS 2/1/2008 2:20PM CST ->​


<<<<<<<< WARNING >>>>>>>>
The procedures outlined in this guide could possibly render your video card inoperable, damaged, fried, crippled, and/or all of the above if done improperly. Altering the BIOS on your card and/or flashing your card with the altered BIOS can and probably will VOID THE WARRANTY. In short and to be quite blunt, if you fuck up your card don't come back and accuse me of twisting your arm and making you flash your new card. Capiche? Good! Let's GO!



REQUIREMENTS / PREREQUISITES

Hello boys and girls! Today we are going to learn how to alter the fan speeds (and the thermal profile under which they operate) on our G92 based nVidia boards. This guide is being written with the following cards in mind:

  • 8800GT 256MB
  • 8800GT 512MB
  • 8800GT 1024MB
  • 8800GTS 512MB (NOT the G80 based 320/640MB cards!!!)

This guide may also work on some other boards that use the new IC method of fan control, namely certain variants of the 8600, 8500, and 8400 cards.

You will also need the following software:



INTRODUCTION

Late this year the giant green behemoth known as NVIDIA saw fit to bestow upon us a new GPU and a new line of cards in the form of the 8800GT. Yes, the G92 was thrust upon a largely unsuspecting enthusiast community and for a short while all was good. The relatively inexpensive (by enthusiast standards, anyway) card wowed us like few had done before it and even lured a fair number of the sheep away from the red side. Billions... ok millions.... ok hundreds of thousands of [H]ardcore gamers rejoiced in sheer gaming ecstasy.

But all was not well with the newborn 8800GT as some of us would soon discover. It would seem that in its haste to release a quiet yet powerful product NVIDIA was overzealous in their estimation of airflow inside the typical PC gamer's case. Or maybe the guy doing his homework on the thermal envelope for the 8800GT boards fell asleep on the job the day the design was being ironed out. Who knows? Soon all of the popular enthusiast communities were ablaze with people complaining that their new 8800GTs were getting too hot under normal usage conditions. How hot? Hot enough to cause the spontaneous human combustion of 51 young gamers at a LAN event in Houston, Texas. OK... OK... I just totally made that up. But in all seriousness it wasn't uncommon for people to see GPU temperatures over 100 degrees celsius after several hours of heavy gaming in popular titles like Crysis. And in short order the complaints of heat related lockups and artifacting began to roll into the RMA departments of the major board partners. NVIDIA had a Cry... errr.... crisis on it's hands.

Shortly thereafter the damage control team at NVIDIA went into full motion. Not only was the original reference cooler redesigned with a larger and more quiet fan designed to keep the card cooler and silent, but the board partners were issued warnings about the thermal issues with the boards that had the original cooler installed and encouraged to release new BIOSes to the end user with an updated thermal profile for the integrated fan controller on the 8800GT boards. We began to see new BIOS releases from most of the major board partners which featured this updated thermal profile for the cooling fan and for the most part these BIOS releases have helped cool down some blisteringly hot cards.

But that wasn't enough for some of us. We wanted the ability to alter that thermal profile even more and now we have it. The folks at mvktech have released NiBiTor 3.7 and with this holiday release comes the ability to make those very fan alterations that we desire!


NIBITOR 3.7 - NEW FAN IC FEATURE

I'll assume that if you are reading this howto you have heard of NiBiTor before. NiBiTor is short for NVidia Bios Editor and this piece of software does just what you would expect it to do - it allows you to make any number of alterations to your NVIDIA card's BIOS. You name it and you can probably change it, from core and memory clocks to power-on messages you can do it with NiBiTor.

With the release of NiBiTor 3.7 we see a slightly redesigned "Temperature" tab. Look at the screenshots below:


nibitor36temptab.png

(NiBiTor 3.6)

nibitor37temptab.png

(NiBiTor 3.7)

See that new button labeled "Fanspeed IC"? That's our ticket to fan control freedom on the G92 baby! Click that button and you will get a warning from NiBiTor that you are about to delve into dangerous territory. Are you scared yet?


NVIDIA'S NEW 8800GT BIOS - BEFORE AND AFTER

So now that we have the ability let us take a look at the difference between the original 8800GT BIOS versions and the 'new' versions with the updated fan controller thermal profile:



8800gt_oldfanprofile.png


Above you see the profile for the original shipping BIOSes on the 8800GT 512MB cards. We can see from this screen that the fan is set to operate at 30% and will not change until the GPU temperature reaches about 80 degrees celsius (TLow). If the temperature reaches 100 degrees celsius the fan will ramp up to full speed (100%) until such time as the GPU temperature drops below 98 degrees.

