GF6600GT on MDD

[techfury]

Hey folks, been a long time Mac user and lurker. Recently, I've been looking into upgrading the GPU on my MDD02 1.25 DP for Core Image and better gaming performance. I picked up a very cheap XFX 6600GT recently, and I'd like to try to get this working on my MDD. I checked the info on themacelite, and while it seems nobody has a 6600GT ROM, they have made 6600s work. I noticed someone around this forum (I forget who) also has a working 6600GT, so this does give myself some hope.

The card I picked up is a XFX PV-T43A-NDF7, "GF 6600GT DDR3 DUAL DVI TV", with a Nvidia reference PCB, part number 180-10218-0000-A02B.

Removing the heatsink reveals a SST-brand 512 kilobit flash ROM in SOIC-8 package at U1. I believe that for a 6600, I would need to replace this with a 1 megabit part, due to the fact the smaller ROM maker is lost, correct? (This is well within my abilities...)

Slight complication, however: I do not actually have an AGP-equipped PC on hand to dump/flash the card with. I do, however, have a suitable device programmer for doing it out of circuit.

Am I correct in assuming that this is the correct procedure to start off with?

1. Dump original ROM
2. Use the ROM Maker to transplant the softstraps, clock tables, etc. from the original PC ROM
3. Program new chip with the results of step 2
4. Tape off or cut traces to pins 3 and 11
5. Install in MDD
6. ????
7. Profit! (hopefully)

Not sure if I'm missing anything here or if it's really that simple...

 

[techfury]

Update: ROM has been desoldered and dumped. I fed the output into the old Arti 6600 maker and received a file that appears to have these attributes:

- 68.5 kb in size (time to buy some chips!)
- PCI ID is properly copied from the old nvidia ROM, which has 0x00f1, compare to 0x00f0 for a non-GT 6600 in themacelite example
- ditto for softstraps
- I'm not entirely sure if the performance table copied "correctly", but I may be looking wrong. Confusingly, the generated ROM has *two* BIT markers and two sets of values... (edit: seems that this is actually a result of FCode that looks for a BIT marker causing a second search hit)
- boot settings copied OK
- timings table copied OK

I should have some new SST25VF010As at my door in a few days to try this out... is there anything else I'm missing for 6600GT flashing?

 

[reddrag0n]

sounds like you have a fun time ahead of you, but didn't the 6600 and LE versions only came out for the G5 pci-e ?