Disclaimer

The modifications described in this article have been successfully made in practice. Each mod was tested by us and helped achieve the desired result. We don’t accept any claims concerning damage to your graphics card or any other PC component after the modification because such problems imply your own mistakes. The author and X-bit Labs are not responsible for any damage inflicted by repeating anything of what is described in this article. We also cannot promise you that your final result will be as good as ours due to the variation in the potential of particular samples of graphics cards.

Warning! Volt-modding, if recognized, makes all warranty obligations void.

You should take up volt-modding if all the following items are true:

• you are definite about how you will do it;
• you are very definite about why you will do it;
• you have soldering skills;
• you are not afraid of losing the warranty;
• you have squeezed the maximum out of your computer, but want more;
• all other methods of overclocking are exhausted.

Before doing any volt-modding, make sure the graphics card is properly cooled (sometimes the standard cooler may be insufficient even for ordinary overclocking).

Ingredients

To modify a GeForce 7950 GX2, you need:

• Multi-turn variable resistors with ratings of 10,000Ohms and 150,000Ohms
• A thin-tipped soldering iron with a power of no higher than 25W
• Spirit-based resin solution or some other non-aggressive flux
• Digital multimeter
• Thin connecting wires
• Lead pencil or conductive lacquer

Potential Problems

Before doing the volt-mod, I want you to be aware of the pitfalls you may encounter while modifying the graphics card.

1. Cooling. I’ve said above what I think of the card’s native cooler. The ideal option for the GeForce 7950 GX2 is liquid cooling, but you need a thin water-block with side fittings due to the specifics of this graphics card. You can take one from the Aucma Cool River kit. It may be hard to install other water-blocks. The connecting chip is an additional headache for the enthusiast because it’s difficult to find and install a proper heatsink for it. Do not forget that the power elements on board need at least additional air cooling, especially if you volt-mod the card.
2. You are sure you’ve got the maximum out of your graphics card? But what CPU do you have? An Athlon 64 Venice clocked at 2.7-2.8GHz or something like that? It’s silly! Upgrade your CPU and you won’t need any volt-mods. I feel that even our Athlon 64 X2 4800+ clocked at 2.8GHz (Toledo, 2x1MB L2 cache) is not quite a good match for a GeForce 7950 GX2, especially if the latter is overclocked. This problem should resolve by itself after the Conroe hits the market and shows its overclocking potential.
3. Do you still keep it in mind that this is a sandwich graphics card? Two separate PCBs with the same design. Of course, you have to modify both PCBs so that you could overclock the GPU and memory on each of them. It is possible that one core will be good at overclocking even without volt-modding while the other will require a voltage increase in order to reach the same frequency. I’m not yet certain as to how to approach this situation. Each sample of the card needs an individual approach I guess.

The volt-mod is the same for both PCBs despite the certain differences in their design.