Now let's look at the "updated" BIOS with the new fan controller settings:


8800gt_newfanprofile.png


Above you see the profile for the 'new' BIOS that the board partners have been releasing for the 8800GT 512MB cards with the original cooler. We can see from this screen that the fan is set to operate at 30% and will not change until the GPU temperature reaches about 65 degrees celsius (TLow). If the temperature reaches 100 degrees celsius the fan will ramp up to full speed (100%) until such time as the GPU temperature drops below 98 degrees.

Take note that I'm no rocket scientist. I've figured out and/or assumed the definitions below:

TCrit = Critical threshold temperature - at this temperature the fan will throttle up to 100% (full speed)
THyst = Hysteresis - Google the definition but it's kind of like a "buffer" value so that the fan speed doesn't go bouncing around like mad every time the temperature changes a tiny bit.
Tmin = Minimum allowed temperature. Below this temperature the fan will run at the Minimum Duty Cycle speed setting.
THigh = High limit trip point ?unknown?
TLow - Low side trip point. When the temp reaches this point it will begin to ramp up in speed beyond minimum duty cycle.
Toperating = At this point the fan controller will start to dynamically adjust TMin based on the current temperature of the card. I'm not clear on this but I'm assuming the higher the temperature the higher TMin is adjusted.
Trange slope = How fast the fan ramps up to maximum speed.
Min. Duty Cycle = The absolute lowest fan speed the fan controller will ever run your card's fan at.


So looking at the 'new' BIOS we can see that the fan starts to ramp up significantly earlier than on the original BIOS. Instead of waiting until the card is cooking at 85 degrees celsius the fan speed kicks up at a much lower 65 degrees celsius. But what if you want that value even lower? Or what if you want to increase the minimum fan speed on your card (Min. Duty Cycle). Yes! You can DO IT!



LET'S MAKE SOME CHANGES!

So here we go from beginning to end. Oh yeah, let's repeat that disclaimer again in case you didn't see it at the top of the post:

<<<<<<<< WARNING >>>>>>>>
The procedures outlined in this guide could possibly render your video card inoperable, damaged, fried, crippled, and/or all of the above if done improperly. Altering the BIOS on your card and/or flashing your card with the altered BIOS can and probably will VOID THE WARRANTY. In short and to be quite blunt, if you fuck up your card don't come back and accuse me of twisting your arm and making you flash your new card. Capiche? Good! Let's GO!

OK now let's go!

First, let's you need to install and run NiBiTor 3.7 which is as simple as unzipping the archive and then double clicking the nibitor.exe (honestly, if you didn't figure this out you had better just stop right now and let mommy back on the PC to play Peggle or something).

Vista Users: NiBiTor should run on the 32-bit version of Vista perfectly fine. However, the 64-bit version of Vista may require some elbow grease when it comes to dumping the BIOS. For instance you may need to disable driver signing at boot in order for NiBiTor to function properly. (Reboot, hit F8 at the black screen before the Vista loading bar pops up, and select "Disable driver signing...").

If disabling driver signing doesn't work then you can use the following workaround posted by [H]ardForum user Vette8855:

Ranger - I used GPU-Z to download the GPU Bios without any problems, it just saves it as a different extension (img instead of bin), but NiBitor can read it anyway.

So.. I got the bios through GPU-Z, opened it in NiBitor, save it as oldbios.bin (as a backup), then edited it and saved that as newbios.bin. Everything seems to have worked well.

This was in Vista64 without disabling driver signing.

Once you have your BIOS dumped with GPU-Z you can edit it in NiBiTor with no problem.



Now you should be at NiBiTor's main window:

nibitor_mainwindow_nobios.png

Great! But as you can see things are a little.... empty. That's because we haven't loaded a BIOS yet so let's take care of that now.

nibitor_mainwindow_selectde.png

Go to the 'Tools' pulldown menu and hover over 'Read BIOS' and then click on 'Select Device'. You should be presented with a window similar to this:

nibitor_selectdevice.png

As you can see I only have one card installed, and that's my 8800GT 512MB PCIE. So I'm going to make sure it's selected and click the 'OK' button. If you've got multiple cards installed you should select the device ID that corresponds to the card you want to change the fan profiles on. After you click OK you should be sent back to the main NiBitor Window.

