Resistor hack turns a Nvidia GTX690 into a Quadro K5000 or Tesla K10

"No, no schematic, what I did was look for resistors that looked like they had an alternative position, have a look at the photos and you will see what I mean. Any that I suspected of being a strap I used a meter to check if the resistor was connected to ground of 3.3V directly, and looked where the general traces were going in the area. If they went towards the GPU and connected to one of the rails it was a pretty good bet that it was a hard strap."

http://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/hacking-nvidia-cards-i...

"It is far cheaper to make one very good chip for the highest market, and modify it slightly for lower end markets...

Now, this is the part you hate: this is the only viable alternative. There's no point demanding different designs for different market segments as that would significantly increase the cost you, the consumer, pays. You can demand chips be sold at lowest prices without being fused down, but then the company eats its own market, becomes unprofitable, and goes out of business at worst - or, at best, doesn't make enough money to fund further r&d as much as they want, which again hurts you, the consumer."

http://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1aj3n3/not_coo...

These days you don't just toss a chip when it fails a test - you design the tests to exercise different physical regions of the chip to identify the location of a defect. You also design the chip in a way that allows you to power down different regions and behave like a lower priced part.

So a defective quad-core CPU might be sold as a dual-core part, or as a variant with a smaller cache. You have slightly finer grain control on a GPU, and very fine grain control on RAM or flash.

This is a matter of price discrimination. Nvidia wants to be sure they have a chance to sell their gear to every single person who has money to spend on graphics cards at a range of price points.

Consumers have smaller wallets than professionals, but both have similar needs. So the company performs a "hack" that allows them to extract maximum revenues from each segment.

Let's take this to an absurd extreme. Sennheiser did this by crippling their low-end headphones with a piece of foam to limit audio quality. Savvy audiophiles simply popped open the cans and removed the foam. No quibble with that, right?

For me, companies have every right to practice price discrimination by fiddling with their hardware. And I think consumers have every right to mod that hardware. A few tinkerers are unlikely to break a meticulous price discrimination model like Nvidia's, and I think it's probably a net win for the company to have a chunk of their userbase who love them so much all they want to do is tinker in this way.