How to make Link speed 2.5GT/s to 5.0GT/s on ATI card and Nvidia card

fouel · Feb 22, 2013

Many people want to know how to make flashed ati card run 5.0GT/s.
Just want to let you guys know that it is little different from 2.5GT/s to 5.0GT/s.
Example for 4870 card:

1.Find resistor located at "MR 153".

2.Move it to "R153".

3.Done.

So you will find that it does not matter with rom.

What about other ati cards ?
Ans: same concept but not same location of resistor.

============================================================================
How to make 6870 card run 5.0GT/s

1.Find resistor located at "R3" (near crossfire connector).

2.Add a tiny 10K Ohm resistor at "R3"

3.Done.

DanielCoffey · Feb 23, 2013

And how on earth is the typical user supposed to do something like this? Micro-resistors are not exactly easy to desolder without specialist tools.

How did you research and perform this mod?

Maxpecas · Feb 23, 2013

Hello,

And What about the performances ?

Is the card is really faster after this mod ?
Thanx

PowerPCMacMan · Feb 23, 2013

I had a similar situation with my 2008 Mac Pro when I owned one. I bought a flashed PC 8800 nvidia card and compared the difference between 2.5 and 5.0 - I did not even see a difference at all to my naked eye.

My guess is that it would be comparing 1066 to 1333 mhz memory - the speed difference is not noticeable to the naked eye.

Maxpecas said:
Hello,

And What about the performances ?

Is the card is really faster after this mod ?
Thanx

GermanyChris · Feb 23, 2013

DanielCoffey said:
And how on earth is the typical user supposed to do something like this? Micro-resistors are not exactly easy to desolder without specialist tools.

How did you research and perform this mod?

So I take it you won't be doing it then.

Good call on chastising a guy/gal who did a bunch of research ad posted it for free use.

MacVidCards · Feb 23, 2013

foeul did the research by buying up our cards under different names. Very easy to do research when someone else already did the work.

Any Mod here can verify by looking in my PM inbox. You have my permission. Feel free to post his lovely words for everyone.

Some charming pm's from this guy. (aka "Macgrafixfan" or something like that)

nekton1 · Mar 22, 2013

Is there a similar chip resistor move for the HD 6870? Mine is flashed to the mac efi rom (thanks to netkas and rominator) but I'd like to get 5 GT/s too!

fouel · Mar 22, 2013

nekton1 said:
Is there a similar chip resistor move for the HD 6870? Mine is flashed to the mac efi rom (thanks to netkas and rominator) but I'd like to get 5 Gb/s too!

Same concept but not same resistor.
Maybe MacVidCards (rominator) would like to tell you the detail.

----------

Maxpecas said:
Hello,

And What about the performances ?

Is the card is really faster after this mod ?
Thanx

The performance is almost same.

Tesselator · Mar 23, 2013

PowerPCMacMan said:
I had a similar situation with my 2008 Mac Pro when I owned one. I bought a flashed PC 8800 nvidia card and compared the difference between 2.5 and 5.0 - I did not even see a difference at all to my naked eye.

My guess is that it would be comparing 1066 to 1333 mhz memory - the speed difference is not noticeable to the naked eye.

Yup! Or akin to SATAII vs. SATAIII. 95% of the card's tasks don't require and probably can't, move at such high speeds. But in the few instances when it can/does then there's a speed-bump.

--
I wonder with the deal is with this Rominator/MacVideoCards/fouel/Macgrafixfan thing? Sounds like a deep and intriguing conspiracy. Muaaaahahahahaaa....

nekton1 · Mar 23, 2013

So Rominator,

Can you divulge the trade secret about which chip resistor(s) to move on the reference HD 6870 cards to support PCIe 2.0?

It's OK if you can't. I can live with PCI 1.0.

And thanks for all your other work with so many cards over the years.

PowerPCMacMan · Mar 23, 2013

Who knows? and really who cares? If it doesn't involve me I don't bother with it. But in all my uses of a 2.5 or 5.0 speed on my Mac Pro video cards I don't ever see a difference in performance. Even when I encode video I don't see any difference at all..

I think the SATA II and III sum it up.. No way the bus would be saturated by a regular 7200 SATA HDD, but maybe a few SSD's possibly. I have to climb on board the SSD bandwagon myself, but I can't seem to find a 1TB for under 1000.00 anywhere.

Tesselator said:
Yup! Or akin to SATAII vs. SATAIII. 95% of the card's tasks don't require and probably can't, move at such high speeds. But in the few instances when it can/does then there's a speed-bump.