Now click on the 'Tools' menu once again, hover over the 'Read BIOS' item, and click on 'Read into NiBiTor:

nibitor_readintonibitor.png

NiBiTor will take a second or two to read the BIOS from your card and then you will be sent back to the main NiBiTor window.

Things look different now, don't they?

nibitor_biosloaded.png

As you can see we now have your card's BIOS loaded into NiBiTor! Now we're ready to make some changes. *evil laugh*

*** At this point you can make any number of changes to your card's BIOS. Want to raise the default core/shader/memory clock? Well it's right there in front of you! Those changes really aren't the focus of this howto but if you feel like making them now would definitely be a good time. Just make sure your card can actually run COMPLETELY stable at whatever clock speeds you set should you choose to change them. For example: I know my Asus EN8800GT will run quite happily at 700/1700/1000 but it's stock clocks are only 600/1500/900. So to gain a little bump but still be safe I raised my BIOS clocks to 650/1620/950. Yup, it's that easy. ***



Now, let's head for the temperature and fan controls and cool this puppy down a little!

Click on the 'Temperatures' tab and you will be presented with this warning:

nibitor_tempwarning.png

Read the warning. Know the dangers. I'm serious - if you don't know what you are doing or are not paying attention and do something stupid like zeroing out your fan speeds, you can FRY YOUR CARD. Toast. Flambe. Fricassee. No more fapping to the Dawn demo for you... :(


OK so now that you've accepted your mission despite it's dangerous nature, click OK and get that warning out of the way.

nibitor37temptab.png

Now you should be in the Temperatures tab of the NiBiTor main window. DO NOT change any of the settings on this page, instead click the button in the lower right hand corner of the window labeled 'Fanspeed IC'. You'll get a window similar to the following:


8800gt_newfanprofile.png


This is what the fan speed IC settings for my card look like, and if you are particularly sharp you will notice that these settings are from the 'new' 8800GT BIOSes that have been released with the 'fixed' fan control profile. So my card should be reasonably cool right? Well I'm a control freak. So let's say that I want to raise the MINIMUM fan speed for my card to something higher. Why? Well a higher minimum fan speed (Min. Duty Cycle) should in theory at least lower my card's idle temperature and possibly increase the overall lifespan of the card itself.

So I'm going to make a simple change to the fan speed profile for my card's BIOS so that the fan will not spin any lower than.... ooooh... say 60% of it's maximum speed. That's effectively double the stock minimum duty cycle of 30% and should net a noticable difference in idle temperature. It should also help with load temperatures a bit since the fan will be starting from a higher speed anyway. So let's change the value for 'Min. Duty Cycle' to 60%:

nibitor_changemindutycycle.png

There we go! You may like something a bit lower because as the fan speed gets higher the whine of the (original) stock cooler becomes more and more noticeable. If you've got one of the 8800GT cards with the new updated larger fan 60% will probably sound nearly silent for you (I freaking hate you!). For me 60% is fine because I have a lot of ambient noise in my computer area anyway and I'd rather keep my card cool.

But there are several more options you can change. Say you want the fan to start ramping up in speed sooner than it does currently. Well you can adjust the 'TLow' value to something you feel is more appropriate. Since I already have the 'new' BIOS my TLow is set to a fairly comfortable 65 degrees celsius, but I'm going to lower it even more to 60 degrees celsius to help my card cool itself off sooner:

nibitor_changetlow.png

And as you can see there are several more options here to explore, many of which I have yet to try out myself. For instance, if you set the Automatic/Dynamic toggle to 'Automatic' fan control appears to becomes a bit more straightforward.

Want your fan to reach 100% speed sooner? Adjust TCrit to a lower value than the 100 degrees celsius that it comes set at by default.

Want your fan to switch from one speed to the next more gradually? Tick the box next to 'Acoustic Enhancement' and the fan should ramp from one speed to the next on a more gradual basis.

There appear to be many, many possibilities!



OK so here's how my new fan profile looks:

nibitor_newfanprofile.png

So as you can see I've changed the Minimum fan speed (Min. Duty Cycle) to 60% and lowered the point at which the fan begins to ramp up in speed (TLow) to 60 degrees celsius. Now we just need to save the edited BIOS file and get it flashed back onto the card.

