Wow this thread is quite old!
Well a few days ago I decided to buy a cheap 660 Ti for $65 (Asus 660Ti-DC2-2gd5) in order to try out some of these mods here and learn more about graphics cards for virtualization purposes. I thought I would share some of my findings:
1. Modding into a quadro did not provide any performance benefits whatsoever. (SPECViewperf score was pretty bad especially in SNX) Mosaic and other workstation specifc features did not seem to show up in the Nvidia control panel, and even if they did show, they didn't work.
2. Modding into a grid K2 card, I was unable to get vGPU working in ESXi 6.5, but it might be possible in XenServer. I don't plan on bothering with vGPU on this old hardware anyway. If it is possible on newer consumer cards like the GTX 1060 that would be really cool to experiment with.
3. Using the card as-is unmodded works just fine with VMWare Horizon and I was able to get my 3 monitor thin client setup working with NVENC support. I tested this out with both the 660 Ti and a 1060 6GB along with an HDMI Dummy plug. Modding into a grid K2 allows you to bypass the need for any dummy plugs in horizon. This means that any consumer card should work just fine. There will be a file you need to install in order to get NVENC support if it doesn't already work with Horizon, however. Feel free to PM me for more info on this.
4. I found some old ATI FirePro v5700s and they pretty much destroyed the GTX660 Ti in certain SPECviewperf tests.
5. There are some surface mount components near the die on the GPU package and they had some different values... I wonder if changing those can enable some features.
6. I would have been better off just buying a cheap card like a 1050 for $40 more and get better performance in Blender and Premiere Pro
Huge thanks to everyone on this thread for all the contributions to this modding experiment. It was a pretty fun experience modding this card into all kinds of things. Well now that I have a card sitting around, I'm always interested in more cool graphics card experiments!
Mods done:
660 Ti --> K5000, Grid K2, Tesla K10, 670