--
I wonder with the deal is with this Rominator/MacVideoCards/fouel/Macgrafixfan thing? Sounds like a deep and intriguing conspiracy. Muaaaahahahahaaa....

Tesselator · Mar 23, 2013

MB/s = Megabytes per second
Mb/s = Megabits per second
GT/s = Giga-transfers per second in 8/10 (meaning for every 10 bits sent you only get 8)

PowerPCMacMan said:
Who knows? and really who cares? If it doesn't involve me I don't bother with it.

Doood, where's your spirit for the drama and conspiracy?

But in all my uses of a 2.5 or 5.0 speed on my Mac Pro video cards I don't ever see a difference in performance. Even when I encode video I don't see any difference at all..

Yeah, wiki has this to say:

720p HDTV uncompressed
8 bit @ 1280 x 720 @ 59.94fps = 105 MB per/sec,
10 bit @ 1280 x 720 @ 59.94fps = 140 MB per/sec,

1080i and 1080p HDTV uncompressed
8 bit @ 1920 x 1080 @ 24fps = 95 MB per/sec,
10 bit @ 1920 x 1080 @ 24fps = 127 MB per/sec,
8 bit @ 1920 x 1080 @ 25fps = 99 MB per/sec,
10 bit @ 1920 x 1080 @ 25fps = 132 MB per/sec,
8 bit @ 1920 x 1080 @ 29.97fps = 119 MB per/sec,
10 bit @ 1920 x 1080 @ 29.97fps = 158 MB per/sec,

1080i and 1080p HDTV RGB (4:4:4) uncompressed
10 bit @ 1280 x 720p @ 60fps = 211 MB per/sec,
10 bit @ 1920 x 1080 @ 24fps = 190 MB per/sec,
10 bit @ 1920 x 1080 @ 50i = 198 MB per/sec,
10 bit @ 1920 x 1080 @ 60i = 237 MB per/sec,

And of course 1080p/25 with 7-1 Surround in MPeg-4 is typically only around 2MB/s max.

So when we start editing uncompressed or layered uncompressed then the speed difference will show up but with MP4 we could potentially do about 100 layers before we needed to concern ourselves with the link speed as a bottleneck.

And what Wiki shows there is about what I experience in the real world as well. I can write about one 8 or 10 bit stream of 1080p/24 or 30 before it starts to choke. And of course the memory bandwidth in the 1,1 and 1,2 is just about the same anyway. If I were editing uncompressed in layers or just doing it a lot I would want the high link speed. Otherwise, eh...

I think the SATA II and III sum it up.. No way the bus would be saturated by a regular 7200 SATA HDD, but maybe a few SSD's possibly. I have to climb on board the SSD bandwagon myself, but I can't seem to find a 1TB for under 1000.00 anywhere.

Hehehe, at $10 per gig we could RAID0 one hundred 1GB thumb-drives.

nekton1 · Mar 23, 2013

Thanks for reminder on GT/s—I corrected the original post. Force of habit because I work a lot in optical telecoms where Gb/s in the norm (and GT/s is such an unusual unit)!

I am still hoping MacVidCards might spill the beans on the HD6870, but maybe trade secrets will prevent him.

Looking at the MacVidcards site, it likes to emphasize 5 GT/s advantages, but that is marketing for you. Had I known about them before, I could have gone that route but being outside the US, shipping and customs/import duties add costs I'd rather put into the card instead of government.

tjlazer · Mar 24, 2013

Thank you for detailing this! Glad someone spilled the beans so we don't have to spend $280 on a ATI 4870 on rip off bay. Now I can get my card to 5.0. I can easily move a resistor with a soldering iron. If you can't too bad. Send it to MacVidcards for $100.

fouel · Mar 25, 2013

6870 card run 5.0GT/s

nekton1 said:
Thanks for reminder on GT/s—I corrected the original post. Force of habit because I work a lot in optical telecoms where Gb/s in the norm (and GT/s is such an unusual unit)!

I am still hoping Rominator might spill the beans on the HD6870, but maybe trade secrets will prevent him....

It seems that Macvidcard (Rominator) won't tell us the 6870 card secret of 5.0GT/s.
Don't waste time to wait for him.

I added how to make 6870 run 5.0GT/s on the thread.

Tesselator · Mar 25, 2013

Well, you didn't need to slap him with a large trout or anything but thank you for adding that yourself.

MacVidCards · Mar 25, 2013

Tesselator said:
Well, you didn't need to slap him with a large trout or anything but thank you for adding that yourself.

So easy to dress up like Santa and hand out Christmas Candy when you didn't have to do the work making the candy.

