The same thing happened to MSI’s Lightning. Guru3D, a creators of Afterburner, were working with MSI to include a voltage manipulation from their software. Shortly after this announcement, NVIDIA has told MSI that it’s not allowed to do so. So only the first 5,000 units of this card could offer this feature. Nevertheless, MSI continued to do whatever they can to make their products the most competitive for overclocking enthusiast. The solution was quite simple, manipulation of the PWM system of their GTX 660 Ti and 670 Power Edition card. Unfortunately, their modification brought more problems than good. It turned out that one additional component could even stop your pc from posting. Here’s what Tom’s Hardware discovered after investigating the circuit of those graphics cards:
So what’s happening? A small component completely superfluous to the normal circuit in one of the ground connections causes major overvoltage in the PWM chip in question – instead of the 5 volts specified by Richtek, the chip is hit with up to 9.3 volts.
Ultimately this whole situation could indicate that GeForce 700 Series might not offer both software and hardware voltage manipulation. The reaction of the people has shown that NVIDIA’s decision might not have been the best. Particularly when few thousands of graphics cards were already made and sold with those ‘forbidden’ features.
And by the way, I’m quite sure that ASUS will likely follow those guidelines as well, by dropping VGA Hotwire feature for their TOP models.
