fdisk Geek Part I: Hacking the graphic card

QUICK GLIMPSE:

I got caught up with the whole rigging and over-clocking wave and have been a devoted Geek hermit for 4 days straight. This is my toy. It may look ugly on the outside right now, but it is a beauty inside. It has been a great experience neglecting every other part of my life and focus on understanding the technology as well as holding my breath and wrapping my Duvet blanket all around me in fear of flying exploding computer components. So without further ado, this is how I got my junk $87 graphic card to perform like a high-end $400 card.
BENCHMARK OF ORIGINAL SETUP:

The Vanilla setup of the system is as follows.

Pentium D915 dual core @ 2.8Ghz

2xCorsair PC5300 512MB RAM @ 266Mhz

Sapphire ATI Radeon X800GTO @ 390Mhz GPU and 351Mhz RAM

Measured memory bandwidth @ 4887MB/S

Measured CPU execution @ 12596 MIPS

3dMark2006 @ 1007

THE DIRTY DETAILS:

To my wonderful surprise, I found out that the $87 Sapphire Radeon X800 GTO VIVO 256MB PCI-E graphic card actually has a GPU that is designed for greater purpose. A quick check with ATI TOOL confirmed that the manufacturer used a R480 core that was intended for a ATI X850 XT Platinum Edition. All they did was put in some restriction in place so that this card doesn’t steal the market share of their high end graphic cards.

This card has 4 graphical pipelines that are diverted to do Video Input and Video Output to TV and are thus disabled from any 3d rendering for gaming. Since I can’t find a previous instance of hacked BIOS in the list provided, I push forward armed with the knowledge of the GPU’s BIOS, I proceeded with hacking the firmware using a free Hexeditor and a modified flashrom utility. After that is done, it is only a matter of fooling the OS into believing that the graphic card is an ATI X850XT PE so it’ll use the correct driver that takes advantage of the 16 pipelines. I used RAbit for this purpose and flashed the GPU firmware again.

The theoretical value of increasing graphical pipeline from 12 to 16 should be a 33% increase in performance ( (4/12)*100% ), instead I got a new performance rating of 1635 in 3dMark2006. A 62.36% increase in performance ( (628/1007)*100% ), not bad at all. The extra 30% is most likely from having the pipeline at a multiple of 8 instead of an uneven 12 which forces the processing to take one extra cycle to complete.

THE CONCLUSION:

The performance of a near $600 high end graphic board at the price of $87.19 is definitely the biggest steal and performance booster for this setup. I got lucky this time and purchased just the right card at the right price, but most importantly of all. I didn’t have to do any soldering at all. Comparing the result with Tom’s Hardware VGA charts confirmed the same 62% performance jump between the two video cards. However, I don’t understand why my score is around 1600 whereas theirs resulted in a mere 768. Anyways, mission accomplished on the graphic card.
All the files used are zipped and stored here (14MB) if you are interested in trying out yourself.

Next up: Access my hard drive from anywhere in the world