Offloading an old card

[madad2005]

Hi,

I have a GeForce 6600 256MB. As I understand, this is the 8 pipeline version of the 16 pipeline 6800. Is this true? Is so, is it possible to flash the bios to get all 16 pipes working again?

Cheers,

[pop pop]

I doubt it.

However, I recently read an article that described a non-BIOS hack to do just that. It seems the architectures are identical, the additional pipelines are just disabled. I don't remember where I read it, but it was online--maybe Tomshardware or one of the others. Google it.

Naturally, the manufacturers advised against enabling the other pipelines.

[saphalline]

Not true. There are lesser versions of the 6800 that have some of the pipelines disabled, which would explain the hacks that pop pop mentioned. But the 6200, 6600, and 6800 are all completely different chips, sporting a max of 4, 8, and 16 pipelines respectively. They're even all fabbed on a different process, with the 6200 and 6600 being the first 110nm chips from NVidia. The 6800 uses the slightly older 130nm process (although the successor to the 6800 will undoubtedly use a smaller process).

In short, there's no way to get a 6600 up to 16 pipelines because they simply aren't there to "enable".