 So cryptocurrency mining experienced... Let's call it a downturn... No, let's be honest. A huge crash in 2018. So there is no shortage of great deals to be had on graphics cards that were used for cryptocurrency mining on sites like eBay. But one class of cards that there appears to be no use for other than to melt them down and salvage the gold and other valuable elements is crypto specific cards like this one from Gigabyte. This is a P106. It's actually very similar to a GTX 1060. 6-pin power, dual fan cooler, except for oh one small problem. It doesn't have any display outputs and not only that, but the drivers have been locked down by Nvidia so it can't be used for gaming because these were designed only for cryptocurrency mining. But could this card be used for gaming? Well, Chinese site Taobao has a seller who says they can and is selling them with a modified firmware that they claim will work for $67. That is under a third the price of a GTX 1060 6GB. Will it work? Well, it'd be damned if I know, but I'm sure gonna find out. After this message from our sponsor, Thermaltake. Thermaltake's A500 has a modern minimalistic design and brushed aluminum panels with dual hinge swing tempered glass doors. Check it out today at the link in the video description. So we're not gonna go through the whole process yet because we won't know anything about... Oh, by the way, Anthony is gonna be joining me for this video. Hi. He arranged the whole thing which was apparently like a big hassle getting this thing. Yeah, apparently the seller wouldn't actually ship to Canada. I don't know what the reason was, not sure if it's legal or whatever, but anyway, long story short, Dennis had to contact them directly and in order to get it shipped, they had to put it down as a computer mouse. But it's here and it seems to be exactly what we were expecting. It's as advertised, including all the dust and grime that's built up on it from presumably months of cryptocurrency mining in a dirty warehouse somewhere. Anyway, back to what I was saying before. We're not ready to rock on that just yet because we won't know how it compares to the other ones. Because we won't know how it compares to a regular GTX 1060 unless we go ahead and run one. So this is a run of the mill EVGA GeForce GTX 1060 SuperClaw. Okay, it's not quite run of the mill. So we're gonna run just a quick Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark so that we have a before to compare to our after. Now, we don't need to run a whole suite of benchmarks because we're not comparing cards across different architectures, different brands, or even different GPUs. These are both running the same graphics core on them. So all we need to know is did they cripple it in some meaningful way or is it all just a software lock? And we need to get our drivers installed for this puppy. Speaking of which, both the cards should be 6 gigs. So we should be looking at the full CUDA core count. So I've installed driver version 4.16.16, which is from October. And I'll explain why I did that a little bit later on. But we're gonna go ahead and fire up Shadow of the Tomb Raider. We're running at 1920 by 1080 and at all high, except I turned off motion blur because it's stupid. So here we have it. Average FPS, 68. Okay, you can see the specs of our test bench here. So this is kind of a best case scenario for the 1060. We've got a 9900K in here. And our minimums were... Wow. Oh, yeah, 56. Okay, that makes more sense. Yeah, okay, there we go. So minimums of 56, that's very playable. Here comes the Chinese mining card. Yeah, isn't that a great question? You guys probably couldn't hear that because Brandon was like kind of mumbling. Come on over here, Brandon. Come on, come on, come on. This is cool. How are you going to plug it in if it doesn't have I.O.? So we're not saying that this technique is gonna work for everyone because if your motherboard does not have graphics outputs and your CPU doesn't have an IGPU built into it, you will not be able to do this. But remember how we got FreeSync running off of an Nvidia card before by passing the GPU power through the other card that interfaced with the display? Well, with the modified driver, the theory is we'll be able to do the same thing here, not with FreeSync, mind you, but with the performance of our graphics card being passed through the output of our onboard graphics. This is a technology that didn't really have any reason to exist on desktops on their own, but it's kind of a carryover from laptops that have onboard graphics that they run when they're trying to save power and then high performance graphics that they switch to in games. So, but then because the feature exists, well, we can take advantage of it here. So we're gonna go ahead and install our 416.16 drivers. At least we're going to try. Is this supposed to work? I didn't install that driver. There's a different driver that we need to install. But if this works, then did