As an extreme benchmarker, the stock settings for video cards and such are not nearly enough for me, the first thing I do is add voltage and overclock them. In the case of my new nvidia GTX580 the card itself limits it’s maximum voltage to 1.15 volts, not very much at all. That means I need to change things! The part of the card that controls the maximum voltage is the BIOS, it stores the basic settings of the card and tells the card how to do what it needs to do (just like the BIOS on a motherboard).
There are tools that can pull a copy of the BIOS out of the video card (GPUz is the easiest), tools to edit them (FermiBIOSEditor can edit gtx580 bioses), and tools to stuff the bios back into the card (nvflash is the easiest to use for nvidia cards). This guide is on how to get the bios out of the card, edit the maximum allowed voltage and how to put the new one back in.
A disclaimer: Mucking around with the bios on your card is an excellent way to turn it into an expensive paperweight! Any damage done to your card by following the methods in this guide are your problem, not ours! Follow this guide at your own risk.
The very first thing you need to do, before anything else, is ask yourself if you really need a higher voltage cap. 99.9% of the people in the world (or more!) do not. If you are overclocking your card, the temperature of the card is good, and you need more voltage to OC further, then this guide is for you.
1) You will need to download the most recent version of GPUz, then you will need to download the most recent version of NVflash. Thirdly you will need to have something to edit the bios with, I like FermiBiosEditor, you will need to google a bit and find version 1.5.5 to edit a GTX570/580 bios.
2) You will need to get a copy of the bios out of your card, to do that click the circled button in the picture below, and select “Save to file”. Give it a file name (the model of the card is good, in this case gtx580.bin), and save it.
3) You need to make a backup copy of the bios file, this is very important. Copy the file you just saved to another spot on your hard drive, email it to yourself, or use any other method to make SURE that you have a safe copy of the file.
4) Open the file in FermiBiosEditor, and click on the “voltage settings” tab as circled in the picture below.
5) Move the top slider (Max Table Voltage) to the far right, 1.212 mV, as pictured in the above picture.
6) Click the “Save Bios As” button at the bottom right corner of the FermiBiosEditor screen. Save it to your desktop as “new580.rom”.
7) Unzip all the files in the NVFlash zip file to your desktop.
8) Click the start button, find Run where ever microsoft hid it on your OS. In the box that pops up type “cmd” as pictured below.
9) In the dos prompt window that comes up, type “cd Desktop”, as pictured below.
10) In the same dos window, type “nvflash -4 -5 -6 new580.rom”, as in the upper of the two windows in the picture below, and then hit enter.
11) A new window will pop up (the lower window of the two in the picture above), asking if you are sure. If you are sure, push “y”.
12) Very important: Do not do anything until the bottom window announces it is done and closes itself. If your computer crashes, the power goes out, or you disturb that window you will have a very expensive paperweight shaped like a video card, and will have to do this process without a working monitor. Doable, but not something you want to do!
13) Reboot, and enjoy access to higher voltage levels through whatever program you use to overclock your card!
Final notes: This method of flashing nvidia bioses is slightly more risky then using native dos. It is, however, easier as well. To flash native DOS you will need to create a bootable drive of some soft with MSDOS on it, unzip the nvflash files onto that drive, and copy the modified bios onto that drive. Boot off the drive, and then type the same “nvflash -4 -5 -6 new580.rom” that you did in the command prompt version above. Like I said, it’s a bit safer, but you have to go through more steps to make a bootable dos drive. Your call on that one!
Really final note: Please remember that this is an advanced technique, even if it appears fairly simple. If you are not pushing the overclocking envelope there is absolutely no need to do the above.
A disclaimer: Mucking around with the bios on your card is an excellent way to turn it into an expensive paperweight! Any damage done to your card by following the methods in this guide are your problem, not ours! Follow this guide at your own risk.