Oh come on, you need a visual aid for that too? OK fine... go to the File menu and click on 'Save BIOS file':

nibitor_savebios.png

You'll get a standard Windows 'Save File' prompt wherein you can choose the name of the file you want to save your BIOS as, I chose to name mine 'newbios.rom'.

Now all we need to do is get this new BIOS flashed onto the card.
 
LET'S GET READY TO FLASH!

Ahhh good old DOS.... you would think in this day and age we wouldn't have a need for it any longer, and if it weren't for the dubiously incessant need of hardware manufacturers to write their flash utilities so that they only run under this ancient beast of an OS, we wouldn't. Alas there is no currently available Windows version of NVFlash (NVIDIA'S in house VGA BIOS flashing tool) that will work for the G92 based card so we are forced to use the newest available DOS version. So go and grab NVFlash 5.57 because you're going to need it in a sec!

You will also need a USB thumbdrive or a USB based memory card reader and media for the flashing process outlined here. Almosr everyone has SOME sort of USB drive laying around. You can even use one of those USB stick MP3 players like I do. There ARE other methods for booting into MS-DOS such as using a floppy diskette or a bootable CD or DVD, but I'm going to focus on the USB thumbdrive method right now.

Got your USB drive ready? Cool... go ahead and plug it into a USB port on your PC.

First you need to extract the DOS boot files from the archive download I linked to earlier. Extract these files somewhere you can remember because you will need them for the next step.

Now install the HP USB Bootkey Utility, it's your basic software installation so no explanation needed. Once you've got it installed run it and you'll be greeted with the main window:

hpusbdosbootmaker_main.png

You'll want to leave all of the options as they are, except you'll want to tick the box next to "Quick Format" and also the box next to "Create a DOS Startup Disk". Now under "Using DOS system files located at:" you need to specify the directory where you placed the MS-DOS Boot files earlier. All set? Now click 'Start' and watch it go... in a mere matter of seconds your USB thumbdrive will be converted into a nice little MS-DOS boot drive:


hpusbdosbootmaker_done.png


That was fast eh? Ahh the wonders of modern technology... back in the day it took us 2 minutes to format a floppy I tell ya!

Now you can close the HP USB Storage Format Tool, but DON'T unplug your USB thumbdrive yet - we're not done with it! We need to copy the flash tool and the edited BIOS onto the thumbdrive, so next let's find our drive in Windows Explorer:


explorer_thumbdrive_bare.png


Mine showed up as 'Removable Disk' and that's what 98% of yours will show up as (unless you named it when you formatted it with the HP Format Tool). So you see we have nothing there but COMMAND.COM (The MS-DOS command executive) and a couple of necessary MS-DOS boot files. So now you need to move/copy over NVFlash 5.57, the edited BIOS file you saved earlier in NiBitor, and lastly your original unedited BIOS file (just in case!).


explorer_thumbdrive_loaded.png


REMEMBER to also copy CWSDPMI.EXE along with NVFLASH.EXE, without CWSDPMI.EXE the flasher won't run. (CWSDPMI is a DOS extender allowing the flasher to access memory above 640KB... ooooold skool shiznat here).

All done? Ready to roll? Are you sure you don't want to turn back? OK let's go!



LET'S FLASH BABY!

Firstly make sure your newly created DOS bootable thumbdrive is plugged in and ready. See my cheapo MP3 player turned thumbdrive?


nvflash_thumbpluggedin.jpg



Now reboot your PC and take whatever steps are necessary with your motherboard to enable it to boot to a USB drive. Most boards have an 'on-the-fly' boot device selection menu wherein you can select the device you wish to boot from. For example on my Gigabyte board I can hit F12 at the POST screen and get this menu:


nvflash_hdbootmenu.jpg


From there I can select any bootable device attached to my machine.


Or I can go into the BIOS 'Advanced Chipset Configuration' menu and choose 'Hard Disk Boot Priority' and then change the order of the boot devices so that my USB flash drive gets first priority:


nvflash_biosbootselect1.jpg

nvflash_biosbootselect2.jpg


Reguardless if your motherboard was made sometime in the last 5 years you will have some way of booting to a USB device. Consult your motherboard manual or nearest guru for assistance if you can't figure this out.

Now, let's continue booting to our MS-DOS thumbdrive.

