risk of softmodding videocards

[longshot]

i had a Asus x800 pro that dies running at XT speeds after 3 days.

[saaya]

was it vmodded? what cooling? was it artifacting? how did you enable the extra pipes? how exactly did it die? what happened?

[blinky]

so many cards have died from other things, that its safe to say a couple are going to die right after modding, and it will seem like its because of modding, but its from other things.

[Geforce4ti4200]

i had a Asus x800 pro that dies running at XT speeds after 3 days.

sorry to hear but thanks for stepping forward. Like I said, there is a risk, some will die sooner or later, others may never die. When I upgrade my ti4200 and 9500np, my new card will NOT be modded, period. Heck I may even leave it at stock speeds except for benching, its gonna be waaaaaaaay fast enough as is

[bldegle2]

of two ATI 9800 pro's that came DOA, i have never had a card puke with a soft mod (re: bios upgrade), i have had some that didn't like the mod, so i just flashed them back to original and moved on.

i would have to agree that soft modding is about as safe as you can go, and i am laying money that most that choked and died had something other than just a soft mod done to them, like a cooling upgrade performed improperly, bad handling, and other related stuffs.

i am sure that somewhere out there, a softmod here and there may have gone south, but you make sound like an epidemic, if it was, many here would be relating the info in large numbers already.

baldy

[Shade00]

sorry to hear but thanks for stepping forward. Like I said, there is a risk, some will die sooner or later, others may never die. When I upgrade my ti4200 and 9500np, my new card will NOT be modded, period. Heck I may even leave it at stock speeds except for benching, its gonna be waaaaaaaay fast enough as is

Is that when you upgrade to a 9800?

This is hardly conclusive proof that flashing a new BIOS will kill your card.

[Henning-DK]

*Giant sneeze*

Sorry.. I'm just so allegic to bull sheit

I'll still buy a x800 Pro VIVO and mod it to XT PE and as long as I don't get a virus that infects my graphics card and writes a message all over the screen that says: and then OC's my card to 1 billion GHz on core and memory to fry it, and then I would still be happy, cause for a fraction of a second, I had the fastest card ever..!

As long as that doesn't happen, I'll just be happy with my elite graphics card that runs whatever games I throw at it.

[zakelwe]

Unwinder ( who wrote rivatuner ) apartently had a 6800nu that went bad after he soft modded it. He had corruption when at 16 pipes but when went back to 12 pipes it still had the corruption, so it can happen. You'd expect unwinder to have not done anything bad of course. However failures are probably very wide apart. To be honest with the X800 and 6800 people have not been running them long enough to know if there is deteriation over time, for instance electron migration in Northwoods would cause loss of overclock only after months.

My opinion though is that it's worth the small risk.
Regards

Andy

[DrJay]

Typical. Again Geforce stirs e up (that he most likely doesn't believe himself) with baseless claims. After that, in the ensuing uproar of people calling BS, Gf4 sits back and gets his jollies or some perverse satisfaction from his brief moment in the center of attention.
Okay, this may not be 100% acurate, but even the thought of being part of a GF4 psychology experiment makes me .

[kromosto]

yes softmodded x800pro may die bot is it because of the soft mod????? i dont think so

[Geforce4ti4200]

http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.p...61#post3148061

two guys lost their x800pros here. also Unwinder himself lost a 6800nu from the mod and so have others


slyfury lost his!

[Shade00]

http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.p...61#post3148061

two guys lost their x800pros here. also Unwinder himself lost a 6800nu from the mod and so have others


slyfury lost his!

Mmmmmkay.... let's see.

A 6800nu is NOT the same thing as an X800. In fact, it's a very different beast when it comes to modding. It's hardly proof of an X800 death epidemic.

Now, as for slyfury, on O/C Forums, look at what else he said in the thread he made when his card died:

i had the zalman with heatpipe and fan (POS). idle/49c load/80-90c
right before dying/111c i tried the pencil mod a while back ago but took it off the next day. before the tragic events took place my cpu and case idle temps were very weird. 36-cpu/48-case idle...and my cpu is oc'd to 2.5 gigz.

Nice temps, eh? Now, was it the mod that destroyed his card?

There's clearly no X800 plague.