it work? If this works, then I'm a little confused. I mean, this driver is theoretically already installed on the system. No, okay. So we do have a problem. It's showing up as P106-100 in Device Manager instead of GTX 1060. Well, let's go ahead and let's try, but this is not supposed to work. So I may have jumped the gun here. Yeah, it's showing up as a P106, but the driver fully installed. Okay, Nvidia control panel is there, but it's in display settings that I would switch to it, correct? Right, under GPU or graphics settings down at the bottom there. Graphics settings, there we go. Okay, so let's browse for an app. Options, here we go. High performance, save. Okay. Oh. Oh. So it doesn't pick up a P106 as a high performance GPU option. Well, what happens if we pop open the Nvidia control panel here? You are not currently using a display attached to an Nvidia GPU. All right, Anthony, come on in here. What do we need to do? Okay. And talk to the camera. So, okay. I'll move here. Okay. Let's just, yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay, what do I need to do? There's this little folder on the desktop that you missed, which is fine because it's like in this honeycomb pattern, which is great. It's called mining. Okay. And in there is the actual driver we need. It is modified. But if you try to install that right now, Yeah. Chances are it will error out. Okay. So we need to disable secure boot. Okay, so that we have to restart for. Okay, now the benefit of secure boot is theoretically that it prevents malware from attacking your pre-boot environment. Is that about right? Yeah, but there's been an exploit on that. So this is the boot options menu in the advanced on the BIOS. It's going to change depending on what motherboard or computer you have. Yeah. But long story short, we're going to go into key management. Yeah. Then we're going to go to clear secure boot keys. And it'll be like, do you really want to delete them? Yeah, we do. So now if we go out, it's disabled. I remember the first time I encountered this, I was just absolutely furious because it doesn't even register as a change to the BIOS. No, nothing. Like I was so mad. I was like, what do you mean that's how you disable it? I don't want to delete them forever necessarily. Like it's not really a very clear terminology anyway. Yeah, no. And you can put them back. It's ridiculous. Anyway, long story short, you can turn it off. It's perfectly fine. You can put it back if you want, but we need to turn it off for now. Okay. Now we're back in the PowerShell. We're going to try that command again. So it's PC edit slash. Hello. Slash windows still hasn't figured out how to not take the focus away from a window that I'm actively working on. How is that even possible? It's very rude. Anyway, slash set. Test signing. On. Completed successfully. Yay. Now we need to reboot. What this allows you to do is install drivers that have not been signed. So that means that they may have been modified and might be corrupted. It might cause instability in your system. So it's not generally a good idea, but it is required in this case. One thing I am doing here is I'm going to disable Windows Update. And there's no particular reason other than it annoys me when it tries to reinstall the driver. So I'm just going to go ahead and do that. You should probably turn it back on afterwards if you're doing this. Now we're going to go to device manager. We're going to delete this driver that we installed earlier. Do we have to DDU it or is that good enough? I think this is good enough. We can DDU it. It's probably best practice to DDU it, but YOLO. Anyway. For those not familiar, DDU is a third party driver removal utility that's actually freaking awesome. Go check it out if you ever have a stubborn driver issue. And feel free to throw some support those guys way. They've been at it for a very long time. It's a really useful tool. I've used it many, many times. Here it is. So this is what happens. Normally you would get an error saying that the driver is corrupted or modified or something like that. Go ahead. You can still explain it. OK. But now what it came up with is this software is unsigned. So it just came up with a warning because you've got test signing mode on. It means that you're basically for Windows, overall Windows knows a driver developer. So you're installing that driver anyway. Again, if you see that under normal circumstances, you should probably not do that. But it is required here. Do we have any way of knowing that this driver is not installing malware on this system? No. OK. Yeah, I haven't actually looked at it. So to be clear, what we're doing here, we are actually not recommending that you try it at home. Graphics driver installed. So we'll just close that. Now we want to do is look at this. It still looks like P106. But if we go into driver, it'll say not digitally signed here. OK. So that's what we expect. That's what we expect. This is