X-Bit Labs legt in dit bericht uit hoe je je GeForce3 kaart kunt opwaarderen naar een professionele nVidia Quadro DCC, die pas in augustus leverbaar wordt. De Quadro DCC is gebaseerd op de GeForce3 en blijkt qua hardware ook nauwelijks te verschillen. De enige handeling die nodig is om je GF3 aan te passen is het verplaatsen van resistor R216 en R218. Vervolgens zal de kaart herkend worden als een 'Quadro DCC' en wordt het mogelijk om de speciale MAXtreme drivers te gebruiken die zwaar geoptimaliseerd zijn voor professionele toepassingen. Hieronder een klein gedeelte uit het bericht:
In other words, NVIDIA decided, simply and unpretentiously, to resort to the same approach as in case of professional graphics cards based on Quadro, Quadro2 Pro and Quadro2 MXR/EX. Some time ago smart Chinese engineer, aka tnaw_xtennis, found those resistors responsible for ChipID on those cards and managed to make Quadro, Quadro2 Pro and Quadro2 MXR/EX based cards by some simple resoldering of the regular GeForce256, GeForce2 Pro and GeForce2 MX based graphics cards. It seems quite logical that the same thing should work for GeForce3 and Quadro DCC as well.
With a graphics card from VisionTek at our disposal we compared the location of the elements on this card with those on ELSA GLoria DCC, we decided to make an experiment and to introduce a few changes to our VisionTek GeForce3 card.
The changes implied the following manipulations:
- The resistor on the card marked as R216 was moved to a position market as R217;
- The resistor located on the card and marked as R218 was moved to a position marker as R219.
[...] All in all, the described modification made Detonator 12.60 driver see the "resoldered" GeForce3 as a Quadro DCC. Of course, we do not guarantee that the card we got in the end is a real Quadro DCC, but the fact is undeniable: there are only two resistors responsible for proper identification of GeForce3 and Quadro DCC.