So cryptocurrency mining experience
Let's call it a downturn
No, let's be honest a huge crash in 2018
So there is no shortage of great deals to be had on graphics cards that were used for cryptocurrency mining on sites
like eBay
But one class of cards that there appears to be no use for other than to melt them down and salvage the gold and other
valuable elements is
crypto
Specific cards like this one from Gigabyte. This is a P 106
It's actually very similar to a GTX 1060
6-pin power dual fan cooler except for all one small problem
It doesn't have any display outputs and not only that but the drivers have been locked down by NVIDIA
So it can't be used for gaming because these were designed only for cryptocurrency mining
But could this card?
be used for gaming
well
Chinese site Taobao has a seller who says they can and is selling them with a modified
Firmware that they claim will work
67 US dollars that is under a third the price of a GTX 1066 gig. Will it work?
We'll be damned if I know but I'm sure gonna find out after this message from our sponsor Thermaltake
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So we're not gonna go through the whole process yet because we won't know anything that oh, by the way
Anthony is gonna be joining me for this video. Hi
He arranged the whole thing which was apparently like a big hassle getting this thing
Yeah, apparently the seller wouldn't actually ship to Canada
I don't know what the reason was not not sure if it's legal or whatever
But anyway, the long story short Dennis had to contact them directly and in order to get it shipped
They had to put it down as a computer mouse, but it's here and it seems to be exactly what we were expecting
It's as advertised
including all the dust and grime that's built up on it from presumably
months of cryptocurrency mining in a dirty warehouse somewhere
Anyway back to what I was saying before we're not ready to rock on that just yet because we won't know how it compares to
a regular GTX 1066
Unless we go ahead and run one. So this is a run-of-the-mill EVGA GeForce GTX 1060
Superclock, okay, it's not quite run-of-the-mill
So we're gonna run just a quick shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark so that we have a before to compare to our after now
We don't need to run a whole suite of benchmarks because we're not comparing cards across different
Architectures different brands or even different GPUs. These are both running the same graphics core on them
so
all we need to know is
Did they cripple it in some meaningful way or is it all just a software lock and we need to get our drivers installed for?
This puppy speaking of which both the cards should be six gigs
So we should be looking at the the full CUDA core account
So I've installed driver version for 16 dot 16, which is from October and I'll explain why I did that a little bit later on
But we're gonna go ahead and fire up shadow the Tomb Raider
We're running at 1920 by 1080 and at all high except I turned off motion blur
Because it's stupid. So here we have it
Average FPS 68. Okay, you can oh you can see the specs of our test bench here
So this is kind of a best-case scenario for the 1060. We've got a 9900 K in here and our minimums were oh, oh, yeah
56 okay, that makes more sense
So minimums of 56 that's very playable
here comes
the Chinese mining card
Yeah, isn't that a great question?
You guys probably couldn't hear that because Brandon?
Was like kind of mumbling come on over here Brandon
Come on, how are you going to plug it in if it doesn't have IO?
so we're not saying that this technique is gonna work for everyone because if
your motherboard
does not have
Graphics outputs and your CPU doesn't have an IGP you built into it
You will not be able to do this, but remember how we got free sync running off of an NVIDIA card
before
By passing the GPU power through the other card that interfaced with the display
Well with the modified driver the theory is we'll be able to do the same thing here not with free sync mind you but with the
performance of our graphics card being passed through the output of our onboard graphics
This is a technology that didn't really have any reason to exist on desktops on their own
but it's kind of a carryover from laptops that have
Onboard graphics that they run when they're trying to save power and then high-performance graphics that they switch to in games
So but because the feature exists well we can take advantage of it here
So we're gonna go ahead and install our 416.16 drivers at least we're going to try
Is this supposed to work? I didn't install that driver. There's a different driver that we need to install
But if this works, then did it work if this works, then
I'm a little confused. I mean this driver is theoretically already installed on the system. No, okay, so we do have a problem
Showing up as p106 100 in device manager instead of GTX 1060. Well, let's go ahead and let's let's try
But this is not supposed to work. So I may have jumped the gun here. Yeah, like yeah, it's showing up as a p106 but
The driver fully installed okay NVIDIA control panel is there but it's in display settings that I would switch to it, correct?
Right under
GPU, or graphics, graphics settings down at the bottom there. Graphics settings, there we go.
Okay, so let's browse for an app. Options, here we go. High performance, save. Okay. Oh,
so it doesn't pick up a P106 as a high performance GPU option. Well, what happens if we pop open the
NVIDIA control panel here? You are not currently using a display attached to an NVIDIA GPU.
All right, Anthony, come on in here. What do we need to do? Okay. And talk to the camera. So,
okay. I'll move here. Okay. Let's just, yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. What do I need to do?
There's this little folder on the desktop that you missed, which is fine because it's like in
this honeycomb pattern, which is great. It's called mining. Okay. And in there is the actual
driver we need.
It is modified. But if you try to install that right now. Yeah. Chances are it will error out.
Okay. So we need to disable secure boot. Okay. So that we have to restart for. Okay. Now,
the benefit of secure boot is theoretically that it prevents malware from attacking your
pre-boot environment. Is that about right? Yeah, but there's been an exploit on that. So,
so this is the boot options menu in the advanced on the BIOS. It's going to change depending on
what motherboard or computer you have. Yeah. But long story short, we're going to go into key
management. Yeah. Then we're going to go to clear secure boot keys and it'll be like, do you really
want to delete them? Yeah, we do. So now if we go out, it's disabled. I remember the first time I
encountered this, I was just absolutely furious because it doesn't even register as a change to
the BIOS. No, it's nothing. Like I was, I was so mad. I was like, what do you mean? That's how
you disable it. I don't want to delete them forever necessarily. Like it's not really a very clear
terminology.
