MSI NVIDIA GeForceGTX 465 Twin Frozr II Golden Edition GTX 470 Flash Unlock Guide Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,035 words · ~5 min read
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someone posted on my MSI twin frozer2 golden edition gtx 465
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um in the comments that many of these could be unlocked to gtx 470. so my
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curiosity was naturally peaked one of the reasons that most gtx 465s
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can't be unlocked to gtx 470 is that the
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gtx 465 does not have the same number of
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RAM chips as the gtx 470 even though it
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does use a 470 reference pcb but what i
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found out by removing the 10 or so
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screws from the back of the twin frozer 2
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limited edition cooler here is that this gtx 465
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does have 10 RAM chips instead of being
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missing two like a normal 465 so the next thing i'm going to be doing is uh
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putting the cooler back on it and seeing if i can actually unlock full gtx 470
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performance from the gtx 465 and i should put that
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in quotes because it does have 10 RAM chips golden edition limited edition
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video card i put the card back together and did a
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quick vantage run at just stock clocks stock voltage just to see sort of where
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we land and i'm going to try following the unlocking procedure which i will
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show you in a couple minutes to see if we can unlock gtx 470 performance from
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the twin frozer golden edition all right well the first step in our slightly
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unusual video card BIOS flashing procedure
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it's unusual because we're going to have to force the BIOS flashing utility to
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overwrite some parts of the card's firmware that you normally wouldn't even
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when you're updating a BIOS so because we want to change it from being a 465 to
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a 470 and we're going to overwrite with the 470 bio so we have to do things a
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little bit differently so the first step is to use this command
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and the flash dash dash erase e prom
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and then we press y to confirm
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now it is very very important you do not reboot your computer at this time
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because you have erased you basically just erased without
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replacing uh firmware from the card so the next
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step is going to be nv flash
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and we are going to put in some
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additional commands here and then let me just double check what
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i've gone and named the file so i'll just leave this camera here
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for you to look at and apparently it is mashing the space
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bar which is a bad thing right now
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okay there we go
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okay
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470. rom so this is the part where we're
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actually going to flash the gtx 470 firmware onto
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our 465 so pci device id override
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detected yes we do want to do this so we're going to type yes in all caps
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overriding GPU mismatch yes we want to do that as well
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and overwriting the board id is only needed yep we are we are overriding the
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board id because we want a 470.
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now bear in mind unless you check that it has 10
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RAM chips and even then this won't always work i take no
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responsibility for you breaking your card because that can happen in fact
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it's quite possible that i have bricked this one so we're going to go ahead and
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remove my flash drive
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and reboot and find out if we're going to make it back into Windows
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i hope we do maybe i'll let you stay along for the
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ride
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okay first step is going to be getting it to post it posts that's good
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it has to get a lot further than that though
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so in theory this is a gtx 470 now so what i'm going to do is i'm going to run
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some vantage benchmarks on it and see if the
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score actually improves now by unlocking it to a 470
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not only do we actually get to use those additional two chips of RAM so instead
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of being a one gig card this is now uh i believe it's shoot 1280 or something
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like that um it's a 1.2 something gig card so there's that and we also unl
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unlock some additional memory bandwidth and as well as a couple of other
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functional units on the GPU itself so we should get quite a significant
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performance boost out of this and uh
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for nothing for no additional cost so
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yeah this is a very interesting thing that MSI has gone and done by producing
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a gtx 465 that is basically just a 470.
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it's a wolf in sheep's clothing mind you it's not really sheep's clothing when you go
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and put like that beefy crazy all copper cooler on it
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okay so we're into Windows so the graphics card sort of sort of works i
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may actually need to reboot here in order to get it to be detected properly
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so um maybe just bear with me oh no there it
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is okay NVIDIA GeForce gtx 470 so i'll
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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
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is a gtx 470 now you can see gpuz brings
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up all of the information here so it is now a
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1.28 gig card rather than a one gig card it has a 320 bit bus width rather than a
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256 bit bus width and it also
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has uh let me see yeah it has an id that says
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gtx 470 i ran vantage again we score 17
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886 marks so that is a
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very very significant boost over the 14 000 and change we scored before
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there it is confirmed it takes about two minutes to do the flashing process as
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you saw and uh you get a whack load more performance so
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this card actually looks like a tremendous value thanks for checking out
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