Gt 710 VMod Guide This guide is intended for overclockers who would like to try their hand at hard modding a card plus to help people in the OC-ESports(Hwbot) CHEAPAZ CHIPS comp Disclaimer: Following this guide has a high risk of failure and no one but yourself is to blame if you kill something Gigabyte Gt 710 1/2GB So far these applies to both 1gb and 2gb Gigabyte cards but other cards will be added as time progresses Alright the idea is simple as it involves soldering a trimpot to a FB pin on a PWM controller but requires some soldering experience but such a cheap card is a good place to learn and if you have no soldering experience try on a dead card first What you'll need: A multi-meter for reading volts A soldering iron and solder(lead is best) for soldering 1 x 20k multiturn trimpot for gpu core 1 x 50k multiturn trimpot for mem Thin wire for the mods hot glue for holding wires and trimpot in place Something like a third hand tool for holding things while you solder (optional) Heat shrink tubing to prevent shorts (optional) To begin with is the core which is the simplest of the two Begin by testing what the core voltage is before beginning and once that is done you can get started by tinning the IC leg shown and some wire once that is done bring them together and apply soldering iron Next you are going to want to hot glue the 20k trimmer to somewhere on the card and cut back of one of the outside legs (make sure the trimmer is set to max resistance for the pins you are using) and solder the wire to one (pre-tin both wire and trimmer leg) and solder a another wire to one to any ground Gpu core read point Mod done (orange wire) Now on to the memory which is quite hard to do so it's not recommended for beginners but I'm going to let the pics do the talking and for this one you only pre-tin the wire not caps/resistors because they are very easy to damage and a wire has to soldered to read volts finished card although note I have everything on a controller I made I'm including a pic from another card a modded to show trimmer Note: All pics can be clicked on to see larger Also if anybody has anything to add I'm happy to hear it and more will be coming in following weeks Tip: With the trimmers I like to hot glue a d-sub screw to it as it makes them much easier to turn MSI Gt 710 1GB The Core and memory use the same IC and is the same as the gigabyte card but use a 20k or 50k (Shouldn't matter too much which but 20k will set volts slightly aggressive) just pre-tin the ic leg and same as before V read points and grounds (note with grounds the card has lots and you can find more by using a multimeter set to resistance and checking the resistance between something like I/O panel which will only read a few Ohms) For anybody who wants to know I found which ic was which by looking up datasheets and testing the resitance between the vread point to the ic (pin 8 for this one) and reads 1 Ohm Asus 1GB 50k trimpot from one or multiple resistors marked in red to ground More cards in coming weeks
Epower Basics Using Gigabyte GT 710 as reference Alright to being with you are going to want to look over all the traces and check for a large trace running from choke(inductor) to the GPU core (or mems if doing that) which can be on front or back of card or both and once you have that done you should be good to remove the choke. The next part is a bit harder and this is where the real risk of killing the card is as you have to grind back the PCB on the chokes output side so you can solder to the trace (test with a multi-meter to make sure no shorts) and you are going to have to find grounds as close to that point as possible A general rule is too use as thick as possible cables or to use copper sheets to solder to +volts and ground because it allows you to get the resistance from +rail to ground as low as possible but with these cards 16awg seems to work fine and I still mange to get a resistance of 17ohms to ground using 3x 16awg to gpu and 6x to ground and less than 10mv vdrop
Awesome work on the guide, it is great to have you guys to do the hard work for us lazy sods For cooling you just using AIO water ? Or are you using your crazy man chilly AIO setup ?
Thanks guys I've used a h100 but were small gains over a stock amd cooler Notice this card still has its vga output so it's before I modded it
Since hwbot has said something about it keep an eye out at hwbot for the upcoming comp using a gt 710 over the next few days
You called the comp. Hay is the GK208 the 2Gb version ? Have you noticed a difference between the two?
No difference as what shows on hwbot as the gt 710 it claims has the same core as the 520/610 but no such card exists only the GK208 core
Galax 1GB GT710 mods to come. Stock 2D voltages vGPU 0.9 vMem 1.58 Stock 3D voltages vGPU 1.09 vMEM 1.58
Yeh I'd say so, I didnt even get as far as looking up which IC's they are, I'll see if the card shows any promise at default and if not get something else.
I wonder how this would compare to a 10 year old GPU from way-back, like the 7800GTX or something like that Edit: A quick but of Google-FU tells me that a 7800GTX would crush it, you need to go back to the 2004 vanilla Geforce 6800 to get something which is on par. Even the most powerful Intel GPU can't keep up to either of them though. lol
