I work in 3D graphics and have been looking at moving into GPU rendering, but the cost of the quadro's is just so damn much! I am currently using a k4000 at work, but on my home rig that I am speccing, I am seriously considering this kind of mod. Whilst I'm sure this has been covered in this thread, it's already at 52 pages long(!) so I guess I'll have to ask again;
1) what are the potential pitfalls of this?
2) I am no electrical technician/engineer, so how much will I need to learn to do this? I am willing to put a bit of time into it.
1) Your application may not befit. Modified cards do not have the full feature set of the real Quadros. For example, the SPECviewperf scores are no different from a normal GeForce card, and stereo 3D remains unavailable.
2) For Tesla and Fermi series cards (GeForce 2xx/3xx/4xx) no hardware modification is required - you just need to modify the BIOS by about half a byte. See the link I posted above (or website link under my profile) for more details on that. What cards does your application support for rendering? If it supports GeForce cards, you probably don't need to modify them. If it only supports Quadros, see if it supports Quadro 5000 or 6000. If so, I would suggest you get yourself a relatively cheap 4xx series card (GTX470 or GTX480), and modify them into a corresponding Quadro (470 -> 5000, 480 -> 6000), and see how that fares.
Almost all of us here are mainly interested in the modding to get virtualization features and TCC working (those are the big wins), so if you decide to go down this route, please report your findings/results/before+after results - it would be nice to get some feedback from someone using this for 3D rendering purposes.
Well basically I run 3DS Max, in which the
viewport performance gains between quadro & gtx are pretty huge; but as for 3D rendering the GTX cards are on a par with the high end quadro's to be honest, so that's not really where I'd be looking at getting any benefits. All CUDA enabled cards are supported in the rendering package (VRay) afaik.
I'd purely be doing it so that I can get higher FPS whilst modelling things. I work in architectural visualisation, so (due to high res foliage usually!) I often end up with 10~20 million polygon models, which would grind to a halt on a GTX. I am looking to set up a 3D PC at home, but don't have the kind of budget for a quadro - hence being so interested in these mods.
[Edit]I'm still not entirely convinced that GPU rendering is quite there yet; the main reason being the ram limitations of GPU. The K6000 is the first card I've seen that I've thought would be able to load my scenes without any issues. Sadly, whilst adding more and more GPU's to your rig will speed up the rendering process (sometimes almost realtime), it doesn't have the same effect with the vRAM - no matter how many 4GB cards you stick in, you will only ever have 4GB available because it isn't shared - each card must load all of the assets required to render...
Meaning the k6000's biggest selling point for me (and many others) is the ram available, not the CUDA cores.