A Reddit user claims to have found a way to "upgrade" existing GeForce GTX 680 to NVidia’s upcoming GeForce GTX 770 by flashing its BIOS.
The hack/exploit/fix/trick takes advantage of the fact that NVidia’s upcoming GeForce GTX 770 is in fact a GeForce GTX 680 with slightly higher clock rates. Using the modified BIOS and its accompanying .inf file, a reference-design GeForce GTX 680 would run at 1059 MHz core, 1125 MHz maximum GPU Boost, and 1752 MHz (7.00 GHz GDDR5-effective) memory, yielding a memory bandwidth of 224 GB/s. All in all, this translates to 5% to 7% performance improvement.
"The upcoming GTX 770 is a GTX 680 in disguise," explained nvfan104 on Reddit. "NVIDIA has gently revised the GK104 architecture, mostly with process improvements, but the 770 is basically the same beast! Which is good for us enthusiasts. :)"
"By flashing the included BIOS (.bin) to your board, then dropping the included .inf file into the 320.00 driver package before installation... you too can have a GTX 770 weeks before it's released!," he added. "Please note it has to be a 320.xx driver, as support for the 700 Series was added in the DLLs around this time."
The BIOS file can be found here. You can use it at your own risk, but don’t be fooled: you can achieve the same effect by overclocking your GeForce GTX 680 directly to the values mentioned above. As for the name change, it is the result of the modified .inf file and it has no bearing on the card’s performance. In fact, you can edit the file in any text editor and make it report the card as GeForce TITAN or whatever.
