The $999 NVIDIA GeForce GTX ‘Titan’ GPU Purchased for £25 with Error Code 43

In 2013, NVIDIA unleashed a goliath of a GPU for $999, known as the “Titan”. Back then, this was the card to beat, with single GPU core performance rivalling even multiple GPU performance. The 6GB of VRAM was double that of its contemporaries and set new heights in terms of single GPU performance, but also in raising the price ceiling hitting nearly $1000. This helped set the now familiar premium pricing for the latest flagship GPU tech, that we just kind of expect today for the top tier of graphics cards on the market – especially from NVIDIA.

I quite fancied one of these legendary cards for my retro computing collection given the historical significance of this GPU Titan and to my surprise I spotted one for auction with only a few hours left to bid. The current bidding was extremely low and without any expectation of winning the item, I put in my random cheeky cheap as chips bid. To my complete and utter shock as the ebay notification came in, I had actually won the Titan GPU for what I would consider a very low amount of £25. The card did have one rather fundamental flaw though that would have put off a number of prospective buyers. It had a “code 43” error, rendering it pretty much useless.

Error Code 43 showed in the properties under the Windows Device Manager area, clearly shown in the auction with a screenshot. This essentially means Windows has stopped the device because it has reported problems, commonly associated with hardware issues, driver failures or software conflicts. Drivers and software may be easily resolved, but hardware failures less likely.

The card would be usable in a very limited fashion, but only to view a desktop running at a much slower speed than usual and gaming would be totally out of the question. I had a hunch though, that it might be something as simple as re-flashing the GPU BIOS, but you never truly know until you just give it a go. It was a risk, but worse case scenario I would have a really nice display piece of GPU history and visually it looked in great condition with its silver casing and ‘TITAN’ text for all to see.

Feature	GTX TITAN	GTX 680	GTX 780 Ti	GTX TITAN Black	AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Ed.
Architecture	Kepler (GK110)	Kepler (GK104)	Kepler (GK110)	Kepler (GK110)	GCN 1.0
CUDA/Stream Cores	2688	1536	2880	2880	2048
Base Clock	837 MHz	1006 MHz	875 MHz	889 MHz	1050 MHz
Boost Clock	876 MHz	1058 MHz	928 MHz	980 MHz	1100 MHz
VRAM	6GB GDDR5	2GB GDDR5	3GB GDDR5	6GB GDDR5	3GB GDDR5
Memory Bus	384-bit	256-bit	384-bit	384-bit	384-bit
Memory Bandwidth	288.4 GB/s	192.2 GB/s	336 GB/s	336 GB/s	288 GB/s
TDP	250W	195W	250W	250W	250W
Release Price (USD)	$999	$499	$699	$999	$499
US Release Date	February 19, 2013	March 22, 2012	November 7, 2013	February 18, 2014	June 22, 2012

The appropriately named Titan of power and indeed size arrived a few days later, with its original box and probably most of the contents – crucially with the GPU well packaged inside. It did indeed look in a fantastic condition, so all I could do now was to place the rather large GPU inside my modern gaming PC and see how it would fair.

I excitedly and yet with some trepidation, inserted the GPU into my computer’s PCI Express slot and awaiting the results as I powered on the machine…

Power had certainly reached the card, with the GEFORCE GTX lettering in an eye popping green lighting up right in front of me.

It did indeed detect the NVIDIA Geforce GTX Titan in Windows 11 and unfortunately also present was the dreaded Error Code 43 issue in Device Manager. This is when the BIOS flashing adventure would begin…

Curious, I installed and ran the GPU-Z application to see what information this would divulge. My hopes were raised a little as a lot of data was indeed still showing from the Titan, however there were also problems here. Memory size = 0MB, Bandwidth Unknown, Bus Width also depressingly Unknown. The computing technologies were also devoid of positive ticks, with only OpenGL 1.1 recognised as supported.

Flashing the NVIDIA GeForce GTX BIOS with NVFlash

There is a software application called NVFlash, which works under Windows and Linux to flash NVIDIA graphics cards and just like GPU-Z available from the same website TechPowerUp. Handily, you can also download GPU BIOS files, which can be filtered to find the graphics card you are searching for.

Seems simple enough I thought, so after downloading NVFlash and the BIOS file which I needed for the re-flashing – I was set for the journey to come, hopefully.

First I backed up the current GPU BIOS using GPU-Z as a precaution. I also renamed the downloaded BIOS from TechPowerUp to titan.rom to make my life a little easier when typing it out.

Using Window PowerShell I ran the NVFlash tool using the command:

.\nvflash64 -6 titan.rom

I was presented with an error immediately:

ERROR: Adapter InfoROM FS structure is corrupted. InfoROM filesystem recovery (–repairfs) might be required before a FW update. Aborting flash!

I ran the –repairfs command as suggested by the tool, but this failed also. This sadly led me on a one hour goose chase. I found advice suggesting that I would have better luck not within Windows itself but booting from a USB drive to access a command prompt. I tried a couple of USB boot images, but my UEFI motherboard BIOS was causing me aggravation and wouldn’t boot from the stick.

I then came across advice online that mentioned you didn’t even need to create your own USB boot disk, and instead with a for example Windows 10 DVD install disc, you could use that instead. When you reach the first setup screen (the first dialogue box where you would normally select Next, you instead hold down together Shift + F10 on the keyboard and behold the beauty of a terminal-like prompt allowing you to begin typing your commands.

Locating NVFlash once more, I ran the command again…

.\nvflash64 -6 titan.rom

The same error appeared. Further frantic searching suggested that this was now a hardware fault and the GPU would have to be returned. My 2013 era Titan was certainly no longer under its warranty period so I almost accepted the card’s fate of becoming a non-functional display piece only.

You know when you have a niggle, an annoying internal itch that will torment you until you try one last thing… Well that is indeed what I did, I wanted to give it at least one more shot before I admitted defeat.

NVFlash 64-bit (nvflash64) had me thinking. What if an older version of the tool was available, not 64-bit. Once more I went hunting and found an older version on guru3d.

With this 10 year old version of NVFlash, I ran the command:

.\nvflash -6 titan.rom

It worked! To my stunned surprise, I had confirmation that the BIOS had re-flashed. The BIOS was exactly the same as the version previously held on the GPU, but that was fine – it just needed to be replaced with a known working BIOS for this card.

Eagerly I restarted the computer and with a hop and a skip over to Device Manager the good news kept coming…

The dreaded error code 43 had gone, replaced by the ‘This device is working properly’ text. I have to confess, I did fling my arm into the air with clenched fist in celebration at this moment of realisation I may have just fixed this £25 Titan GPU!

it didn’t stop there either, reviewing GPU-Z once more and now all the information was correctly populated…

Memory Size = 6144MB, Bus Width = 384bit, Bandwidth = 288.4GB/s. Computing Technologies all ticked, except for Ray Tracing which of course was a technology not ever on this GPU so an expected result.

I immediately felt the new speed within the Windows desktop environment and rushed over (with a mouse pointer) to any game I could find. Unreal Tournament 3 was the chosen candidate for this gaming test, and it ran beautifully.

So in the end, perseverance paid off. I now have a fully working EVGA branded NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan from 2013 purchased for just £25. So what next? Well I feel another Windows XP build coming on and this should be a wonderfully powerful GPU for anything of this era. I can’t wait to make a start!