[saaya]

lol , i say its a 99% chance that card died from the temps, say what you want, but a passive cooled x800xt oced and even vmodded! sorry, but that kid deserved to have his card die... 110C poor poor card...

and gf4, i dont know what unwinder did to that card, neither do you. maybe he flashed to a bios with higher mem clocks, this has damaged cards for a long time already. or he was running the card with the artifacts for too long wich also could have damaged the memory, just like you might get permanent artifacts if you run your card at too high mem clocks all the time.

or he played with some hidden settings and accidently activated or deactivated some part of the gpu wich then made the voltages in the gpu go up or down and damaged the gpu...

can somebody please ask unwinder?

[texuspete00]

I think the thing to do is conceed there is a small risk. But are't we forgetting something... no one said overclocking is without risk. Can a vmod kill a card.... sure. Anti-vmod threads would surely be frowned upon. This is actually pretty damn safe. You shouldnt have to look as hard as you do to find some instances of this. It's very easy to find links for dead hardware of ANY KIND. Maybe take up knitting instead.

[Creep-DK]

@ texuspete2k2, i couldn't agree more

[gafa]

AFAIK, that Unwinder story is false. he did have some trouble with artifacts when enabling the pipelines/vertex, and then backed up to 12/5 and still had the corruption, but after he found out that the card wasn't correctly inserted in the agp socket , then he plugged it right and never had any trouble since. so this situation can NOT account for "dead cards thread". greetz guys

edit: i didn't ask Unwinder, this situation is posted at one of the threads @ guru3d forums...i'm just lazy to dig it up. but am pretty sure of what i'm saying...and even if this was true, it wouldn't make sense anyway, in the poll there we have almost 200 votes of the softmod, 55% complete mod, and NONE have died or showed problems whatsoever!

edit2: ok i dug it up:

unlocked hardware masked vertex unit on my MSI NX6800 boosted vertex processing performance in 3Dmark2003/VertexShader by up to 20%, but seems to work extremely unstable causing system to hang pretty often. Furthermore, I have serious stability problems even after disabling it so probably it is possible that attempt to enable ‘bad’ unit may even cause permanent hardware damage. I’ve not found the reason of my instability yet, but I don’t exclude such a possibility.

Now some good news. First, I sorted out problems with stability on my home PC with MSI NX6800 (16x1,5vp engineering sample). The problems were not related to additional vertex unit unlocking, I've simply reinstalled the board and it seems like it was installed in AGP slot improperly. Now everything is rock stabe in both 16x1,6vp and 16x1,5vp modes.

[Crankster]

I really think this thread aught to be deleted, it scares our newer members for no reason whatsoever.
Or better yet, place a proof deadline for anyone willing to claim softmods kill.
Honestly, we don't need this.

[Kobalt]

gf4 is a ______ (fill it in with an obvious choice) and should not be believed under any circumstances. I love reading the quotes in peoples sigs...like in blinkys... 9800 pro overclocked > x800 or 6800...LOL

i think that says something about his intellegence.

sorry i couldnt resist

[`schr0et]

GF4 go buy a X800 Pro vivo mod it and then see if it dies and post your results.

Unless your willing to do that go back to the sidelines.

[ocmyface]

In another message board:

"Doc I opened the extra pipes on my x800pro and run it at stock pro speeds ..............it lasted 2 weeks........"

im glad that you know that someone somewhere posted on some forum that they did something to their card and it ...................... lasted two weeks............ im also glad that it was just one post out of the many you have found but all get magically deleted to preserve bandwidth (xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx)

i also saw some dude do some thing that someone said some guy saw he knew someone do but then something happened to him somewhere at sometime but then something came and removed all of the somethings so i dont really know if something happened to someone at sometime and some place, im just gonna assume it did.

EDIT: oh yeah, also, i had a barton die on me becuase i pumped 2.1 volts through it on a fubared motherboard, it died dude! OMG boycott AMD!!!!

EDIT:
-saaya

[=[PULSAR]=]

I have a x800pro vivo flashed to XT PE everysince they were released and mine is running completely fine running it at 1.55volts on air. Everything is running fine, no problems at all.

[spaceman]

GF4 go buy a X800 Pro vivo mod it and then see if it dies and post your results.

Unless your willing to do that go back to the sidelines.

Now there's a thought. There's nothing wrong with just reading and learning.

[STEvil]

lol ocmyface.. kinda reminds me of the writing style of Douglas Adams

[Geforce4ti4200]

http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.p...31#post3150131

heres another but with a 9500np to 9700pro mod. I know mines gonna die sooner or later but it cost me $80 so I dont care, I bought it to softmod otherwise id just keep the faster ti4200>9500np before mod but 9700>ti4200 after mod

[Shade00]

That's proof if I've ever seen it.