okay come here come here okay so this is our mining GPU that we're using
for gaming in spite of its complete lack
of any video outputs but you've seen this before
and the last time we left you guys we weren't recommending these things even
though they're like 75 bucks for the equivalent of a gtx
1060 because the only drivers we had for
them were modified by some chinese
driver modification team and we had no way of knowing exactly what was inside
them but today all of that changes first
and foremost we are going to manually
modify NVIDIA's drivers ourselves making
this completely safe to use second while we're at it we're going to
kill NVIDIA's telemetry that they build into their drivers and third
we are going to run this in sli
with one of these which is like what
what running a real gaming GPU with a mining one in sli they're not even the
same part number oh and while we're at it the 1060 doesn't even support sli
but we're gonna do it you know what else we're gonna do tell
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okay so here's the situation right now we're not quite starting from scratch
but pretty close so we've already disabled driver signing and you can see
how to do that in our previous video here where we use the the modified
chinese driver but other than that we're looking at a pretty bone stock
configuration here so our p106 mining GPU is installed in our system but the
drivers for it are not loaded in any way we're in a in a completely blank state
and we're running entirely off of the onboard graphics that are built into our
CPU here so Anthony's back hi
uh before we go any further i want to lay out what our ideal scenario would be
here because in our last video we weren't just relying on a driver of
unknown origins it was also a little bit on the older side so in a perfect world
we would want our p106 mining card here to behave exactly like a gtx 1060
because hardware wise they're the same thing so that means gaming support
compute support and even end bank video encoding support and all of that while
being able to run the very latest drivers however we've run into some
challenges and we are going to have to make a few compromises here so
what do we got well first of all we won't be able to run on
the latest driver at least not right now the way it works right now it we're just
getting a code 43 error every time so
either NVIDIA has changed something or they've hatched it or whatever either
way we're stuck with 416.34 aside from that as far as i know it's not possible
to get mvx to work so so you're stuck with quick sync which
fortunately you're gonna have to have because you're running your onboard graphics anyway in order to even get a
display output from this thing or x264
so with that out of the way Anthony is going to start by downloading our own
fresh version of that 416 series driver and then taking the chinese one and the
NVIDIA one and comparing what the difference is between them so that we
can replicate the modifications that the chinese team has made that allows the
driver to be installed without copying over anything that could be
nefariously hidden inside it so i'm using notepad plus plus and the reason
for that is it's free it's pretty great actually it's got a huge number of
features including this compare feature which we can access via this plugins
section here we just type in compare and i've already installed it so it's in
here but yeah once you have that just go to you load up your first file go to
plugins compare set as first to compare i've already done that now i will load
up the other one which is this chinese driver
plugins compare compare so here we have a full listing of
everything that is different between these two drivers so as we can see these
lines here have been modified so where it used to say section 110 it now says
section 108 which is actually the same if you look at these device ids 1c06 is
actually the gtx 1060 one c07 is our p106 they have different sections in the
vanilla driver but in the chinese driver they do not that is the primary thing
we're going to be changing here okay now the final one of these sections here
you'll notice that it actually says that it's 109 instead of 110. it's dropped
down a number the same is true over here so we'll just follow here so it'll be
107 for each basically what we're doing is we're copying the same config from
our 1c06 which is our gtx 1060. so we
want section 107 for all of these things now what we're doing here is basically
just tricking the driver into thinking it's compatible we're not actually
changing any of the functional files of the driver installation is that
correct that's right and if we go down through the rest of the comparison here
there is nothing different really so then it's possible that our chinese
driver was totally clean yeah possible but i mean we don't know about the exes
the inf is perfectly fine we can make some additional changes while we're here
though telemetry isn't it convenient that they just listed under nv telemetry
yeah for those not familiar telemetry is
a feature of a software or driver that reports back on your usage to the
manufacturer and a lot of the time this is stuff that
you can opt out of but a lot of the time it's just baked right in so there you go
we passed our compatibility check yep let's go ahead and install it of course
we do not want GeForce experience also don't care about 3d vision because we
don't actually have anything that we can connect it to and hopefully we will get
the same exact thing we got the other day but we did it for ourselves on a
fresh driver hey there we go all right
so that's it if nothing else we now can
say confidently that if you pick up one of these mining cards and use this
method on this particular driver you will be
able to play games
yeah that monitor doesn't really have a shield on its
yeah the biggest criticism we had last time is that we didn't actually show the
Intel integrated and how poorly that performed oh really
yeah oh uh it would be worse than this
a lot worse yeah this is deus ex mankind divided running at 1080p
at greater than eight frames per second so
it's working now the thing is even though we're
having trouble moving on to the latest drivers which would give us support for
things like oh i mean i guess freesync doesn't matter because you'd be you
could actually have freesync running off of Intel's onboard graphics yeah oh you
could never mind depending on whether or not your onboard graphics supports freesync okay but still there are good
reasons to be running the latest drivers now we're not saying it's impossible
we're just saying that when we applied this same method to
the latest drivers even checking line by line
we weren't successful so it might just be down to people who are a little bit
better versed in their driver modification wizardry to figure out what
