Volt Mod Guide: NVIDIA 8600GTS

Juice up your mid-range NVIDIA DX10 card for peak 3D performance.

Voltage modifications, or as many people simply refer to them, volt mods, can either make you excited with anticipation of unlocked performance and crazy cooling or nervous at the thought of running out-of-spec and possibly dangerous voltages into your new, expensive and totally awesome piece of PC hardware.

This article will cover the basics of voltage modifications. This will include the purpose, the after effect and the unique process of actually performing a voltage mod. Next these concepts will be implemented on an NVIDIA-based ASUS EN8600GTS Top Edition graphics card.

Disclaimer
The following acts of extreme computing, uber geek skills and general amazement will void your warranty. Other potential risks include failure of hardware and potential self harm. Only attempt the following if you feel the leet vibe and awesome skills to pull it off. Atomic and Haymarket Media take no responsibility for attempts that result in broken bits and injured people.

When it comes to modifications of hardware, the enthusiast crowd ranges from your average user tweaking for personalisation through to your performance nut that wants to make piece of kit hit such a staggering level of performance that there is no care if it happens to die!

Essentially, when it comes down to modifications there are soft-mod and hard-mods. Soft-mods are software based modifications of the hardware. This could be a Windows tweak, modified BIOS, a third party application that unlocks performance or any other means of software based changes.

A hard-mod, on the other hand, is a hardware-based modification. This means physically changing, removing or adding pieces to the hardware to increase performance. The majority of performance enhancements that modify the voltage control on hardware are a hard-mod. There are exceptions to the rule, such as manually setting voltages through modified BIOS for 7800 series GPUs, these are however not only fairly irregular in existence (dependent on hard configuration) but also never quite as definitive as a hard-mod, be it soldering, penciling or penning, two points.