Turing 'non-A' vBIOS tweaking: am I wasting my time?

Hi Win-Raiders!

Going to forgo the usual rhetoric here… another owner of an original Turing 1E04 card, watercooled and ready to hit some numbers but held back by the restrictive vBIOS. I get a bit OTT if I think something can be done regardless of the situation and have had @SoniX HxD program open comparing the raw data between my 1E04 vBIOS with 310w power limit, and the closest vBIOS I could find to my card but for the 1E07 models with 370w power limit

I gave myself several hours to see how much I could get through, making notes of the table entries where the data is different. Managed to get through ‘F’ & ‘E’ tables (working in reverse) and so far only ~5% is different which means… FA… so before proceeding am I wasting my time? My head, with it’s greatest of intentions, is telling me that I will magically spot the power limit entries in 1E04’s vBIOS and unlock the extra headroom, or that I will find 1E07’s board config data and swap it out for 1E04’s and yield a clean flash with no mismatch

Would like to hear your thoughts as I could smash through the rest if it’s worth it, but at potentially 8 days work I’d rather not if it’s all in vein

You need flash programmer, dump then edit, other than that @ket may be able to help you locate power limits if you upload your dumped vBIOS for him
Mobile Pascal TDP tweaker may be able to change it for you, then you can compare before/after to find locations of changes. Try 1.20 and 1.21

Never tried it on a "non A" Version of a turing card, but the "A" Version refuses to post with a modified bios.

Thanks @Lost_N_BIOS , still keeping the forum alive as per usual? I had a CLEVO W370SS which you kindly helped me out with… I hadn’t considered extracting sections of the Turing BIOS and adapting it so I can tweak it in Maxwell/Pascal editor, great idea and I hope @ket can reply and impart a bit of wisdom

@oldirdey what did you try with your 1E07 Turing card exactly? I don’t mind giving it a try, even if it doesn’t post

@2814-2815 - You;re welcome, sorry I can’t help a whole lot here, if you had AMD then maybe I could be of more help Yes, I try to keep up, but always buried
I didn’t mean extract “Sections” of the vBIOS, I meant directly open it all, make the changes you want (one at a time) and save, then compare in hex so you can find the exact locations for the changes you want and make them manually (in case program messes something else up)

@lost_n_bios ahhh what a great idea! I wonder if there’re ways of comparing the raw data tables pre/post version changes… probably asking too much… no apology needed, it’s still help for me all the same :slight_smile: input appreciated as always

If you do think (or see) of anything extra that would be of service, don’t hesitate to report back

Nvidia encrypt the firmware and have done so since Pascal. This means any manual editing will always fail even if you fix the checksum because it breaks the encryption. The best nvidia card owners can do these days is perform a shunt mod or use a flash utility that bypasses the security checks to flash another stock image with higher power limits. For example, if you have a “baseline” model from a manufacturer that also happens to sell the same card with higher clocks you’ll be able to flash to the card that uses the higher clcoks, and as a result, has higher wattage allowances. In some cases you might even be able to use another manufacturers image entirely as long as the PCB designs are similar.



changed the powerlimit to show another guy that it´s impossible to edit nvidia desktop bios since pascal cards.

edit: afair this screenshot was taken from an 2080ti, you can see the power limit written as 6 digit number. if you use nvida-smi you can read the actual limits of your card and then start searching in the binary file.

Thanks @ket - I was not sure when that happened, or what cards come after what series etc.
Nvidia is such boneheads! Go AMD @2814-2815 then you wont have this issue and can mod vBIOS all you want

@Lost_N_BIOS AMD are doing pretty shitty things as well to abide (so they say) by MS standards for Windows. Its not coincidence that there hasn’t really been any AMD modding tools either since Vega. Polaris might well be the last card ever thats truly moddable.

@ket - But, it always takes a little bit before tools, right? So no 5xxx modding as of now, even manually?