Out of all the surprises that the GeForce GTX 600 Series gave us, the limited voltage overclock by NVIDIA of these cards was definitely the biggest one. Of course, it didn’t took long before manufacturers here in Taipei (EVGA especially) came out with a solution called the EVBot. Nevertheless, NVIDIA didn’t seem to like it very much and simply gave a red light to EVGA on that product forcing the company to remove it from the market.
What is the EVBot
The EVBot is simply a homemade solution developed by EVGA to resolve the voltage overclocking issue inherent to the GTX600 Graphic cards series. The dives allows you once linked to the card, to control again the voltage as you would be doing usually through softwares while overclocking the card.
NVIDIA still supports Overclocking?
From the beginning it has been clear that NVIDIA isn’t the kind of company that gives too much liberties to its industrial partners. True, NVIDIA designs cards (reference models) and often ships these designs with the chip to its industrial partners (Gigabyte, EVGA, MSI, Spahire etc) and allows them to build custom boards inspired by the reference design.
These custom boards tend to have better performances due to circuitry optimization and increased component quality, but no matter what, before being able to sell a custom graphics card, manufacturers need to obtain the so called “green light” by NVIDIA. This is a total control by NVIDIA of what can be done or not with its GPUs. If they don’t like it, the product can’t be sold. That’s it!
Jacob Freeman of EVGA explains after several complaints to Overclockers.com forums:
“Unfortunately our Classifield 680 new cards will not come with support EVBot. If there are any questions or concerns send them to us directly to us for a solution, “
“Unfortunately we no longer allowed to include this feature. It was removed in order to comply 100% with the rules of NVIDIA GeForce GTX products to sell, the voltage control is not permitted by any external device. “
NVIDIA Control, how far can it go?
Such control by NVIDIA over tech partners whereabout is justified in a matter of assuring product quality, brand image and warranty triggers. If features might endanger the life of a product, that feature might not be welcome.
Nevertheless, too much control and limitations pushes enthusiasts and manufacturers to try out things as the EVBot to counter excessive limitations. Innovation by hardware manufacturer in such case is slightly limited to the solely adaptation of the reference PCB and improvement of the card design. Overclocking in such case stays out, waiting for a brighter future.
Source: Overclockers
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