Google has a lovely link on doing this in the bios: http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=539

Which is tragically inapplicable to any newer cards. The idea is to use rivatuner to emulate the workstation card. Rivatuner cannot do this above roughly 6*** series.

A second link: http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/lofiversion/index.php/t134631.html
is in no way a walkthrough of the process, but shows that changing the bios can achieve the desired result. He also uploaded the original and modified bios he used. The main point to this thread is to say that this works.

So far, I changed his bios to lower clock speeds to 8800gt stock, dug out a floppy drive and flashed my 8800. Windows and linux agree that I now have a fx 3700 in my computer, and I am pleased with myself.

No benchmarks or overclocking results yet. The intention from here is to flash back to my original (stock overclocked) bios and run as many benchmarks as I can find. I'll then flash to the fx 3700 and repeat.
Finally I'll put the card under water and see how far I can overclock it, then flash the bios to reflect these values and retest.

None of the above will help me at all in games, and may well hinder it. I'm after making CAD applications run better, and if I can successfully imitate the £600 professional card I am well happy.

Cheers all


edit: settled on spec viewperf as a benchmark system. its drawing very pretty pictures on my screen as I type. Many views, no comments, strange


edit2:
Well boys and girls, this works. Ill see if I can produce pretty graphs once I've got some more data to plot, but preliminary results look very good. At 600 / 1500 / 900 core/shaders/memory speed which I'm pretty sure is stock for the card, increases of roughly 25% can be seen between the different bios. Solid works from 12.4 to 16.4 being one I care about. NX from 4.95 to 5.03 is unfortunate as I use solid edge most at present, but increases across the board.

Now going to repeat at my card stock of 650/1620/950. I'll leave it there until I get the card under water, but all looking good so far

edit3:
Returned card to it's factory overclocked speed and reran tests. the slow speed quadro beat the faster nvidia by a fair margin. a couple of benchmarks showed slower fps when going from slow nvidia to faster nvidia, i'm undecided whether i can be bothered to retest at the slower speeds.
Thus far failed to replicate the sources work from scratch, i managed a working bios that installed 8800gt drivers then ran like crap. Currently have a card that identifies itself as an evga fx 3700 (possible unique )and is running through spec viewperf rather nicely, but under cross examination would admit to being an nvidia referance card.
Curiously no overheating issues with any of the tests despite the card running passive. Cpu is a 2.83ghz q9550, same windows install. Process undertaken is flash, remove drivers, reboot, install drivers, reboot, test, repeat. Not surprisingly, the overclocked fx 3700 is quicker than the stock fx 3700, and I am well pleased with myself.

edit4:
Now very confused. At 600mhz, changing to quadro makes things much better. At 650mhz, changing to quadro makes things a bit better. But the 600mhz quadro outperforms all the others. I'll think on this one, presumably my processor is now getting in the way. This may take longer than I'd intended as a result

Rude though it is to bump my own thread, I'm very pleased with this and so will break forum etiquette.

To clarify the above, if you wish to change your card to a quadro but the techarp guide is too outdated for your card, do not despair. The above guide fails because rivatuner no longer supports the technique, but the technique remains valid and successful if done at the bios level.

What you need to change is the four digit identification code on the third tab of nibitor to match the appropriate card. In my case, 8800gt is hardware equivalent to the fx 3700. So you change the identification strap to this. You also change the vendor id strap to nvidias one. Next, at the top, you change 'evga' or whatever your brand may be to 'nvidia', and set the card identification directly below this to fx 3700 from 8800gt. Finally, on the last of the tabs at the bottom, you can change the text displayed on bootup to whatever you wish. Quadro would be obvious. Then save this bios to a bootable floppy disk with nvflash extracted to.

Reboot, boot from floppy. typing dir will list whats on the floppy disk. nvflash -b current.rom will save your current bios [recommended in case things go wrong]. nvflash -5 -6 new.rom will flash your bios with the file new.rom. Itll ask you if youre sure, because the device id's dont match. Hit y, y. Reboot and see the uglist attempt to render windows possible...

Remove your drivers. Reboot. Install quadro drivers. Note that this time it accepts that you have a quadro card rather than refusing to install. Reboot. Congratulations, you now have hardware accelerated opengl applications. CAD works a hell of a lot better. It's well worth reading the two sources in the OP as that is what all of this is based on. If you have an 8800gt, the second link includes a ready edited bios that worked excellently for me. If you dont, the first link tells you what referances you need to know. Comparision between the fellows original bios and the edited one using nibitor is enlightening.

