Making Changes Permanent (nVidia-Based Cards)

As we mentioned before, all changes made to your video card aren’t permanent. This happens because the video card's BIOS will instruct the VGA to run on its default configuration every time you reboot your PC. That’s why you need to keep PowerStrip loaded: it will load your personalized configurations and reconfigure your video card every time you load Windows. If you shut down PowerStrip your video card will use the BIOS default configuration again.

You can edit the video card BIOS and make your overclocking permanent, if you want to. With this option, you won’t need to load PowerStrip anymore and the video card will always work under the clocks you programmed at its BIOS.

But don’t worry: in the future you can revert this change and make your video card to run back on its original configuration.

For doing this you will need two programs, a BIOS editor (used to edit the BIOS contents, i.e. to change your video card clock rates) and a BIOS programmer (used to save the new modified BIOS to the video card). The programs you will need depends if your video card is based on an nVidia or on an ATI chip. Below we will show you how to modify your nVidia-based video card BIOS, and on next page we will talk about on how to do the same thing on an ATI-based video card.

For your nVidia-based card you will need two programs: NiBiTor, which is a BIOS editor, and nvFlash, which is a BIOS programmer. Both can be downloaded from our download section. Please download the latest version available.

Run NiBiTor and first backup the BIOS your video card is currently using. So if in the future you want to restore your video card original BIOS, just update your video card BIOS this file.

Go to Tools, Read BIOS, Select device and select your video card. Then go to Tools, Read BIOS, Read into File. Give a name for your file. This will backup your video card BIOS to a file.

Then go to File, Open BIOS and load the BIOS file you’ve just saved. You will see a screen similar to Figure 22.

click to enlarge
Figure 22: Editing your nVidia-based video card BIOS.

As you can see, there are two places you will want to change, “Core” and “Memory”. Just type in the maximum core and memory clocks you know your video card can run stable.

After editing these two fields, save the BIOS into a new file, by going to File, Save BIOS. Now you have a BIOS file with your overclocked settings.

The next step is to create a bootable floppy disk. Go to http://www.bootdisk.com, select a DOS boot disk, download the .exe file and run it to create your bootable floppy. Copy nvFlash.exe and your overclocked BIOS file to the floppy disk. Then boot your PC using this floppy (you may need to enter the motherboard setup and change the boot order).

At the command prompt, type:

nvflash file_name_of_your_overclocked_bios

Restart your computer and your work is done.

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