lol this reminds me of whatever that card was back in the 2000’s or so, where you could literally make a trace with a pencil to upgrade the version lower to the version higher.
Yeah, those were the days when cost control was simply to use the same PCB but with just the traces left out. There were also quite a few cards that used the exact same PCB, traces intact, that you could simple flash the next tier card’s BIOS and get significant performance bumps.
Did a few of those mods myself back in the day, those were fun times.
Yeah. Those Durons were a stupidly good deal at the time since you could overclock the snot out of them and get a CPU on par with a top of the stack one for absolute pennies.
Unless they caught fire. But that mostly usually didn’t hapen all that often sometimes.
I barely remember this anymore but the downgrade had certain things deactivated. Something like my card had four “pipelines” and the high-end one had eight, so a minor hardware modification could reactivate them. It was risky though, because often imperfections came out of the manufacturing process, and then they would just deactivate the problem areas and turn it into a lower-end version.
After a little while, someone put out drivers that could simulate the modification without physically touching the card. You’d read about softmod and hardmod for the lower-end radeon cards.
I used the softmod and 90% of the time it worked perfectly, but there was definitely an issue where some textures in certain games would have weird artifacting in a checkerboard pattern. If I disabled the softmod the artifacting wouldn’t happen.
lol this reminds me of whatever that card was back in the 2000’s or so, where you could literally make a trace with a pencil to upgrade the version lower to the version higher.
Yeah, those were the days when cost control was simply to use the same PCB but with just the traces left out. There were also quite a few cards that used the exact same PCB, traces intact, that you could simple flash the next tier card’s BIOS and get significant performance bumps.
Did a few of those mods myself back in the day, those were fun times.
Ok now how do I turn my 2070s into a 5090? 😅
Get 500 dollars then use AI to generate the other 3/4 of the money and buy a 5090.
Well of you ask Nvidia it’s now just the driver making frames for you.
Ya I’m sad to see and exit. Maybe in a year or two I’ll get that sapphire 7900 xtx or whatever it is.
Liquid nitrogen cooling
My 2070 is still treating me pretty well!
Mine too except for 3440x1440 with 144Hz possible. I hardly get that resolution and refresh rate on higher demanding games
3440?
Yeah my mistake
Yeah same, but I only have a 1440p monitor, and I can barely tell the difference after 90hz, anyhow.
This would be more like 2070 to 2080
I know it was a joke
I remember using the pencil trick on my old AMD Duron processor to unlock it. 🤣
There were several GPUs and CPUs where that was true
Yeah. Those Durons were a stupidly good deal at the time since you could overclock the snot out of them and get a CPU on par with a top of the stack one for absolute pennies.
Unless they caught fire. But that mostly usually didn’t hapen all that often sometimes.
I barely remember this anymore but the downgrade had certain things deactivated. Something like my card had four “pipelines” and the high-end one had eight, so a minor hardware modification could reactivate them. It was risky though, because often imperfections came out of the manufacturing process, and then they would just deactivate the problem areas and turn it into a lower-end version.
After a little while, someone put out drivers that could simulate the modification without physically touching the card. You’d read about softmod and hardmod for the lower-end radeon cards.
I used the softmod and 90% of the time it worked perfectly, but there was definitely an issue where some textures in certain games would have weird artifacting in a checkerboard pattern. If I disabled the softmod the artifacting wouldn’t happen.