Now, benchmarking this hit a problem. My 2.83ghz quad cant keep pace with a fx 3700. I think this is astonishing but does mean you'll have to wait for me to clock my processor before you'll get accurate graphs. Suffice it to say that a 600mhz quadro flattens a 650mhz 8800gt. I'm not very interested in games, and if you think a quadro bios will make frame rates higher I strongly recommend doing some research before attempting this, as killing your card through ignorance gets sod all sympathy.

Now, given a second hand 8800gt can be had for 50 quid, and a new fx3700 costs 600, I think this is close enough to overclocking to be of direct interest here.

I'm not brave enough to do this to a 280gtx, but Id be facinated if someone else is willing to risk a brick for public knowledge. I think the difference in onboard memory is irrelevent but I don't know this for sure. As my fx3700 is now the fastest thing in my computer (for cad, which is what the computer is for), I dont feel a pressing need to try for a fx5800.


still to come:
Comprehensive benchmarks. If you want a gaming one you'll have to tell me which as I dont have any.

Screenshots of the editing process, or at least better directions than the above.

hey there! I'm a 3D/CAD designer and would love to get this BIOS mod working on my gtx280....but...I am a poor 3D/CAD designer - with no knowledge of flashing gfx bios's would be great to hear if anyone does get this working on the 200 series.

I remember reading up on that article when I had my 8800GTS 512 but it wouldnt work because it said that it only works on anything older than the G92 chip - so the 8800GTX and older GTS's should still be able to do this through rivatuner.

From what I've managed to find online, only up to the 6*** series can be changed in rivatuner at this time. I could easily be wrong on that note, but I would still be astonished if you can't convert the 8800gts using nibitor. Theres an element of past tense to your post though, is the 8800 no longer with you?

For the 200 series, rivatuner definitely wont do it, but I'm 90% sure that nibitor would. I wasn't brave enough to break new ground on that, and it might be hard to find someone willing to give this a shot on their own card. A fx5800 must retail for ridiculous money though [looks like $3500], so when I sort finances slightly better I'll probably give it a go.

Yep, I used to have a GTS until very recently but I now have a gtx280. Would you say that by softmodding a card into a quadro I would see massive gains in my rendering speed? (for Maya and 3DS). If it would be a significant boost then I may be coaxed into trying this on my 280

Graphics card won't speed up rendering at all, only viewport performance.

JonJ678,

I have found your post VERY insightful and am checking this page ever few hours in hope that you'll post your "Screenshots of the editing process, or at least better directions than the above."!

I can't wait to do the softmod on my XFX GeForce 8800 GT Video Card - Alpha Dog Edition, 512MB DDR3.

Do you think I can do this mod to both of my 8800 GT cards and make them run as FX3700 Quadro SLI?

I am stoked!

Would this boost google sketchup at all? That's all the 3d work I do right now...

Hey guys. I'm leak testing a watercooling loop with the 8800 in at present so the computer isn't available at present. First attempt at wc, but hopefully I wont have killed anything

First results, this is at stock clocks on the card
Test 8800gt fx3700
3dsmax-04 7.55 9.47
catia-02 7.92 10.45
ensight-03 14.49 15.11
maya-02 13.06 18.43
proe-04 6.35 7.26
sw-01 12.44 16.39
tcvis-01 2.78 3.33
ugnx-01 4.95 5.03

These are frames per second I believe while drawing something very complex [at 1600x1200 res]
There are more results, but in need of some processing being uploaded to rs at present.

I'm pretty certain this process is speeding up rendering Quixote. nvidia drivers wont, the quadro drivers will. Google sketchup I don't know about, is there a benchmark I could run for it?

http://rapidshare.com/files/160384434/aquamac_Quadro_3700_Roms.zip
These are the bios roms developed by the guy who did this first. Infowars, flashing your cards with these will almost certainly work. I'll get screenshots up, but won't be until my computer is running again (this is a netbook).

Couple of things. This isn't really a softmod, as the change is at the bios level. Save a backup of your bios to the floppy before flashing, as if things go terribly wrong it'll be useful.
If the 280gtx will change into the fx5800 (though with less ram), it'll work really scarily fast. A 2.83ghz c2d quad severely bottlenecks the fx3700 at 650mhz clock speeds, I'd expect the fx5800 to be a fair bit quicker than the i7.

With luck my computer will be back online by this evening. Cheers

edit: http://rapidshare.com/files/219733713/Bench_at_2.83_ghz.zip.html raw data gathered so far

SWEET! I get my 8800GT's today! I am hoping to spend the evening turning them into FX3700's!

It has been an absolute PAIN in the butt trying to make a USB drive bootable without having a floppy drive!!!

edit: Is it possible to make a bootable FAT32 Thumbdrive if the drive is 8gig?

edit: I figured it out thank god. I had no idea that after the format that the dos files would not show up on the drive even if you have your folder options to show hidden files.

