Today I made a post asking which video card was best for me, but someone brought up an interesting topic. They mentioned how video card producers lock or make some pipelines dormant. What is the point of this, and why do they do it?
Basically what they do, for one series of cards, is make a bunch of the same GPU core. But, instead of catering only to the high-end market, they'll disable x number of pipelines. That way is has reduced performance, so they can justify selling it for less.
Now, a lot of times the reason they disable it is that the core may not be able to WORK with all those pipelines. Slight defect somewhere, or just a bad run. So they'll disable them. Other times they'll do it just to keep up supply for the lower-end cards. That's why you can enable the pipelines on a good majority of cards - either they're fine and were purposefully disabled or they'll glitch once in a GREAT while and you'll never notice it. But they do it because if you dish out buko bucks for a card, it damn well better work 100% of the time.
Its basically to save the manufacture money, so they dont have to produce two or three differnet chips, which in turn gives them more profit. and quite a few times the only thing seperating the cheaper model card from the more expensive version is a different bios. which is somewhat easily done, if you can follow directions. like in the radeon X800 Pro VIVO you can flash it to XTPE specs in about 20 min. and save yoursel a hundred or so dollars
Successfully unlocking the four pipes separating an X800 Pro from an X800 XT and overclocking a bit gives a huge performance increase for free, instead of paying $100 more for the real thing. It's just not guaranteed.
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Now, a lot of times the reason they disable it is that the core may not be able to WORK with all those pipelines. Slight defect somewhere, or just a bad run. So they'll disable them. Other times they'll do it just to keep up supply for the lower-end cards. That's why you can enable the pipelines on a good majority of cards - either they're fine and were purposefully disabled or they'll glitch once in a GREAT while and you'll never notice it. But they do it because if you dish out buko bucks for a card, it damn well better work 100% of the time.