In 2011, ijsf posted the results of his research to turn a NVIDIA GeForce GTX480 into a much more expensive NVIDIA Tesla C2050. In short, the NVIDIA driver checks the PCI Express device ID of the card which denotes which type of card it is. The device ID is determined by a set of soft straps that are stored in the firmware of the board. NVIDIA learned from this and changed the way how cards are detected for the GeForce 600 and 700 series by partially hard strapping the device ID. This means that it is no longer possible to modify the entire Device ID by changing the firmware, and hardware modifications are now a necessity. User gnif posted how he turned a GeForce GTX690 into a Quadro K5000, by modifying, adding, and removing several resistors on the board. In that topic, other people also managed to convert Fermi GF1xx and Kepler GK10x based graphics cards to more expensive, professional cards, but no one has managed to convert the GeForce GTX780 or GTX Titan based on the Kepler GK11x GPU.
Hard-, firm-, and software
