Does anyone here own a 6800nu or plan on buying one? Well, just so you know, you can softmod those suckers to a full whopping 16 pipelines and 6 vertex shaders, just like the 6800GT/Ultra. Nice, eh?
Note that the basics of this tutorial can be used to softmod a 6800le as well as a 6800gs.
Infact, any AGP based NV40 card should softmod.
***DISCLAIMER***
Although there have been no reports of damage done to cards from the softmodding process, I AM NOT responsible for anything that goes wrong! Although, if the process is followed correctly, nothing should go wrong in the first place.
*WARNING-Rivatuner is an extremely powerful program. There are settings in there that can damage your card if you enable them and you don't know what you're doing. Please follow the directions here CAREFULLY!
Onwards!
1. Grab Rivatuner from
GURU3D.
2. Run that puppy once on your system. Browse around, get used to its features
*.
3. Download
3dmark05.
4. Now comes the actual softmodding process. Start up Rivatuner. Note that the program shows the card as 12,5-meaning that the card has 12 pipelines (3 quads) and 5 vertex shaders enabled.
5. Click on the customize button. A menu will pop up: here click on very first icon that says "low level system settings"
6. Now you will see a window called NVstrap driver. Check the box that says "Allow enabling hardware masked units" and click the box that says "customize".
7. Now you will see a screen that shows the quads and vertex shaders on your 6800-don't be intimidated! Note that a quad is a group of four pipelines, don't let that confuse you. You will see that there is one disabeled quad on your card and one disabled vertex shader on your card.
Simply check the box on both disabeled items.
8. Now hit apply and restart your computer. Start up Rivatuner and have a look:
16 pipelines (aka four quads) and 6 vertex shaders! A fully unlocked card.
9. Run 3dmark05 and any other games that you have. Look for artifacts. (Artifacts are small glitchy lines that appear in games. When you see them, it will be fairly obvious.) If you see artifacts, don't panic! Go to step 11.
10. If you don't see artifacts, congratulations on your successful softmod! Now go frag some!
11. Once again, don't panic! All you have to do is go back into Rivatuner and
uninstall the NVSTRAP driver. Sorry, but your card either has a damaged quad or vertex shader! Ah well, thats life, isn't it?
If you want to mess around a little more, you can individually enable either the vertex shader or the extra pipelines one at a time to see which is causing the artifacts, and then just enable the good one-and there you go! Instant performance boost.
If and when fully softmodded, a 6800 can do much better than stock. My 6800nu got its 3dmark03 score boosted about 1500 points with the softmod, and yielded 15 more fps in most games...that's about a 30% increase over stock settings!
If you have any questions, POST THEM HERE! I'm glad to help.
