Nvidia Said We Couldn't Game On This Crypto Mining Card...
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
2,963 words · ~14 min read
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So cryptocurrency mining experience
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Let's call it a downturn
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No, let's be honest a huge crash in 2018
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So there is no shortage of great deals to be had on graphics cards that were used for cryptocurrency mining on sites
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like eBay
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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
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valuable elements is
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crypto
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Specific cards like this one from Gigabyte. This is a P 106
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It's actually very similar to a GTX 1060
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6-pin power dual fan cooler except for all one small problem
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It doesn't have any display outputs and not only that but the drivers have been locked down by NVIDIA
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So it can't be used for gaming because these were designed only for cryptocurrency mining
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But could this card?
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be used for gaming
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well
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Chinese site Taobao has a seller who says they can and is selling them with a modified
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Firmware that they claim will work
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67 US dollars that is under a third the price of a GTX 1066 gig. Will it work?
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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
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Anthony is gonna be joining me for this video. Hi
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He arranged the whole thing which was apparently like a big hassle getting this thing
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Yeah, apparently the seller wouldn't actually ship to Canada
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I don't know what the reason was not not sure if it's legal or whatever
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But anyway, the long story short Dennis had to contact them directly and in order to get it shipped
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They had to put it down as a computer mouse, but it's here and it seems to be exactly what we were expecting
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It's as advertised
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including all the dust and grime that's built up on it from presumably
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months of cryptocurrency mining in a dirty warehouse somewhere
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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
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a regular GTX 1066
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Unless we go ahead and run one. So this is a run-of-the-mill EVGA GeForce GTX 1060
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Superclock, okay, it's not quite run-of-the-mill
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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
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We don't need to run a whole suite of benchmarks because we're not comparing cards across different
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Architectures different brands or even different GPUs. These are both running the same graphics core on them
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so
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all we need to know is
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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?
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This puppy speaking of which both the cards should be six gigs
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So we should be looking at the the full CUDA core account
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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
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But we're gonna go ahead and fire up shadow the Tomb Raider
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We're running at 1920 by 1080 and at all high except I turned off motion blur
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Because it's stupid. So here we have it
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Average FPS 68. Okay, you can oh you can see the specs of our test bench here
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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
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56 okay, that makes more sense
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So minimums of 56 that's very playable
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here comes
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the Chinese mining card
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Yeah, isn't that a great question?
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You guys probably couldn't hear that because Brandon?
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Was like kind of mumbling come on over here Brandon
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Come on, how are you going to plug it in if it doesn't have IO?
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so we're not saying that this technique is gonna work for everyone because if
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your motherboard
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does not have
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Graphics outputs and your CPU doesn't have an IGP you built into it
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You will not be able to do this, but remember how we got free sync running off of an NVIDIA card
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before
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By passing the GPU power through the other card that interfaced with the display
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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
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performance of our graphics card being passed through the output of our onboard graphics
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This is a technology that didn't really have any reason to exist on desktops on their own
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but it's kind of a carryover from laptops that have
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Onboard graphics that they run when they're trying to save power and then high-performance graphics that they switch to in games
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So but because the feature exists well we can take advantage of it here
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So we're gonna go ahead and install our 416.16 drivers at least we're going to try
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Is this supposed to work? I didn't install that driver. There's a different driver that we need to install
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But if this works, then did it work if this works, then
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I'm a little confused. I mean this driver is theoretically already installed on the system. No, okay, so we do have a problem
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Showing up as p106 100 in device manager instead of GTX 1060. Well, let's go ahead and let's let's try
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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
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The driver fully installed okay NVIDIA control panel is there but it's in display settings that I would switch to it, correct?
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Right under
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GPU, or graphics, graphics settings down at the bottom there. Graphics settings, there we go.
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Okay, so let's browse for an app. Options, here we go. High performance, save. Okay. Oh,
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so it doesn't pick up a P106 as a high performance GPU option. Well, what happens if we pop open the
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NVIDIA control panel here? You are not currently using a display attached to an NVIDIA GPU.
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All right, Anthony, come on in here. What do we need to do? Okay. And talk to the camera. So,
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okay. I'll move here. Okay. Let's just, yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. What do I need to do?
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There's this little folder on the desktop that you missed, which is fine because it's like in
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this honeycomb pattern, which is great. It's called mining. Okay. And in there is the actual
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driver we need.
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It is modified. But if you try to install that right now. Yeah. Chances are it will error out.
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Okay. So we need to disable secure boot. Okay. So that we have to restart for. Okay. Now,
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the benefit of secure boot is theoretically that it prevents malware from attacking your
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pre-boot environment. Is that about right? Yeah, but there's been an exploit on that. So,
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so this is the boot options menu in the advanced on the BIOS. It's going to change depending on
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what motherboard or computer you have. Yeah. But long story short, we're going to go into key
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management. Yeah. Then we're going to go to clear secure boot keys and it'll be like, do you really
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want to delete them? Yeah, we do. So now if we go out, it's disabled. I remember the first time I
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encountered this, I was just absolutely furious because it doesn't even register as a change to
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the BIOS. No, it's nothing. Like I was, I was so mad. I was like, what do you mean? That's how
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you disable it. I don't want to delete them forever necessarily. Like it's not really a very clear
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terminology.
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Anyway. Yeah, no. And you can put them back. It's, it's, it's ridiculous. Anyway, long story
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short, you can turn it off. It's perfectly fine. You can put it back if you want, but we need to
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turn it off for now. Okay. Now we're back in the PowerShell. We're going to try that command again.