Upon sucessfully booting to your newly created MS-DOS thumbdrive, you will be greeted by a prompt for the date and time - just hit ENTER at both prompts - no need to fill them in:


nvflash_dosflash1.jpg


Wow... hello there C:/> prompt, long time no see! :eek: I'm getting all emotional and nostalgic now... *sniff*...

Now, let's type the 'dir' command (and hit enter) to see what's on our thumbdrive:


nvflash_dosflash2.jpg


Perfect! We've got our NVFLASH.EXE (Nvidia flashing tool), our OLDBIOS.ROM (our original unedited BIOS), and our NEWBIOS.ROM (our edited BIOS).

Now if you didn't save your original BIOS earlier you have one more chance to do so - NVFLASH itself can save a backup for you. Just type 'NVFLASH.EXE --save OLDBIOS.ROM' (without the quotes) and hit enter:


nvflash_dosflash3.jpg


OK, now let's get down to business. It's time for the big flash, are you ready? Seat backs and tray tables in their upright and locked positions? Good.

Type 'NVFLASH.EXE NEWBIOS.ROM' (without quotes) and press the enter key:


nvflash_dosflash4.jpg

nvflash_dosflash5.jpg


As you can see NVFLASH is giving you one last chance to back out! If you want to continue with the flash hit the Y key, if you want to back out hit 'N'. Let the flashing commence!


nvflash_dosflash6.jpg


Wow... look at that! The world didn't end... the fabric of the universe didn't tear and you didn't get swallowed by a black hole! Amazing! :D

Your card's BIOS has just been flashed with your edited BIOS!

So let's reboot (Ctrl-Alt-Del or reset button) and get back into Windows to verify that our change worked. Oh and this is the moment of truth because if you foobared the BIOS flash.... well.... you won't be rebooting. :eek:

If you listen really close at this point you will be able to tell if your changes in fan speed worked or not, because your GPU fan should spin up to the new default fan speeds right after rebooting.

So once you get back into Windows go into the Nvidia Control Panel and look under the GPU performance section for the fan settings dialogue.

newgpufansettings_ntune.png

Well would you look at that - I'd say that's close enough to 60% fan speed! :)


So there you have it. That wasn't too bad, was it? It sure looks a whole lot more complicated than it really is. :eek:


Where do you go from here? Well you can definitely start playing around in NiBiTor - change some more fan speed settings around, change your GPU and memory clocks, etc. Advanced users can even alter the memory timing and latency settings on their cards although I strongly advise against that unless you REALLY know what you are doing.



OTHER NIBITOR PROCEDURES

Several people have asked me to make some additional changes to this howto, mainly adding instructions for the 8800GT voltmod and clock adjustments. While my primary goal for this HOWTO was just to show how changes to the fan operation could be made I'll now give a quick rundown on a couple of additional quick and easy changes you can make in NiBiTor.


GPU VOLTMOD

WARNING: If you've got the original (loud and hot) cooler on your card I would advise against this vGPU mod. Your card runs hot enough as it is. If you insist on doing the vGPU mod then I highly suggest you use the instructions above to alter the fan speed so that it ramps up way sooner.

I personally didn't do this voltmod until I had secured a THIRD PARTY COOLER, in my case the Arctic Cooling Accelero S1. (see my [H]ardForum review of this cooler)

It looks like the days of the BIOS voltmod may be back! NVIDIA seems to have granted the board partners the ability to raise the GPU core voltage ever so slightly (.05v). We can use that to our advantage in order to obtain a higher stable GPU core clock.

The stock vGPU on the 8800GT is 1.05v - keep this in mind. With this BIOS mod we can raise the vGPU by .05v bringing it to 1.1v. It may seem like a really small amount of added voltage but it can add a good 50mhz to your GPU core overclock easily.

So open your 8800GT BIOS in NiBiTor and go to the 'Voltages' tab:

nibitor_vgpu_mod.png


Use the pulldown menu next to 'Extra' and select 1.1v. That's it! Now you can save the BIOS, flash it, and check out how much higher you can overclock.

