Making a Titan out of a Tesla k20x

[124436717]

One question for the ones to already have the card working... i made some furmark tests at 1080p, and i got a score of 3597 (a 12% less performance compared to a real Titan ). I guess it could happend because of some PCIe bandwidh bottleneck (GPU-Z say it`s working at 3x16, but i don`t really trust to this info,because the Tesla have PCIe 2.0,and it would be magical to increase it just with a diferent firmware  ) and another bottelneck because of the video pass throuw the IGPU to the MOBO connectors. Any one with another results or ideas?

[akrestix]

Installing Quadro Studio Drivers 472.84 allowed me to enable WDDM on this card via nvidia-smi (-fdm 0 and --gom=0), and thus enabled DirectX and OpenGL to run on this card without hardware mods (yay)

I could not overclock it, until VBIOS has been modded to higher clocks.
Surprisingly, after booting, card defaults to factory clocks, but now OC is possible up to whatever clocks are stored in VBIOS via MSI Afterburner.

Here is my Furmark score @ 1080p, but the card is installed in PCI-E x4 2.0 slot, @ 953 MHz core, 3GHz mem.
HWINFO reports max 30% bus load, so I guess PCI-E bandwidth is not an issue in this case?
Also I had to use NVCleanstall to add support in the driver for GTX 970, since it is also installed in the system.

 

Now I am wondering if hardware modding this puppy to titan will improve performance, or should I leave it as is.

 

Edit: nvm modded it

 

Flashed stock Titan firmware using CH341a, and changed resistors.

 

GPU Boost is now enabled, and the card scores the same (3200) with stock Titan clocks, and 3330 with @ 977 core.
Should have done some other benchmark, I think Furmark takes GPU temp into score calculation? But at least both runs (modded and unmodded) ended @ 68*C.

 

 

I guess Titan firmware has more aggresive voltage regulation, since on K20X VBIOS, GPU core was stable at 953 MHz max. (Tested using OCCT & MSI Kombustor). But now the card runs at 977MHz and boosts beyond 1GHz if temp is low enough, so that's nice.

 

GPU-Z still reports PCI-E 2.0 x16 as max supported, Vulkan runs just fine, but checkbox is unticked, and now it shows real GPU clocks.

 

Was it worth it, considering the risk of breaking the card? Probably not, but I had fun and now also I have a bit faster GPU.

[Rahul Vivek]

Can you show me which resistors you changed so i could do it too?

[adelage]

Hi guys,

first of all thanks for this post, after watching the video from Level1Tech I got a couple of Tesla k20x for a ridiculous price, and after tinkering with the cooling system I was not happy with the frequencies, so I decided to go for the titan mod, and now I want to share my experience:

 after replacing the 35k resistor with a 25k one and removing the 45k I got id 1031, and no driver was working, so I decided to put back the 45k resistor, but since it got lost in the process, I put a 56k instead, and to my great surprise I got id 1005, and the driver for the gtx titan magically worked!

I have done some tests on a pc with an i5 4690 and the gpu is boosting to 1032mhz, and I got 4000 with furmark (1080p preset) and ~3000 with unigine valley (everything maxed out with 1680x1050 res), which are in line with a gtx titan.

I will post some pictures as soon as I can.

[Kerbe]

Hi,

Has anyone tried to solder a resistor other than 25kΩ (for example 20kΩ or 24kΩ) and is there a risk of damaging the card if I try to do it? I tried to change these resistors into different combinations (25k without 45k, 25k with 45k, 25k with 56k) but I only got id1021 and id1031, I thought I was soldering something wrong, so I tried to re-solder and then lost the 25kΩ resistor.

[ABIT-Wolf]

I was able to overclock the K20Xm without any mods by only using these commands.

 

nvidia-smi -fdm 0

nvidia-smi --gom=0

nvidia-smi --compute-mode=1 tested but not in use

nvidia-smi -ac 2600,784  small OC to the core

nvidia-smi -q -d SUPPORTED_CLOCKS   used only to see what clocks can be used

 

For final results I used a older version of MSI Afterburner to OC the memory.

No mods to this card bone stock. Installed in a BTC T37 mining MB so low PCIE x1 2.0

 

 

[Jelly4563]

On 3/31/2022 at 11:54 PM, Rahul Vivek said:

Can you show me which resistors you changed so i could do it too?

Hello, sorry for reviving an old thread but I found a video of someone who managed to modify a tesla k20 to a gtx titan and maybe can help you

Link: