someone posted on my MSI twin frozer2 golden edition gtx 465
um in the comments that many of these could be unlocked to gtx 470. so my
curiosity was naturally peaked one of the reasons that most gtx 465s
can't be unlocked to gtx 470 is that the
gtx 465 does not have the same number of
RAM chips as the gtx 470 even though it
does use a 470 reference pcb but what i
found out by removing the 10 or so
screws from the back of the twin frozer 2
limited edition cooler here is that this gtx 465
does have 10 RAM chips instead of being
missing two like a normal 465 so the next thing i'm going to be doing is uh
putting the cooler back on it and seeing if i can actually unlock full gtx 470
performance from the gtx 465 and i should put that
in quotes because it does have 10 RAM chips golden edition limited edition
video card i put the card back together and did a
quick vantage run at just stock clocks stock voltage just to see sort of where
we land and i'm going to try following the unlocking procedure which i will
show you in a couple minutes to see if we can unlock gtx 470 performance from
the twin frozer golden edition all right well the first step in our slightly
unusual video card BIOS flashing procedure
it's unusual because we're going to have to force the BIOS flashing utility to
overwrite some parts of the card's firmware that you normally wouldn't even
when you're updating a BIOS so because we want to change it from being a 465 to
a 470 and we're going to overwrite with the 470 bio so we have to do things a
little bit differently so the first step is to use this command
and the flash dash dash erase e prom
and then we press y to confirm
now it is very very important you do not reboot your computer at this time
because you have erased you basically just erased without
replacing uh firmware from the card so the next
step is going to be nv flash
and we are going to put in some
additional commands here and then let me just double check what
i've gone and named the file so i'll just leave this camera here
for you to look at and apparently it is mashing the space
bar which is a bad thing right now
okay there we go
okay
470. rom so this is the part where we're
actually going to flash the gtx 470 firmware onto
our 465 so pci device id override
detected yes we do want to do this so we're going to type yes in all caps
overriding GPU mismatch yes we want to do that as well
and overwriting the board id is only needed yep we are we are overriding the
board id because we want a 470.
now bear in mind unless you check that it has 10
RAM chips and even then this won't always work i take no
responsibility for you breaking your card because that can happen in fact
it's quite possible that i have bricked this one so we're going to go ahead and
remove my flash drive
and reboot and find out if we're going to make it back into Windows
i hope we do maybe i'll let you stay along for the
ride
okay first step is going to be getting it to post it posts that's good
it has to get a lot further than that though
so in theory this is a gtx 470 now so what i'm going to do is i'm going to run
some vantage benchmarks on it and see if the
score actually improves now by unlocking it to a 470
not only do we actually get to use those additional two chips of RAM so instead
of being a one gig card this is now uh i believe it's shoot 1280 or something
like that um it's a 1.2 something gig card so there's that and we also unl
unlock some additional memory bandwidth and as well as a couple of other
functional units on the GPU itself so we should get quite a significant
performance boost out of this and uh
for nothing for no additional cost so
yeah this is a very interesting thing that MSI has gone and done by producing
a gtx 465 that is basically just a 470.
it's a wolf in sheep's clothing mind you it's not really sheep's clothing when you go
and put like that beefy crazy all copper cooler on it
okay so we're into Windows so the graphics card sort of sort of works i
may actually need to reboot here in order to get it to be detected properly
so um maybe just bear with me oh no there it
is okay NVIDIA GeForce gtx 470 so i'll
be back in a minute and i'll show you the full results but it looks like it worked well let there be no doubt this
is a gtx 470 now you can see gpuz brings
up all of the information here so it is now a
1.28 gig card rather than a one gig card it has a 320 bit bus width rather than a
256 bit bus width and it also
has uh let me see yeah it has an id that says
gtx 470 i ran vantage again we score 17
886 marks so that is a
very very significant boost over the 14 000 and change we scored before
there it is confirmed it takes about two minutes to do the flashing process as
you saw and uh you get a whack load more performance so
this card actually looks like a tremendous value thanks for checking out
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