On my Asus EN8800GT this BIOS voltmod brought my maximum stable GPU clock from 720mhz to 770mhz, and amazingly enough it also brought my maximum memory clock up from 1020mhz to 1060mhz as well. Pretty damn nice. :)







CONCLUSION

I hope this helps out some of you who've been considering this, or at the very least I hope it's a good read for a few of you. I'll be continuing to make updates and revisions to this post as time allows and new information on the fan settings is rooted out. If any of you have anything you think should be added or included please let me know and I'll do my best to not only add the information, but give you due credit as well. :)

<- THIS HOWTO IS CONSTANTLY BEING REVISED AND EDITED ->
LAST MAJOR EDIT WAS 2/1/2008 2:20PM CST ->​
 
That's awesome. Thanks.

I used the guide, and can say that it was fantastic. The only hiccup was the DOS file download for me, NOW RESOLVED :D - that and for some reason my usb drive showed up as a hard drive. It seems that I NEED to have REMOVABLE as a device name, or else it only sees it as a hard drive, and then going into the "Invalid System Disk" loop.
 
Read the warning. Know the dangers. I'm serious - if you don't know what you are doing or are not paying attention and do something stupid like zeroing out your fan speeds, you can FRY YOUR CARD. Toast. Flambe. Fricassee. No more fapping to the Dawn demo for you... :(

Hilarious!

Overall Great guide - worthy of sticky.
 
I know your said this guide is for the 8800gt and the new 8800gts, but if I try this on a older 8800gts 640mb will it fuck up my card?
 
I know your said this guide is for the 8800gt and the new 8800gts, but if I try this on a older 8800gts 640mb will it fuck up my card?

I *THINK* you can use the settings on the main temperature tab to change the way the fan on the G80 boards operate, but I'm not positive. I do know that the settings in the 'Fanspeed IC' screen are for the G92 boards and some of the 8600 and 8500 boards that use a similar fan speed controller.
 
Well, when I open up the Fanspeed IC Screen everything looks okay (as in perfectly normal and at stock settings), but i'd rather know that it will work than be the guinea pig.
 
Good guide! However, I think I'll play it safe and use RivaTuner to adjust my fan speeds without flashing the BIOS.
 
Is there any idea how to configure the BIOS of 8800GTS (G92) by using the Nibitor, in order to control the fan speed directly after power up the card? I would like to keep the fan speed from the power up till windows enters the NVIDIA drivers in a quite mode (<60%). My card start at 100%, which is very noisy.
 
Great guide Blue Falcon! One thing: you might want to remove the BIOS update files from that 622.zip file (the files are: A7350NMS.132 and AFUD4061.exe), wouldn't want anyone to accidentally play around with those, lol. :D
 
Is there any idea how to configure the BIOS of 8800GTS (G92) by using the Nibitor, in order to control the fan speed directly after power up the card? I would like to keep the fan speed from the power up till windows enters the NVIDIA drivers in a quite mode (<60%). My card start at 100%, which is very noisy.

Yours runs at 100% until Windows is loaded? What kind of card?

Mine spins up to 100% only when I cold start the machine (not reset) and then it only does it for like 1 second before the BIOS is initialized. I'm using an EVGA card.
 
Great guide Blue Falcon! One thing: you might want to remove the BIOS update files from that 622.zip file (the files are: A7350NMS.132 and AFUD4061.exe), wouldn't want anyone to accidentally play around with those, lol. :D

Hahaha whooops, those were leftovers from when I used that bootdisk to flash old my P6N SLI Platinum. :D

Fixed!
 
Good guide! However, I think I'll play it safe and use RivaTuner to adjust my fan speeds without flashing the BIOS.


Bah!!!! :p This was so easy to do, if you can edit a registry or flash your mainboard bios, you can do this. I took my old school bios Gigabyte 8800GT (the original HOT bios) and juiced it up to my stable/safe 650/1620/1950 AND set my fan profiles to a nice and quiet ramp that keeps my card under 82c and the fan speed hasn't broken over 57%. It has the added feature of not having to run rivatuner all the time, or forgetting to have it on, etc.

I highly recommend that anyone with the needed flash drive do this, it's as easy as taking candy from a baby.
 
this doesnt work in sli lol, I flashed both cards, they both worked indiviually. After I throw them in SLI the bottum card never spins up.... way to go nvidia.

The only thing I can do is set them to fixed speed.
 
this doesnt work in sli lol, I flashed both cards, they both worked indiviually. After I throw them in SLI the bottum card never spins up.... way to go nvidia.

The only thing I can do is set them to fixed speed.



