HowTo:NV40 (Nvidia 6800 Chip) to Quadro 4000 without hardmod
It’s as easy as Step 1, Step 2 and Step 3,
Although this is an old guide I wrote for guru3d.com at some point 2 years ago, I thought I’d give it a quick show. Notice the simplicity of this softmod, all you need to do is enable the professional abilities using riva tuner, then restart, and then reinstall the drivers (and the nvidia forceware will detect what it thinks is the quadro chip). The beautiful thing is the Quadro’s use the EXACT same chipset (nv40), so the performance *should* be identical. The lock as far as I know is only the “strap”, i.e. the drivers installation actually control if you can use the Quadro, there might be other protections once they are loaded so I wouldnt recommend trying to force the quadro drivers out of the nvidia install (probably not possible?) I don’t know you’d have to be an oldskool decompiler duder for this perhaps? Anyway I probably just saved you a few $1000 for something you might already have, if I didnt and your a 3dsmax/maya/cad designer, or are planninng to build a render farm (distributed supercomputer), this may have just saved you a lot of time aswell as money.
Best Wishes.
