Nvidia GTX 680 Can Be “Tweaked” To A GTX 770

We have already explained to you in several articles what the “deal” with Nvidia’s next graphics card series is. See here for a surprisingly accurate summary from over 21 days ago. However, to put it simply Nvidia is rebranding the GTX 680 through the GTX 660Ti into the GTX 770 to GTX 760 and then shoving a “cut down” version of the GTX Titan (the so called GTX Titan LE) in the place of the GTX 780. This means that nothing is “new” as such but products have just had bits enabled/disabled and then product naming has been shifted around.

The implications of this is that current-generation GTX 600 series cards will be virtually identical to GTX 700 series cards, and one reddit user claims that he has already been able to flash a GTX 680 into a GTX 770. The BIOS file, which we won’t link you to for safety reasons (but you can find it in the source article), works with reference GTX 680 graphics cards and alters the card in a few ways. Firstly, it cranks up speeds to 1059MHz core, 1125MHz GPU boost and 1752MHz memory. Secondly, it edits the INF File which causes the graphics card to show up as a GTX 770 in the motherboard BIOS and GPU-Z validations.

TechPowerUp (see source article) actually tested this new BIOS file on a few of their GTX 680s and said that it actually doesn’t work on most because the high overclocks make a lot of GTX 680s unstable. However, on the cards that it did work on it did give a 5-7% performance boost and show up as GTX 770 in GPU-Z.

We will probably see a similar thing happen with the GTX 670, GTX 660Ti and lower cards when Nvidia releases the GTX 700 series. TechPowerUp also revealed how some cheap graphics card vendors/resellers often do this with graphics cards in developing markets, taking GeForce 201 cards and selling them as GT 630 graphics cards for twice the money using a similar trick.

Put simply the “GTX 770 mod” overclocks your GTX 680 and changes the name string file to read as a GTX 770. It also voids your warranty and risks bricking your card if it can’t handle it and you can’t revert back properly. My advice is to just do some overclocking and live with the fact you have a GTX 680!

What are your thoughts on this story? Be sure to check the source article for a more detailed “technical” explanation.

Source