the additional things that NVIDIA has changed whether just
through the course of changing things to make them better or to specifically
block this in order to make that work
either way at the very least using a slightly older
driver we have a working gaming system
on the cheap but that's not where we stopped today for
our next trick we're gonna run this thing in sli now
we're still gonna have to deal with that same driver compatibility limitation
because one of the cards in our system is one of these p106 mining cards but
what it at least demonstrates is that
from a proof of concept standpoint this can work so you might think that this
process is as simple as throwing a real gtx 1060 into the system and then again
forcing our driver to install remember it's an unsigned driver now so you gotta
do that process manually but as we're about to discover
it did not it did not
oh hi mark whatever the point is there's no sli option in here whatsoever so
now what some kind of weird thing off the tech powerup form yeah what are we
doing so it's a program called different
sli auto it's currently in the downloads folder but you guys will have to
download and extract that for yourselves and we don't actually want to run the
program okay that would be too easy yes
it used to work but it doesn't anymore so
so you'll want to go to see Windows system 32 driver store and now we want
to sort it by date we want to copy the uh
nvldmkm it's the driver itself i might not see this here
yeah i couldn't find it earlier either okay so just in a sea of envy paste it
into the different sli auto folder now you want to open up a hex editor i
downloaded hxd it's free should be there on the desktop okay oh you got it you
want to search for this for the string of uh values seven five zero five zero f
b a oh i already had it there okay cool there it is so we want to change that so
you'll want to go to the beginning of that and type in yeah c74324000
the hard part's over okay so we want to go back to the folder you
got that driver from we want to take the folder name itself copy that and this is
probably also already auto populated but if you go back to the different sli auto
folder yep right click install.cmd go to edit see where it says the nb disk inf
that kind of stuff there you want to replace that in every
every every instance so you can use the replace function in notepad for that
yeah all right so then we want to restart into safe mode
oh lordy okay so networking yeah sure
all right next you're going to want to go into that folder again different sli
auto and run install.cmd as administrator i guess it's the same
thing in safe mode anyway you know what let's just do it okay boom reboot now
for changes to take effect yep so what have we done here sign the driver really
supposedly it doesn't actually work oh okay um that's something that we can do
though um something that requires a lot more busting around that
we don't really want to do right now it does that copies the modified driver that we
change the bits around in to the proper locations in Windows yep
and well that's really about it and then just to clarify for the viewers
out there changing those hex values have we done anything unsafe to our system
have we potentially compromised it not compromised no but who told us to change
those values well it's actually a guy on the tech powerup
forums okay by the name of um
pretentious yeah there we go that's the name yeah he's got a little script that
he runs that takes about an hour or two to find where exactly the string that we
found yeah is in each driver release and he just updates it on the forum it's
pretty great basically what it does yeah is it disables the check for sli as far
as motherboard compatibility and you know enter GPU compatibility so to be
clear you guys aren't going to be running an rtx 2080 ti and
a gtx 1030 and sli at least not
to any positive effect but over here in a case where we have two
gpus that we know are identical other than NVIDIA
deciding they're not our expectation is that we would
actually be able to achieve an improvement in performance
so here it is the sli option is there in the driver we're going to go ahead and
enable it and bippidy
oh keyboard light just went off as it turns out that sli mod will not work
with the p106 unfortunately whatever
maybe it's the fact that it doesn't have outputs maybe it's the fact that they have two different v BIOS's that are you
know for whatever reason right now it does not work if we could force the card
to take a different b bias that might work but i haven't been able to get that to work either i mean we can still run
gtx 1060 is an sli i guess that's still fun
all right so what we've done here is we've manually installed our driver again
moved our HDMI cable over to this GPU and we're going to go ahead and enable
our other device which got automatically disabled somewhere along the way it's
kind of like a precautionary measure hey
sli enabled on the gtx 1060.
where's my deus ex at now beaches i'm
actually not sure what the scaling would be like here
now the thing here is that there's nothing particularly amazing about
running graphics cards in a multi-GPU configuration without a bridge running
between them in fact AMD has been doing it this way for several generations now
NVIDIA though has stuck to their guns saying that the available bandwidth over
the pci express slots is not enough to handle the intercard communication and
has even gone as far as to upgrade the original sli link to the new envy link
standard that you'll see on their rtx cards with that said even though we won't be
able to speak to necessarily
you know micro stuttering and how this solution affects something like that we
can see if we could at least get an FPS improvement with this configuration and
we'll know pretty shortly here yeah the benchmark only takes 90 seconds
hey wow that's a pretty nice little improvement
there isn't it yeah so
once again our experimenting with NVIDIA
graphics cards video does come with some
caveats this isn't necessarily a configuration we'd recommend sli is in
most cases not as good an option as simply getting
a single higher powered graphics card so i don't even necessarily disagree with
NVIDIA disabling sli by default on their lower end cards it's just something that
was kind of fun to do and interesting to show you guys
just how simple it is for manufacturers
to lock down and or enable functionality
at least from a sort of hex editor perspective now the qc that would
actually go into ensuring that this would be an adequate solution for their
users that's a completely separate story and
maybe part of the reason that manufacturers won't allow functionality
that they otherwise could but uh
i'll let you guys be the judge of exactly why it is that this is locked
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