Quadro M4000 1Ghz project

[Ten Shin Han]

Hello Guys,

I just built my new system for Christmas last week, and now I would like to proceed with next step:
overclocking.

CPU overclocking, I had some experience long time ago, I will update my skills thanks to you guys.

GPU overclocking: I am totally new here, and it seems I did NOt choose the easy path with Quadro M4000 GM204 card.
why did I pick up a quadro card ? because I want to play with virtualization, and quadro driver is the only one officially supporting PCI passthrough for virtualization, and for 888 € I think I made a good deal (thanks Germans !)

I figure out that overclocking GM204 is doable, but is tricky, and does NOT rely on the same practice as before.

I don't want to do hardcore overclock,

According to this site, M4000 is rated as follow:

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/2757/quadro-m4000.html

GPU Clock: 773 MHz
Memory Clock: 1502 MHz , 6008 MHz effective

I just want to push GPU clock to 1 GHz, with respect to the thermal boundaries (TDP) as it is my understanding that this is how Maxwell chipset works now.

I have already played with tools available here to extract M4000 BIOS and edit it, but this is where I need advice.

Is anyone interested in this project ?

if this works, I believe it would definitely give a lot of value for this M4000 card.

what do you think ?

PS: first question first: does anyone knows is the M4000 suffers from the same RAMGATE issue as GT970 ?
My intuition is 'no' because I expect NVidia to change the memory caching system to efficiently address 8 GB ram with maximum bandwith as would require a professionnal product, but I have NOT find any evidence of my intuition. Any idea ?

 

[Ten Shin Han]

in the meantime, I found this M5000 BIOS: https://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/177797/177797.html, it is flagged as 'unverified' but for the time being it will do.

because you (Maguire) and other guys here seems comfortable with Kepler, Maxwell overclock, I would like to ask the following question:

How exactly works the 'boost table' ? more precisely, how the green boundaries are configured ?

here is presumably the M5000:

and now my M4000:

How are the green and yellow areas determined ?

for what I have see, the voltage table and the boost table share the same values up to a point, and then the M4000 values are 'blank' or missing.

Playing with the slider on boost table doesn't change the boundaries.

basically, where the BIOS is getting the min max index values of the boost and voltage table ?

please advise

 

[P4-630]

Why would you ever want to overclock or even modify the BIOS of a workstation Quadro card?

 

[Ten Shin Han]

because this new pc project of my own is for fun and experiment

very soon, I would like to install vSphere Hypervisor to host/run multiple OSes (Windows & Linux) at the same time, and use the Nvidia card in the windows VM with PCI passtrough (some guys out there claim there is barely loss of performance compared to bare metal Windows installation, and they can still enjoy dual Linux/windows usage at the same time), this is why I needed the a Quadro card/driver in the first place (quadro driver are the only one supporting PCI pass trough) and I guess also because I work for a CAD software editor.

but I don't think flashing BIOS is such a big deal, and unless I do something really stupid, I will probably not kill my card in the first attempt.

Now, my goal is that I really want to understand & learn what I am doing.

This is why I keep asking questions which probably make me look like a stupid guy here, but I am not afraid to say "I don't know, please advise" if it can save me hours of google search

and quite frankly, overclocking a M4000 at the level of M5000 doesn't seem to ambitious nor risky. this is my belief (one is 120W the other is 150W, with only 1 x 6 pin PCI-E connector in both case).

it reminds me the old day where everybody could buy a Intel CELERON 300A (300 MHz) and overclock it to 450 MHz with Intel blessing, using the same BCLK trick as they just release for Skylake.... history repeating

so if you have some time to tell me the little secret of using the Maxwell II Bios tweaker, you have all my attention

 

[Jetster]

No biggie as long as you understand the risks

 

[pikers01]

780 MHz for QM4K looks like specially decreased freq for not make competition with QM5K. If Increase freq of QM4K to 1GHz kan be reached performance like on much more expencive QM5K. It's looks reasonable, because same game GTX970 have base about 1GHz freq.

 

[Ten Shin Han]

I have found someone that will mod my BIOS but is reluctant to explain all the mysteries of Maxwell II tweak utility.

Anyway, I will carefully study the modified BIOS learn from it. If everything makes sense to me, then I will give it a try, keeping en direct eye on the card itself, and if everythinh works fine then I will call it 'Quadro 4500 BIOS'

 

[cdawall]

Are the windows based utilities not capable of overclocking a quadro card? It has a been a while since I have played with one, but last I checked overclocking was overclocking.

 

[pikers01]

It's looks like locked possibilities on bios level.
Any utilites like NVIDIA System Tools or MSI Afterburner are not make any effect.