Dos bootable usb sticks in general are a pain in the ass. I gave up and used a floppy drive after an hour or so getting nowhere with dos-for-usb and similar

An 8 gb one shouldn't give any more problems than a normal one though. Make a 1gb partition at the start of the drive and leave the rest empty. Format that to fat16 (sometimes called fat) and leave fat32 out of it. The more similar you can make it to a real floppy drive the better.

Can you just rob a floppy drive out of another computer for the few minutes it takes to flash?

Let us know how it goes. I'm thinking about getting a second 8800gt myself

I am stumped on this one:

What you need to change is the four digit identification code on the third tab of nibitor to match the appropriate card. In my case, 8800gt is hardware equivalent to the fx 3700. So you change the identification strap to this.

The third tab on Nibitor 5.0 says, "Adv. Info". Under here you can change Device ID, Sub Vendor ID, Sub System ID, and Board ID. I don't see 8800gt anywhere under this tab.

What do I do here?

Am I using the wrong version of Nibitor?

Good solid work here JonJ768 (lol pun!), been watching this with great tinterest. I've fiddled with flashing some ATI cards to FireGL (but gave up when I realised that FireGLs are pants).

Tempted to go get me some 8800s on that well-known auction site and flash em...thanks for blazing a trail!

Hey all, I have successfully booted into dos, but as far as using Nibitor and following the instructions above, I'm at a roadblock.

When it says:

What you need to change is the four digit identification code on the third tab of nibitor to match the appropriate card. In my case, 8800gt is hardware equivalent to the fx 3700. So you change the identification strap to this.


What does this mean?

I don't want to brick these cards. I just bought 2 of them and want to get my Quadro SLI going!

Almost BRICK ALERT!

Hey y'all, I just tried to flash my card with the new rom. Here is what I did.

First I attempted to follow the instructions by JonJ678. I fired up Nibitor and went to the 3rd tab. Since I didn't know what to change there I went to the top and changed the card to a Quadro FX3700. I changed the vendor to NVIDIA. When I changed the card to the Quadro FX3700, the Device ID automatically changed. I thought that is what it meant when he said:

What you need to change is the four digit identification code on the third tab of nibitor to match the appropriate card. In my case, 8800gt is hardware equivalent to the fx 3700. So you change the identification strap to this.

I am pretty sure I assumed incorrectly. Anyways, I than went to the last tab and changed the name of the card and saved my rom to my boot disk.

I went and dloaded nvflash and extracted it to my boot disk.

I rebooted my machine into DOS. I made my backup by following the instructions by JonJ678. Finally, I went ahead and attempted to flash the card. I typed in the sequence "nvflash -5 -6 new.rom". It asked me about the device ID which I was ready for that and I hit the "y" key for yes. However, the next question it asked me was about the subsystem ID. I was not ready for that question. I went ahead and hit "y" . . what the hell . . might as well. So than it asked me a final question which I was ready for because in the instructions above it said to hit "y,y" so I was figuring that was what you were supposed to do because the subsytem question wasn't supposed to happen.

So the card successfully flashes and I reboot. In the boot sequence, it does not recognize the card as Quadro. When I get into windows, my display settings were reset (i was expecting that) but windows detected the card as a 8800GT. So I went ahead and reboot with the rom provided here: http://rapidshare.com/files/16038443..._3700_Roms.zip I used the 8800GT 512MB rom.

So I reboot and do everything the same and flash the card. After flashing the card, the PC reboots . . . HELL ON EARTH!

All of the characters were scrambled and I could barely recognize some of the words. Luckily it boot back to DOS and I went ahead and flashed to the ROM that I saved.

After the flash, it everything looked normal again and the card works fine in windows.

Does anybody know what i did wrong other than attempt to flash a card without the knowlede and experience in doing so? Can anyone provide step by step instructions? I really believe the subsytem ID is the problem but I don't know for sure.

Edit: I am using the newest versions of NVFlash and Nibitor

Here's what it looks like when I get to DOS:



I just tried it again and had a very scary result! When it rebooted, the monitor stayed blank . . . even after the boot! So with a black screen I typed in: nvflash -5 -6 current.rom and hit enter. I than hit y,y,y and it beeped when it was done flashing. I went ahead and rebooted and it came back . . THANK GOD!

Non removable BIOS chip too, lucky escape! I think I'm gonna leave mine as is as I don't to much 3d modelling, but if I used Maya more I'd definitely do it, 8800gt's are so cheap that even if you bricked 1 or 2 it would still be cheaper than buying a quadro

To be honest, I am contemplating sending these cards back and just buying a quadro. Without any help I am in danger of building a brick house.