the not signed driver. It's running. So now we go into our display settings. Shadow the Tomb Raider. Shadow the Tomb Raider. Oh, we might need to reboot. Yeah, I came up with the methodology here about two hours ago. And Wansho started three minutes ago. Oh, that's cool. We're like 1000 percent seat of our pants right now. So we DDU'd it this time, which it turns out was probably a necessary step. And we're ready to go again. So we're going into here and there it is. High performance GPU, Nvidia P106 100. So let's make that the default and shadow the Tomb Raider. Here we go. Remember, guys, it's like under 70 US dollars. OK, that's the important part of this. I'm so excited right now. It's worth remembering that this card was basically destined for the recycling bin. Exactly like it could not game. There was no possible way. Well, could it be used for compute other than game or other than mining? Yeah, but it's a 1060 class GPU. So it's not even worth the PCI Express slot you put it in for that kind of a workload. But here it is. Maybe a new lease on life. And just so you guys know, there's no there's no smoke and mirrors. Here's our HDMI cable. There it is. Going into the bottom of our monitor and directly into the back of the motherboard. There is nothing on this card. That is looking pretty good, actually. That might actually have been higher than the SuperClock. Oh, that is looking real nice. Gaming on a graphics card with no outputs. Feels good, man. Well, we missed the moment when it came up, but that's fine. We've got our result. And actually, this is as good as I would have expected. So we fell four FPS short in our averages. And then for our minimums, we only fell three FPS short. Now, you will see a slight difference in performance when you're running the compute or the rendering of the game on one GPU and then outputting it via another one. And this is pretty much consistent with what I would expect from either that or the difference in clock speed between a SuperClock and just a regular 1060 card. So it worked. Yeah, pretty sweet. But we are not saying at all that we would recommend this. So, Anthony, there weren't really instructions from the seller on Taobao. Where did you end up getting the driver you used? Shockingly enough, from our forum. There are actually a lot of different forum posts about this. Long story short, there was one person who included a doc and a link to a Google Drive folder with all the stuff we needed, which was great. Thank you very much. With all that said, that is not a recommendation for any of you to go download that because there's no way of knowing when you're installing an unsigned driver. If anything has been changed, other than the things that they said they changed, unless you're qualified to go through and examine exactly what it is they changed, in which case you could just go and do it yourself. So right now, there's really no path to avoiding the scrap heap for these P106. And if I recall correctly, there were GTX 1070 equivalents as well. Yeah, I think so. Cards. So really, the onus is on Nvidia to do something about it. Because while I'm not expecting them to run out and make this a supported use case for any motherboard with onboard video, there's no reason that this couldn't work if they weren't specifically locking it out. So I'm not asking them to support it. I'm just asking them to not specifically disable it because this is a serious e-waste problem. Literally thousands, tens of thousands of these cards, just useful for absolutely nothing anymore when gamers could be gaming on them. Now the next stage is getting ourselves one of those fancy solder alignment things that Rossman has and putting an HDMI port on it. I wonder if it would work. I can't think of any reason it wouldn't. Does it have the actual chips for it? I'm sure there's... I don't think these guys modified their boards very much. So all that's left now is to thank PIA for sponsoring this video. Private Internet Access lets you use the Internet privately. It allows you to get around government censorship, access geolocked content, and even do things you might not think of, like save money on flights. So you can set your VPN to make it seem like you're shopping for tickets from somewhere else. They've got tons of great features. They don't log user data. They've got servers in... I forget how many countries it is, but it's like hundreds or thousands of servers or something like that. Whatever, I'm sure all these talking points are being shown to you guys. It's freaking awesome and it's affordable. So check out PIA today at the link in the video description. So thanks for watching, guys. If you disliked this video, you know where that button is. But if you liked it, hit like, get subscribed, or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description. Also down there is our merch store, which has cool shirts like that one and our community forum, which you should totally join.