Such a generous guy !!!

GermanyChris · Mar 25, 2013

on a more pragmatic note, those willing to solder resisters on their cards are unlikely to buy from MVC..no matter right or wrongness.

Tesselator · Mar 25, 2013

MacVidCards said:
So easy to dress up like Santa and hand out Christmas Candy when you didn't have to do the work making the candy.

Such a generous guy !!!

Hehe... I know the feeling. But I wouldn't begrudge him... That's pretty much how information works these days. And there's no way to cap it that know of... So ya just gotta hope the market you're dealing with is big enough that the do-it-yourselfers don't constitute too big a bite.

In this case I think they totally don't as I doubt more then one or two people will ever touch a soldering iron to their cards for almost a meaningless "upgrade" - though I could be wrong.

nekton1 · Mar 27, 2013

Can a similar chip resistor modification be used on the GTX680 to achieve 5 GT/s PCI bus speeds?

Inconsequential · Mar 28, 2013

MacVidCards said:
So easy to dress up like Santa and hand out Christmas Candy when you didn't have to do the work making the candy.

Such a generous guy !!!

I can understand why you contain this kind of information to maintain your business but at no point would I ever buy a modified card off you or your competitors.

Hence if you ever get 5 GT/s on 7xxx series cards, I would very much like to know how to do that (privately obviously).

I'll be doing the 5 GT/s mod for my 6870 shortly!!

nekton1 · Mar 28, 2013

The weird thing is MacVidcards makes a huge free contribution to the GPU mac rom scene (thanks) but the company likes to keep the resistor mods secret. I would have guessed (wrongly I suppose) that the rom efi work is much harder than discovering the resistor mods. Perhaps the rom stuff has to be public because netkas is working on it too and he releases publicly, whereas only MacVidCards works on the resistor mods so they keep them proprietary?
I like to do hardware hacks on my own machines but using MacVidCard's work when they are clearly annoyed about it having been disclosed makes me feel very uncomfortable, but even so I have still modded my 4870 and 6870 cards and would mod my GTX680 too if I knew what resistor to move.
If there was some way to make a reasonable payment via Paypal to MacVidcards for this chip mod information so people with the cards, chip resistors, motivation and soldering technique could mod their own cards, I would feel much happier.
Is there any way we could do this?

MacVidCards · Mar 28, 2013

Please let this thread fade away

let it go please

Tesselator · Mar 28, 2013

fouel said:
I added how to make 6870 run 5.0GT/s on the thread.

Concorde Rules said:
I'll be doing the 5 GT/s mod for my 6870 shortly!!

nekton1 said:
I have modded my 4870 and 6870 cards and would mod my GTX680 too if I knew what resistor to move.

So, you guys who made this mod: Any noticeable speed increase? If so what was increased, what apps etc.?

Thanks.

fouel · Mar 28, 2013

nekton1 said:
The weird thing is Rominator makes a huge free contribution to the GPU mac rom scene (thanks Rominator) but the company he is associated with likes to keep the resistor mods secret. I would have guessed (wrongly I suppose) that the rom efi work is much harder than discovering the resistor mods. Perhaps the rom stuff has to be public because netkas is working on it too and he releases publicly, whereas only MacVidCards works on the resistor mods so they keep them proprietary?
I like to do hardware hacks on my own machines but using Rominator's work when he is clearly annoyed about it having been disclosed makes me feel very uncomfortable, but even so I have still modded my 4870 and 6870 cards and would mod my GTX680 too if I knew what resistor to move.
If there was some way to make a reasonable payment via Paypal to MacVidcards or Rominator for this chip mod information so people with the cards, chip resistors, motivation and soldering technique could mod their own cards, I would feel much happier.
Is there any way we could do this Rominator?

Running with 5.0GT/s on ATI(AMD) cards, it needs to move resistor.
On nvidia card, it needs to modify softstraps.(Where to modify softsraps)
softstraps located in 0h0058~0h0077
example for 9500GT:
The first picture is the softstraps of PC card.

If put the card in Mac OS X 10.7 or later, it will show up 2.5GT/s.

The second picture is the softstraps modified for Mac.
It shows up 5.0GT/s if you modify "1E" to "FA".

Same concept for every nvidia card but not same hex value.
If interested in the mod, please find the answer by yourself.
I just offer the hint to let you guys on the correct direction.
Don't always wait for answer from others.
By some reason, they could hide the answer for some purpose.

How to make Link speed 2.5GT/s to 5.0GT/s on ATI card and Nvidia card

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