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So it's PC edit slash. Oh, hello. Slash Windows still hasn't figured out how to not take the focus
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away from a window that I'm actively working on. How is that even possible? It's very rude.
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Anyway, slash set test signing.
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On. Completed successfully. Yay. Now we need to reboot. What this allows you to do is install
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drivers that have not been signed. So that means that they may have been modified. It might be
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corrupted. It might cause instability in your system. So it's not generally a good idea,
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but it is required in this case. One thing I am doing here is I'm going to disable Windows update
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and there's no particular reason other than it annoys me when it tries to reinstall the driver.
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So I'm just going to go ahead and do that.
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You should probably turn it back on afterwards if you're doing this. Now we're going to go to
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device manager. We're going to delete this driver that we installed earlier. Yep. Do we have to DDU
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it or is that good enough? I think this is good enough. We can DDU it. It's probably best practice
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to DDU it, but YOLO. Anyway. For those not familiar, DDU is a third-party driver removal
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utility that's actually freaking awesome. Go check it out if you ever have a stubborn driver issue.
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And feel free to throw some support those guys way. They've been at it for a very long time. It's a
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really useful tool. I've used it many, many times. Here it is. So this is what happens. Normally you
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would get an error saying that the driver is corrupted or modified or something like that.
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But now... Go ahead. You can still explain it. Okay. But now what it came up with is
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this software is unsigned. So it just came up with a warning because you've got test signing
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mode on. It means that you're basically, for Windows, for all Windows knows, a driver developer.
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You're installing that driver anyway. Again, if you see that under normal circumstances,
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you should probably not do that. But it is required here. Do we have any way of knowing
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that this driver is not installing malware on this system? No. Okay. Yeah, I haven't actually looked
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at it. So to be clear, what we're doing here, we are actually not recommending that you try it at
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home. Graphics driver is installed. So we'll just close that. Now what we want to do is look at this.
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So we're going to go into driver. It'll say not digitally signed here. Okay. So that's what we
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expect. That's what we expect. This is the not signed driver. It's running. So now we go into
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our display settings. Shadow the Tomb Raider. Shadow the Tomb Raider. Oh, we might need to
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reboot. Yeah. I came up with the methodology here about two hours ago. And WAN Show started three
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minutes ago. Oh, that's cool. We're like 1000% seat of our pants right now. So we DDU'd it.
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We DDU'd it this time, which it turns out was probably a necessary step and we're ready to go
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again. So we're going into here and there it is. High performance GPU, NVIDIA P106 100. So let's
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make that the default and Shadow the Tomb Raider. Here we go. Remember guys, it's like under 70 US
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dollars. Okay. That's the important part of this. I'm so excited right now. It's worth remembering
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that this card.
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Okay. That's the important part of this. I'm so excited right now. It's worth remembering that this card.
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Was basically destined for the recycling bin. Exactly. Like it could not game. There was no
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possible way. Well, could it be used for compute other than game or other than mining? Yeah, but
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it's a 1060 class GPU. So like it's not even worth the PCI express slot. You put it in for that kind
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of a workload. Yeah. But here it is maybe a new lease on life. And just so you guys know, there's
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no, uh, there's no smoke and mirrors. Here's our HDMI cable. There it is going into the bottom of
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the monitor and directly into the back of the motherboard. There is nothing on this card. That
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is looking pretty good. Actually, that might actually have been higher than the, uh, super
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clone. Oh, that is looking real nice gaming on a graphics card with no outputs. Feels good, man.
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Well, we missed the moment when it came up, but, uh, that's fine. We've got our result.
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And actually this is as good as I would have expected. So we fell four
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FPS short in our averages. And then for our minimums, we only fell three FPS short. Now
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you will see a slight difference in performance when you're running the compute or the, the,
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the rendering of the game on one GPU and then outputting it via another one. And this is pretty
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much consistent with what I would expect from either that or the difference in clock speed
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between a super clocked and just a regular 10 60 cart. So it worked. Yeah. Pretty sweet.
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But we are not saying at all that we would recommend this. So Anthony,
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um, there weren't really instructions from the seller on Taobao. Uh, where did you end
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up getting the driver you used shockingly enough from our forum. There are actually a lot of
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different forum posts about this long story short. There was one person who included a doc and a link
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to a Google drive folder with all the stuff we needed, which was great. Thank you very much.
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Um, with all that said, that is not a recommendation for any of you to go download
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that because there's no way of knowing when you're installing an unsigned driver. If anything has been
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changed other than the things that they said they changed, unless you're qualified to go
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through and examine exactly what it is they changed, in which case you could just go and
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do it yourself. So right now there's really no path to avoiding the scrap.
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for these P106, and if I recall correctly,
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there were GTX 1070 equivalents as well.
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Yeah, I think so.
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Cards.
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So really the onus is on NVIDIA to do something about it,
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because while I'm not expecting them to run out
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and make this a supported use case,
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for any motherboard with onboard video,
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there's no reason that this couldn't work
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if they weren't specifically locking it out.
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So I'm not asking them to support it,
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I'm just asking them to not specifically disable it,
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because this is a serious e-waste problem.
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Literally thousands, tens of thousands of these cards,
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just useful for absolutely nothing anymore,
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when gamers could be gaming on them.
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Now the next stage is getting ourselves
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one of those fancy solder alignment things that Rossman has,
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and putting like an HDMI port on it.
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I wonder if it would work.
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I can't think of any reason it wouldn't.
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Like, does it have the actual chips for it?
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I'm sure there's,
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I don't think these guys modified their boards very much.
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