Anyway. Yeah, no. And you can put them back. It's, it's, it's ridiculous. Anyway, long story
short, you can turn it off. It's perfectly fine. You can put it back if you want, but we need to
turn it off for now. Okay. Now we're back in the PowerShell. We're going to try that command again.
So it's PC edit slash. Oh, hello. Slash Windows still hasn't figured out how to not take the focus
away from a window that I'm actively working on. How is that even possible? It's very rude.
Anyway, slash set test signing.
On. Completed successfully. Yay. Now we need to reboot. What this allows you to do is install
drivers that have not been signed. So that means that they may have been modified. It might be
corrupted. It might cause instability in your system. So it's not generally a good idea,
but it is required in this case. One thing I am doing here is I'm going to disable Windows update
and there's no particular reason other than it annoys me when it tries to reinstall the driver.
So I'm just going to go ahead and do that.
You should probably turn it back on afterwards if you're doing this. Now we're going to go to
device manager. We're going to delete this driver that we installed earlier. Yep. Do we have to DDU
it or is that good enough? I think this is good enough. We can DDU it. It's probably best practice
to DDU it, but YOLO. Anyway. For those not familiar, DDU is a third-party driver removal
utility that's actually freaking awesome. Go check it out if you ever have a stubborn driver issue.
And feel free to throw some support those guys way. They've been at it for a very long time. It's a
really useful tool. I've used it many, many times. Here it is. So this is what happens. Normally you
would get an error saying that the driver is corrupted or modified or something like that.
But now... Go ahead. You can still explain it. Okay. But now what it came up with is
this software is unsigned. So it just came up with a warning because you've got test signing
mode on. It means that you're basically, for Windows, for all Windows knows, a driver developer.
You're installing that driver anyway. Again, if you see that under normal circumstances,
you should probably not do that. But it is required here. Do we have any way of knowing
that this driver is not installing malware on this system? No. Okay. Yeah, I haven't actually looked
at it. So to be clear, what we're doing here, we are actually not recommending that you try it at
home. Graphics driver is installed. So we'll just close that. Now what we want to do is look at this.
So we're going to go into driver. It'll say not digitally signed here. Okay. So that's what we
expect. That's what we expect. This is the not signed driver. It's running. So now we go into
our display settings. Shadow the Tomb Raider. Shadow the Tomb Raider. Oh, we might need to
reboot. Yeah. I came up with the methodology here about two hours ago. And WAN Show started three
minutes ago. Oh, that's cool. We're like 1000% seat of our pants right now. So we DDU'd it.
We DDU'd it this time, which it turns out was probably a necessary step and we're ready to go
again. So we're going into here and there it is. High performance GPU, NVIDIA P106 100. So let's
make that the default and Shadow the Tomb Raider. Here we go. Remember guys, it's like under 70 US
dollars. Okay. That's the important part of this. I'm so excited right now. It's worth remembering
that this card.
Okay. That's the important part of this. I'm so excited right now. It's worth remembering that this card.
Was basically destined for the recycling bin. Exactly. Like it could not game. There was no
possible way. Well, could it be used for compute other than game or other than mining? Yeah, but
it's a 1060 class GPU. So like it's not even worth the PCI express slot. You put it in for that kind
of a workload. Yeah. But here it is maybe a new lease on life. And just so you guys know, there's
no, uh, there's no smoke and mirrors. Here's our HDMI cable. There it is going into the bottom of
the monitor and directly into the back of the motherboard. There is nothing on this card. That
is looking pretty good. Actually, that might actually have been higher than the, uh, super
clone. Oh, that is looking real nice gaming on a graphics card with no outputs. Feels good, man.
Well, we missed the moment when it came up, but, uh, that's fine. We've got our result.
And actually this is as good as I would have expected. So we fell four
FPS short in our averages. And then for our minimums, we only fell three FPS short. Now
you will see a slight difference in performance when you're running the compute or the, the,
the rendering of the game on one GPU and then outputting it via another one. And this is pretty
much consistent with what I would expect from either that or the difference in clock speed
between a super clocked and just a regular 10 60 cart. So it worked. Yeah. Pretty sweet.
But we are not saying at all that we would recommend this. So Anthony,
um, there weren't really instructions from the seller on Taobao. Uh, where did you end
up getting the driver you used shockingly enough from our forum. There are actually a lot of
different forum posts about this long story short. There was one person who included a doc and a link
to a Google drive folder with all the stuff we needed, which was great. Thank you very much.
Um, with all that said, that is not a recommendation for any of you to go download
that because there's no way of knowing when you're installing an unsigned driver. If anything has been
changed other than the things that they said they changed, unless you're qualified to go
through and examine exactly what it is they changed, in which case you could just go and
do it yourself. So right now there's really no path to avoiding the scrap.
for these P106, and if I recall correctly,
there were GTX 1070 equivalents as well.
Yeah, I think so.
Cards.
So really the onus is on NVIDIA to do something about it,
because while I'm not expecting them to run out
and make this a supported use case,
for any motherboard with onboard video,
there's no reason that this couldn't work
if they weren't specifically locking it out.
So I'm not asking them to support it,
I'm just asking them to not specifically disable it,
because this is a serious e-waste problem.
Literally thousands, tens of thousands of these cards,
just useful for absolutely nothing anymore,
when gamers could be gaming on them.
Now the next stage is getting ourselves
one of those fancy solder alignment things that Rossman has,
and putting like an HDMI port on it.
I wonder if it would work.
I can't think of any reason it wouldn't.
Like, does it have the actual chips for it?
I'm sure there's,
I don't think these guys modified their boards very much.
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