Thursday, May 21st 2015
NVIDIA Back to Dirty Tricks with GTX 900M Series Overclocking
NVIDIA's driver team is at it again. The company drew outrage from the PC enthusiast community, for developing drivers that prevent GPU overclocking on its GeForce GTX 900M series notebook GPUs, in February 2015, with the introduction of its GeForce 347.29 WHQL drivers, blaming it on a "bug" that allowed overclocking on previous drivers. When called-out and under pressure from the community, it re-enabled overclocking on these chips, with the following GeForce 347.88 drivers, with an equally lame quasi-apology.
Hoping that nobody would notice, the company seems to have reinstated the overclocking block, or "clock-block" as the community is calling it; with its R350 and R352 drivers, such as the GeForce 352.86. Enthusiasts in notebook-centric communities such as NotebookReview, discovered that the latest GeForce drivers prevent overclocking if it reads a "lock-bit" in the video BIOS. Below are the two excuses the company exhausted by means of mutual-contradiction.
Hoping that nobody would notice, the company seems to have reinstated the overclocking block, or "clock-block" as the community is calling it; with its R350 and R352 drivers, such as the GeForce 352.86. Enthusiasts in notebook-centric communities such as NotebookReview, discovered that the latest GeForce drivers prevent overclocking if it reads a "lock-bit" in the video BIOS. Below are the two excuses the company exhausted by means of mutual-contradiction.
50 Comments on NVIDIA Back to Dirty Tricks with GTX 900M Series Overclocking
For those who do overclock then it sucks royally, but I'm pretty sure those people number a fraction of a percentage point of the total customer base. If I were someone that overclocked gaming laptops I'd probably gravitate to the premiere ODMs, and thus look to pressure them to bring the change - after all, some of these companies need every opportunity to differentiate themselves from the HP's and Dell's of this market.
If a laptop is over clocked it generally has poorer heat management than a desktop. If there is a recorded and known risk of devices heating up to the point of combustion, or even non ignition burning, it is required by the manufacturer to mitigate that risk.
In a desktop, you might fry a card but it is not known to cause combustion. In a confined compartment space like a laptop, that risk is known.
The comment made about "checks lawyer to see if I can sue" is relevant in this respect. If I know I provide a product which when over clocked or over volted may cause harm to persons, I am vulnerable to legal action. Saying that overclocking is 'not allowed' doesn't remove the risk.
I am not defending Nvidia. It would be easier to say to the consumer that certain devices aren't designed for over clocking.
As for myself, it would never ocurr to me to overclock a laptop for performance increase and I run a custom water loop with over clocked CPU and twin gpu's with flashed BIOS'.
You want a fast gaming laptop? Then splash out some serious cash and be happy. Leave the over clocking to desktops.
One last point. I put everything under water to overclock. Even if I was on air I'd buy a substantial air cooler. You don't get that inside a laptop. Nvidia are covering their asses and then looking like tools (sorry, are being tools) by not being honest about it (no surprise there).
(If you are uncertain as to what I mean, check the catalyst editorial thread. Some fun accusations there...)
This has been my personal theory since the last go-round on this topic.
I think a plausible scenario is that at some point nvidia realized 16nm wasn't going to make the mobile refresh cycle, said something collectively to the effect 'oh shit', and then did everything possible to make sure those 'new' gpus will look like some kind of masterful efficiency/performance boost.
I'm not saying they ever intended overclocking to available in the first place, but with how badly they've handled the situation and clearly have gone out of their way to prevent people from doing it even in spite of tremendous outcry for 'removing a feature', there has to be a motive...
....and with nvidia, the Occam's razor usually points to it involving green.
back to your world.. oh its just TEXT..nothing personal
Though that made me just think of something else. This overclocking lock, if I read the original article correctly, reading a lock bit from the BIOS. So it can't be too long before someone figures out how to edit the BIOS to remove the lock bit and re-flash the unlocked BIOS. Granted, flashing a GPU's BIOS is a bit more risky with a laptop, but then again so is overclocking.
This just in... leopard back to being spotted.
I guess people are forgetting that the company still lists the 970 as having 4 GB of 224 GB/s VRAM, even though that is a 100% verifiable lie — according to their own information.
...although I guess AMD's drivers should be pretty polished given than they are coding for 4 year old parts getting their fourth name....HD 7870M > HD 8870M > R9 270X > R9 M370X. If the driver team can't get it right after four years of trying, maybe they should try another line of work...although given the protracted problems with Enduro and Switchable Graphics, I'm guessing the driver team possess a large cache of incriminating material against AMD's board members. :roll:
Sure the 765m in my laptop's drivers have been WAY smoother than when I had a 560 Ti (So maybe Nvidia is improving), but honestly that might just be because I don't update the drivers as often as my desktop.