Got a FX5900?! Want a FX5950?!

Ever get the feeling that its sorta harsh of companies to sell people the same basic product, but to change the name and charge a bit more for it?!

"For those of you with a Geforce FX5900 card out there you might be interested in this. There has been some ongoing discussion over at the Futuremark forums with info on how to flash your FX5900 video card into a FX5950 Ultra. This was first posted on this Korean site and where this info became available. What they basically found out was that the FX5950U is just a software renamed FX5900 with of course 256MB of memory instead of 128MB. I am not going to get too much into the details but I will let you know how you can do it and what advantages/ disadvantes come with it.

On that site they used a Leadtek Winfast A350TDH-LX. This is the slowest version of the FX5900 offered by Leadtek. Reading some of the discussion in the Futuremark forums about this, it seems like many brands of cards are having success with this mod. For my guide I will be using the Leadtek Winfast A350 TDH MyVIVO card. This is the card I reviewed back in October. Before I did any BIOS flashing of any sort I overclocked the card to FX5950U speeds (475Mhz core/ 950Mhz DDR) just to see if the card was capable of running at those speeds. After doing so and testing for any problems I decided to give it a try.

I downloaded the A380 Ultra (Leadtek's FX5950 card) BIOS from the Leadtek site and extracted the files onto a bootable floppy disk made in WinXP. Restart the computer and boot with the floppy. Here is what you need to do in order to flash your video card BIOS.

1) Backup your original BIOS -- WFFLASH.EXE-S

2) Once backed up flash to new BIOS -- WFFLASH.EXE NM A380U.rom

3) Once you hit enter it will flash the BIOS and display this screen if successful."

View: More Info @ Explosive Labs Forums