That's awfully strange since you are not radically altering anything, only the points at which the fan speeds change and/or the minimum fan speed. Did you flash both cards individually?
 
Impressive.

The only part that did not work as advertised was the DOS 6.22 boot files. First off, my driver for the USB flash drive was borked and it took foreeeeeeeeeeever to figure out how to get it fixed. When I did that, it formatted and copied the boot files, but the DOS 6.22 files never worked (got a "Non-System Disk or Disk Error" message). After I nearly shed a nostalgic tear, since it had been years since I've seen such a message, I tried a Win98 boot disk and it worked.

Fan is set at 60% low and I can't hear a thing. Temps dropped from 78C after 15 minutes of ATITool to 68C after 25 minutes with no appreciable increase in noise. I'm contemplating turning the fan speed up again later, but this works well enough for me, and I'm going to go with an S1 soon. Thanks again, Blue Falcon!
 
This should be sticky'd.

OP, if you could add instructions for altering the clock speeds and voltages, that would be cool too.
 
yes this should be stickied! i only found this off a link on another forum :( mods sticky this thread :)
 
OP, if you could add instructions for altering the clock speeds and voltages, that would be cool too.

Will do when I have a chance, dealing with some rather serious personal health issues right now that are taking up most of my time and making very little time to sit in front of my rig. :(

I'll get on it soon enough though!
 
And this isn't stickied, why? :p


Just*Do*It folks....this is an easy way to totally customize your G92 card.....I have a custom boot message, and changed profiles for the fan/temps and I no longer need to have Rivatuner running at all times for fan speed control.
 
well, guess it will just have to keep gettin bumped till it gets stickied huh. because seriously, it should be!
 
Thanks!

This was very helpful. Now I don't have to manually change my clocks and fan speed every time I reboot.
 
BlueFalcon

First off ..great guide.
Secondly, could you add a sub-section for the bios volt mod option for the 8800GT since you are editing the bios anyway...
 
You never had to, Rivatuner can remember it all


Of course it can, what I am talking about is:

1. no need to even HAVE to use Rivatuner for fan speed control
2. by flashing BIOS you can run the card in ANY pc without the need for Rivatuner
3. it's easy and permanent (at least until you reflash the card)
4. less programs running = teh win
 
Vista x64? I had to boot into XP to read the card bios. I then modded it and saved it. Went to flash and said the BIOS ID didn't match the cards ID, failed the checksum. Didn't flash. Tried making a new ROM and saved without checksum and it still wouldn't flash.

EDIT: Just spotted this in the OP.
Vista Users: NiBiTor should run on the 32-bit version of Vista perfectly fine. The 64-bit version of Vista may require some elbow grease. For instance you may need to disable driver signing at boot in order for NiBiTor to function properly. (Reboot, hit F8 at the black screen before the Vista loading bar pops up, and select "Disable driver signing...").​
 
Ranger - I used GPU-Z to download the GPU Bios without any problems, it just saves it as a different extension (img instead of bin), but NiBitor can read it anyway.

So.. I got the bios through GPU-Z, opened it in NiBitor, save it as oldbios.bin (as a backup), then edited it and saved that as newbios.bin. Everything seems to have worked well.

This was in Vista64 without disabling driver signing.
 
Ranger - I used GPU-Z to download the GPU Bios without any problems, it just saves it as a different extension (img instead of bin), but NiBitor can read it anyway.

So.. I got the bios through GPU-Z, opened it in NiBitor, save it as oldbios.bin (as a backup), then edited it and saved that as newbios.bin. Everything seems to have worked well.

This was in Vista64 without disabling driver signing.

I'll try that , thanks !
 
Ranger - I used GPU-Z to download the GPU Bios without any problems, it just saves it as a different extension (img instead of bin), but NiBitor can read it anyway.

So.. I got the bios through GPU-Z, opened it in NiBitor, save it as oldbios.bin (as a backup), then edited it and saved that as newbios.bin. Everything seems to have worked well.

This was in Vista64 without disabling driver signing.

Thanks for this, I'll add it to the howto and give you credit!
 
I've added a new section at the end of the howto called 'Additional NiBiTor Procedures' and I've placed instructions there on how to to the BIOS voltmod on the 8800GT. I'll try and add a couple of other things there as time allows (and if I can get the damn post number of characters limit to cooperate). :)
 
Bump it up to sticky ;)

This thread is getting linked a fair amount from other sites......
 
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