Have you ever been annoyed by the fact that you can't overclock your older GeForce GPU? Well, now you can, without restrictions! Sure, that doesn't sound particularly secure, and it's not. But it's just a taste of what's possible with a new set of modding tools developed for Nvidia GPUs—without the company's permission, of course. With these new tools, you'll be able to do pretty much anything your heart desires on your older Nvidia graphics card. You can even flash a new Ada Lovelace GPU with a different card's vBIOS, if you really want to live in the danger zone.
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According to TechPowerUp, Nvidia has been locking down its GPUs since the 900 series, also known as Maxwell, since 2014. It included an on-die security chip that had to verify the GPU BIOS to work, so if unofficial firmware was installed, it wouldn't work. Now two intrepid modders have found a way to bypass this, allowing for near-unlimited modifications to GPUs up to Turing and vBIOS cross-flashing to Ada Lovelace. The tools were developed by two forum members independently, with one member named Veii releasing a utility called OMGVflash and another tool called NVflashk from Kefinatorforum.
Both utilities let you do pretty much anything you want to your Turing-based GPUs, including raising (or lowering) voltage limits and raising power limits. You can also adjust default fan curves, change default fan speeds, and more. The author of OMGVflash has posted an extensive thread here about the utility. TechPowerUp says it may even work with the author to host future versions of the tool alongside the popular CPU-Z and GPU-Z utilities. The author also includes a simple warning that reads: “Don’t flash stupid things and complain that it won’t be posted.”
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The biggest beneficiaries of this tool will likely be owners of RTX 40, who can now upgrade their MSRP GPU with a high-end, factory-overclocked GPU to easily get the performance settings of that card. This will also open the door to running an RTX 4090 at 1.1v, which is a slight boost from the default 1.07v setting on newer GPUs. However, deep voltage and settings customization is not available for Ada cards, as you can only do a direct swap of another card's vBIOS.
As always, using these tools will void your warranty and could potentially damage your GPU, so be careful. However, the tools will also allow you to install a new vBIOS on a stuck GPU, hopefully bringing it back from the dead. TechPowerUp says it thoroughly tested each of the utilities for viruses and malware, and both came out clean, so at least that's one less thing to worry about.
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information source:extremetech.com
