Chinese hack mining GPU and turn it into gaming GPU!

[Dev Dichromate]

On 1/16/2019 at 7:17 PM, WildCat444 said:

 

Roughly speaking PCIe 3.0 x4 == PCIe 2.0 x8 == PCIe 1.0 x16 so the performance loss should not be that significant (as long as it's running in 1.x  x16) and equivalent to using a thunderbolt 3 dock on a laptop. If you want to see the performance difference yourself you can put tape over the appropriate number of pins on the expansion card and the system should detect the card with that bandwidth. The card pictured below is only running in x4 mode in the first one because there are not enough PCIe lanes.

Thanks man.
So it also proves that using igpu to communicate with the graphics card doesn't reduce any/much performance

[Sci666]

Hello there !

 

i wanted to experiment a bit by myself, so i bought a Colorful P106-100 6GB for about 60 Euro's here in Germany.

 

i just wanted in the second step to solder on a display output. but first manage to install the card "normally"

 

First of all, i have a question, what is this "hacking" about for the taobao model ????  is this the driver hack or something with the hardware ?

 

So. the first thing i made is a backup of the original mining bios. with an USB eeprom programmer CH341A with this clip you can direktly put to the Bios chip on the PCB.

 

than i wrote a normal consumer Card Bios for the same model on it from https://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/190384/190384

 

seems to be working, Windows 10 says after booting "Basic Graphic adapter."   with original Bios "unknown device"

 

(First Graphiccard is a Geforce GT330 in my test rig (no iGPU ! its a Socket 775 System )

 

next step was to install nvidia drivers, but the actual version for GTX 1060 doesnt find a compatible graphic card

Manual forced installation of 1060 driver works but then i have the yellow sign on it that the device is stopped.

 

does anybody have an idea ?

 

 

[ndroftheline]

try linux! i'm on day one of having "it just works" kind of success with a p106 on pop_os 20.04? i just bought a P106-090 from taobao for like $30 and threw it in an old-ish H97I-PLUS with an i7-4770, plugged in an 1080p monitor i had laying around, and installed...included nvidia drivers, defaulted to using the p106 to render desktop and all games...and while i'm not getting amazing benchmarks, Unigine Heaven hits about 1100 on the extreme preset...and it plays everything i've tried so far flawlessly...so if you have one of these and want to try gaming with less tinkering, try Linux. Pop_OS specifically because i think they have some special sauce around the "hybrid" graphics approach these mining cards require to game on. keen to know others' experiences doing this...