Upgrading the DGFF GPUs in the Precision 7530 & 7730

It's likely that there is a physical limit on the motherboard, and on GPU card itself, regarding how much power it could actually draw in. However it can probably go at least a little bit higher than the 80W that the card vBIOS caps it at. (Messing with the vBIOS gets trickier with each passing generation because of NVIDIA's added security measures.) A 240W power brick might be helpful.

 

@TheQuentincc and @DaMafiaGamer have introduced me to the concept of 'shunt mods', where a sense/shunt resistor is shorted/changed/added to so that the current drawn by the GPU increases, thereby increasing power draw and performance, too.

This is another project for the semester break; I intend to get myself a 240 W power brick and see if I can push the GPUs to 150W or more. This appears to be the real sweet spot for Turing cards.

 

I hope that after you get the 240 W power brick, my very optimistic suggestion will become true without even realizing the mod. The card will identify that there is more power provided and boost it power limits accordingly.

 

it will not, the vbios is limiting the card to 80W, doesn't matter about the power supply.
However 150W seems a lot, I can't see an external power source for the card, is all the power carried by the flex cable ?

 

I don't know enough about the topic so I am just speculating. Were we actually able to confirm that the 80W limitation is in vbios? Ionising_Radiation couldn't go past 80W, and he flashed the vbios with 90W which didn't work either. So the limit was flashed to 90W but it still didn't change from 80W anywhere. Maybe there is something else limiting the card and not vbios? Can it be bios which dictate limits to the vbios? Bios knows what power adapter is connected. Even with 80W limit GPU + CPU at the same time could go over 180W. I have just T1000 and I have seen my power usage go past 170W. In my opinion it makes a lot of sense to limit GPU to 80W when on 180W brick and have higher limits when 240W one is connected. Of course if this is the case I would had liked Dell to document this somehow. If I could get hand on RTX 5000 this would be probably the first thing I would try.

 

@TheQuentincc you know for a fact that dells ec will limit the gpu power after a certain wattage is drawn too. (This is one reason I don’t like precision’s). A shunt mod is a solution to get more power but how much is the mb gonna limit it too? How much is safe for the mosfets we don’t know. @Ionising_Radiation I hope the mod works for you and you get some decent performance out of it just make sure to cool the mosfets well. These ncp303150 mosfets can really be a nightmare.

 

it is locked at 80W by the video bios, there is no 90W vbios that work on this card, only an 80W, even the 110W from the 7740 doesn't work.

Indeed I think you need to shunt mod the motherboard for high TDP but I think the motherboard is not locked to 80W, maybe 90w or 100w, for exemple the M6700 was locked to 130W but the highest TDP in here was a K5000M of 100W

 

Aren't they relatively reliable? Honest question, what's nightmarish about them?

 

I am sorry if I am missing something or trying to think too complicated way, but from I have read here, @Ionising_Radiation was able to boot with 90W vbios but it was still just 80W. So the vbios worked, or was in use, but pushing to 90W didn't do anything or didn't work in other words as you said. My hypothesis is based on this. It works but does't do what it should so maybe there is something else. Of course there could be one more level of protection or something and we could say that it doesn't work, or maybe if something else is actually overwriting the settings of the vbios like bios checking how much power there is available.

 

I think you have indeed misunderstood my post:

1. I never flashed a 90 W VBIOS;
2. I attempted to flash a 110 W VBIOS from the Precision 7740;
3. This flash failed, and I saw a black screen on boot.