My GeForce 6200...Do I have an engineering sample?

[Bires]

The BIOS on my new (two weeks ago) MSI GF 6200 says " Engineering BIOS only - not for retail use"

Anyone else seen this?

I also noticed that my card has the on-die heat sensor enabled. I didn't think anything about it, until I learned that this feature is supposed to be hidden and should have to be unlocked by a bios hack.

http://www.doomedpc.com/drupal-4.5.2/?q=/node/20

I guess I'll be hacking into my HTPC tomorrow...to either unlock a really fast/cheap card, or cook it. :)

[PrObLy]

That's pretty interesting.

I know I've spoken out against unlocking the pipelines in the 6800, but I would give it a shot in the 6200 because from all that I've gathered (er, all that google has told me), these aren't simply failed 6600 cores but rather just have the pipelines masked. (A lot of speculation says that many of the standard 6800's are failed GT cores)

All of the information I've been able to gather says that they've had no problem after unlocking this one and a lot of the people have been getting pretty nice over clocks.

Let us know how it works out for you and what kind of stable clock and memory speeds you can get it at. My poor Ti-4600 is starting to die (for the third time) so this might be a good card to hold me over until I eventually build a new rig.

It is pretty odd that this "Engineering BIOS" came stock on the card. Is it possible that it's that third party BIOS mentioned in the article and somehow you got a repackaged card? Pretty neat that it has the heat sensor enabled.

Good luck!