I just picked up/installed a nVidia 6800 GS in my comp. Love it, simply love it. I was told that there's programs that will "unlock" the disabled pipelines in the card (I believe that the card is basically a restricted 6800 GT). I have even seen posts where people have (said) they've done this. Can it be done? Can anyone recommend a program to do it? I don't want to overclock it though, as it's already OC'd from the manufacturer (EVGA) at 1000 mhz (although they say that you can OC it to over 1100 mhz).

Any help here would be great!

BTW, soft mods only...the wife would kill me if I fried a $200 card!

RivaTuner will do what you want and is probably the one you were told about (if I had to guess). It's a freebie too.

Thanks HitSquad! Have you had any experience using that RivaTuner? Just wondering if there's any advice on what to do/what not to do!

Thanks again!

Hi Steve.
Ya, I've used it a few times. Don't worry about killing your card, you'll be alright. If you see a lot of artifacts or any other screen corruption, it means your card won’t run correctly with all the pixel and vertex pipelines enabled. You may also get different results from different applications\games as well.
If it's a big problem, just go back to the NVStrap area and uncheck them. Some people just leave the sixth vertex unit turned on and disable the pixel units. You end up with a 12 pixel pipe configuration with six vertex units, rather than the 6800's 12 pixel pipe, 5 vertex pipe stock config.

Good to know, much appreciated

See, that's why I ask questions like that, so I know what to expect and what not to. I'll give that a whirl probably tonight, and I'll post back with some results. If it works, I'll run 3Dmark05 and compare it to the score I got with the standard settings (scored 4424 with card on default settings!).

Again, thanks a lot HitSquad

I downloaded it last night, and it said that the drivers that I had currently installed were unrecognized (or maybe it was incompatible) with rivatuner and that using riva tuner with the current drivers may damage the card..... That's weird, becaause the drivers that I have installed for the card are the ones that I downloaded from that website (3Dguru). Any recomendations on which drivers are compatible with riva tuner?

Also, I didn't see a place to turn on extra vertex thingymabobs. The only thing I saw that I could adjust was the pixel shaders (force 2.0 shaders, force 3.0 shaders etc.).

Ugh....I'm feeling rather noobish after getting beat up by this progrma

Hi Steve.
I probably should have asked you this in an earlier post but are you using the PCIe or AGP version of the card? If it's the PCIe version of the card with the NV41 core, forget rivatuner, won't work.

LOL! No, I should've posted it earlier! I usually try to give a lot of information to help prevent to many questions that slow up progress!! It's AGP, running at 8x. Sorry about that!

No Problem Steve, common in forums if ya know what I mean.
I frequently have to step out and sometimes leave people hanging for hours.
Usually somebody else jumps in though.
Anyway, I have never seen a warning concerning incompatable drivers with RT. I always use the drivers that are bundled with the card, which we both know are always outdated. Unless I've got a particular issue that drivers specificly address, I leave well enough alone. Half the time they just cause more issues then they cure. In any case, you should not be getting that warning right off the bat simply by using the application without making changes. Do not attempt to use it until that issue is resolved first. Once you find compatable drivers, if you want to bother, I can walk you through all the settings if you like. I would also suggest you cruise\post in the guru forums for something that may be a simple solution. Might be a known issue or patch or something. Those guys live and breath that stuff.

Sweet! Thanks for the advice, I'll try uninstalling and reinstalling RV and see if I can't get a little more info on that warning that came up. If I get that warning, I'll go from there, and like u said I'll be sure to check for common problems on the guru forums.

I'll post back to let you know how I made out.

Thanks a ton HitSquad

Are you using the official nVidia drivers or something that third parties have been modding?

I'm using the drivers I downloaded from 3dguru.com. According to the techs at EVGA, those drivers should work fine. The techs actually recommended that I download the drivers from that site and use them. I was suprised that I got that error message seeing how the drivers and the rivatuner were downloaded from the same site.

3Dguru is just hosting. Doesn't mean they got anything to do with RivaTuner itself. Nor does it mean that 3Dguru has to be behind the drivers, although eVGA is right that there are a lot of small nice tweaks in the modded drivers you find around the web.

Good to know about rivatuner...I knew that they didn't make the drivers, but I figured that they made rivatuner. Silly me! LOL!!!

I uninstalled then reinstalled rivatuner so I could get that error message again. It's more of a warning, but I'll paste it into this post. I JUST downloaded this 2 days ago from 3dguru.com, so how could it be telling me to search for a newer version?



Any advice on what to do from here? Ignore it and see what happens? Uninstall it and never download it again? Move to Antartica and become a frozen monk?

How do I tell what version drivers I'm currently using? I have 81.94 and 82.12 saved on my external hd, but I can't remember which ones I installed (insert senile joke here)!

Thanks again!

My Computer>Properties>Hardware>Device Manager.
Click the plus sign next to display adapter. Select the display adapter, right click, select properties.
Click the "Driver" tab, installed version is there.
If you need to install unsupported modded drivers, it not worth it in my opinion.

RivaTuner doesn't work with modded drivers because it, amongst other things, mods the drivers itself. It worked fine with the official 81.95.

Ok, when I get home, I'll check the drivers that I have. If they're not the 81.95 drivers, I'll uninstall and reinstall the 81.95 drivers.

Also, I noticed last night that there were some options "greyed out" in rivatuner, and there was an "Install" option, even though I've installed riva tuner already. Does that mean that I have to install something else from within the program to activate more features?