ceewi1

I was recently asked for some advice as to how to unlock locked pipelines on a video card, and thought i'd post it as a seperate thread for everyone's benefit.

Before we start:
It's a good idea to run 3D Mark, or any other benchmarking program. This will give you an idea of the performance increase you've gained by unlocking your card.

Keep in mind that this will generally void the warranty on most video cards.

Also be aware that not all video cards can be unlocked. If your card cannot be unlocked, no masked units will appear in step 9 (as is the case with the 6600GT that most of these screenshots have been taken from). You can still overclock the card, though.

You should always keep an eye on the temperature of your video card, even though it's most unusual for a simple unlock to cause dangerously high temperatures on an otherwise normal video card. This information will be displayed in your video card driver under Display Properties -> Advanced as follows:
http://members.optusnet.com.au/ceewi1/temp.JPG (sorry about the link, you can't have more than 10 images in a single post)

Temperatures in the high 70s are quite safe for a video card under load.

We will be using RivaTuner, which can be found from http://www.guru3d.com/rivatuner/.

Download and install the program.
Here's the procedure, illustrated with screenshots: Follow the red circles!

1. Click on the small arrow at the bottom right under 'Target Adapter'


2. Click on the 'Low Level System Settings' icon (picture of a video card)


3. Click on the NVStrap Driver tab


4. Click on Install


5. Tick the 'Allow Enabling Hardware Masked Units' box


6. Select Yes at the warning

7. Under Graphics Processor Configuration, change the 'Active Pixel/Vertex units configuration' option from 'determined by VGA BIOS' to 'Custom'


8. Select Customize


9. You will be presented with the following screen, showing enabled and disabled pixel and vertex units.


Enabled units appear with a tick next to them. Disabled units appear without one as shown:


Place a tick next to each disabled unit by clicking to the left of the bit number:


Click OK, then Apply, and restart when prompted. Your card is now unlocked! If you notice any artefacts (you'll know them if/when you see them), follow the process again back to step 9, and relock the units one by one by removing the tick. Many graphics cards have some physically damaged units which shouldn't be unlocked, however even if you can't unlock all of them, you may be able to unlock some.

Re-run your benchmarking program and compare the results.

For best performance you can also overclock your card by increasing the core and memory clocks. I will post some info on this if anyone expresses interest.

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Cheap PSUs - 2% of system costs, responsible for 28% of system deaths

Codin

Thanks a ton CeeWee! Very Neat and Clean tut. I cant wait tell I can do this with my new card you help me pick out!

Ku-sama

i did this to a 6800GS AGP, it workd fine, even with an overclock, then it left my house, went to its new owner, and the card instantly fried.... lol temperature changes much?

ceewi1

Highly unlikely. It's always a good idea to keep an eye on your GPU temps, but unlocking doesn't often cause dangerous temperatures. Video cards will throttle-back to avoid frying, and are designed to operate at far higher temperatures than CPUs. Additionally, the temperature change is unlikely to have caused failure. Perhaps it was damaged in transit, or installation? Thanks for mentioning it, though, I knew there was something I forgot to add!

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Cheap PSUs - 2% of system costs, responsible for 28% of system deaths

Ku-sama

nope, card when i got it back was completly un damaged phisically, when it booted to windows (through the BIOS as well) the card MAJORLY Artifacted... it was because of heat, buy at my house, in the computer, it ran completly fine, high temps, but completly normal for an unlocked and overclocked 6800GS, then it got there and fried after working for short minuets

ceewi1

Whether the unlock was responsible for it or not is dubious. Only a couple of weeks ago I had a similar thing happen to an old FX5200, which had been sitting around doing nothing for a couple of months. It had never been altered from stock. My guess is faulty Video RAM, or possibly a bad RAMDAC, but since I no longer have an AGP based system sitting around, there's not much I can do to test it.

I'm not trying to dispute your experience, but I think it's important that people viewing this thread realise that unlocking a video card is generally a very safe activity, far more so than overclocking a processor, for example.

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Cheap PSUs - 2% of system costs, responsible for 28% of system deaths

Ku-sama

it is very simple to do, and the results are like getting a new card for free... im just saying, there are risks

diduknowthat

Then there's the softmod unlocking way, which is looked into alot, and tried many times but my card just didn't budget

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ceewi1

Yeah, there's plenty of other choices. I wanted to keep this guide simple enough for beginners to follow, and as safe as possible to use, so I won't be covering BIOS flashes or hardmodding.

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Cheap PSUs - 2% of system costs, responsible for 28% of system deaths

MasterEVC

Its because you put some rediculous cooler on it and during the trip something might have happened, would not have happened if you had left it be with stock

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