ATI Radeon 9550 Overclocking and BIOS modding FAQ Guide

[tkpenalty]

Omgz.... voltmod instructions PLEASE???

So far on the net, i haven't found a single trace of sapphire voltmod instructions, doesnt anyone have any?

 

[kevinarjun]

HI modders i Have a ATI Radeon Powercolor 9550 GameFX board Series 128bit 256mb...Can you help me to get the proper bios file for this card...Please help...I use ATI oveclocking tool and i can overclock upto core 448.20 mem 246.60...and it works like a charm...is it necessary to change flash my bios or its enough...Please help...Thanks a lot....!!!

 

[Munkul]

(omg i look like a n00b)

EDIT: Thats not 9550!!! 9550 is an entirely different GPU compared to the 9500!!!!!!

oops, soz

idea though: maybe some of the voltage regulators are the same on both cards. see if any of the chip names match up with those on that page, see if the connections make sense to you, and then try it.

 

[Xwz]

I have an ATI Radeon 9550, but with 64bit mem interface

Could somebody help me , and telm me if there are any bios from upper video cards for reflashing my video card into something better????

Sorry for my poor english!!

Thx for passing by!!

 

[tkpenalty]

Which type of fan cooling is better? Sucking air off the card or blowing air onto the card?

 

[Munkul]

as far as i know, your average 40/60/80/92/120mm fans are designed to push air, not pull it. therefore, its always better to have fans blowing air instead of sucking it, although they suck air quite well too

 

[Jimmy 2004]

Which type of fan cooling is better? Sucking air off the card or blowing air onto the card?

Blowing is better, it pushes cool air onto the components and forces the warm air away. Sucking the air would achieve such an efficient flow in most cases. You also want to ensure you have a flow of air through your case.

 

[tkpenalty]

Woot after buying some generic thermal paste i can overclock another 20mhz...

Think of what i can get with artic silver

EDIT: Now my 9550 is @530/280 (damn ram is pissing me off) w00t. Just a question, I have a huge 80mm fan installed on it and most of the heat it generates is blown away, im finding it odd that it doesn't even get hot (tested with probe) because the heat is blown away. Do you guys think it has anything to do with voltages?

 

[KneeDeep]

Am I missing somthing?

Ok, Ive read through 14 pages here and Im still confused. I have a ATI RADEON 9550 256mb ddr....
Ive found things relating to Abit, powercolor, asus and ect. But what about ATI? I dont know what bois file is needed to mod this card.
Ive read the begging of this tread and it just say flash with the bios that pertain to your card but I dont know which one pertains to my card.
as I understand it, I can flash this 9550 to a 9600 or 9600pro? I dont want to do anything befor im certine I get the right one. And I just dont get it.
Sorry for having to resort to asking this as so many people have here but Im not new to flashing bios and framware and this is pissing me off. I get pissed when I dont understand things.
Any help would be great. Agin I have a ATI RADEON 9550 256mb ddr AGP 8x/4x.
And just so were clear I understand how to do the flash it self I just dont know what file to flash with.
THANX!
Heres are the specs I get from ATITOOL 0.26
Device Id: 4153
Chip Name: RV350
Host Interface AGP
Catalyst Ver: 6.11
Memory Size: 256mb
Memory type: DDR
Memory Bus Width: 128bit
Active Pipelines: 4
Default GPU Clock: 250.00MHZ
Default Mem. Clock: 196.00MHZ
Config_Die_Fuses: 0x0
Config_Substrate_fuses: 0x0
Config_Rom_Fuses: 0x0
GB_pipe_select: 0xB03E7E40

 

[tkpenalty]

I need a - 9600PRO 256MB Infineon 4.0 Bios

 

[jacdav]

Flashrom Says Bios Locked / Solved

Is there anyhope to flash gigabyte 9550 to 9600 ? I tried and it say bios is locked, how to unlock ? Plz show me some clues, thx

Flashrom would not flash my card. It said something like 'bios lock not temoved'.
Run 'flashrom.exe -i' , it will say yes for locked. I spent three days trying to figure out how to unlock my bios. I even cut the WP pin on the bios and drew a trace across the top to the power pin in case it was hardware locked (I now think it was unessecary. Take out your card and look at the part number on the bios, it is an 8 pin chip on the front side. My bios was made by 'SST'. The flashing utilities show it as a 'ST' part, completely different company. Atiflash has a -sst option, it worked on mine.
Use 'atiflash.exe -sst -f -p 0 newbios.bin' Atiflash also has a fix for atmel bioses.

I have a Chiefmax Radeon 9550 128MB that I got for $35 retail including shipping. The picture on the retailer's site is a different card. The actual card is close to the 9550 reference design and has a spiral HSF. Atitool shows artifacts at the default clocks, but games don't. I have to drop the mem down to 196 for artifacts to disappear in atitiool. It uses Elixir 5ns ddr. I tried mem timings from other cards that use the same chips, I still get artifacts at 200 mem. My thermaltake ram sinks are very stuck to my radeon 9000.

With lowered mem clocks, atitool went up to 415 core without artifacts. At 417 core, vpu recovery kicked in. I'm trying out different bioses now. I think I'll just modify the clocks and device id of my original bios with rabit. I'm going to settle for 350 core/196mem. If I killed it, I'd have to use my 9000 again. Changing the memory size in rabit does not seem to work properly, also be sure to get a 128bit bios. I have used bioses with a device id of 4150/rv350, but catalyst and atitool show it as 4152/rv360. I think atiflash changes the old pro device id to the xt id.

 

[Mrs varsnia]

hey, im another person wanting help coz they buggered something up.
So here goes.

I have a ATI sapphire Radeon 9550 with mezza memory. Well.. it says "Mezza 054be then underneath z2s56d4octp-65" (Just in case for what ever reason you need to know)

Anyway I flashed my card to a 9600... the the Mobo's bios started going slow... so thought stuff this an realized i didn't back up my bios.. Complete fool i know. =( Managed to find another bios that looked similar to mine. Flashed with that and it said error something cant remember what. Anyway the bios went back to normal everything booted fine says its a 9550 again.
thought my pc was back to how it was...or so i thought.
now my pc keeps hanging on things like Ff IE an..well... anything really. or the icons in the top right of Any program even explorer will turn white as if it aint responing then it will come back after like 10-20sec's.

Then i got rid of the drivers and used these omega drivers.(wish i knew about them before)
Which btw give me 40+fps on guild wars compared to the12-20fps if im lucky with the normal drivers)

Any idea what i can do to stop this hanging? Hope you guys can help. Don't really fancy buying a new gfx card. Aint had this one that long =banghead:

 

[ferynov]

you can try using other bios.... flash dflash again

 

[Mrs varsnia]

flash Dflash?

That a typo or is there something called Dflash? if so..what is it?

If i want to Google what type of RAM i have.. how would i do that? Coz i assume that if i flash my card with something with Different RAM it wont act the same as it would with my default bios.

 

[ferynov]

typo happy flahsing... plz use force command parameter [atiflash help] ......

 

[Mrs varsnia]

Thats what i used the -f parameter. =( any more ideas

 

[tkpenalty]

Mezza 5.0 eh? I can get hold of the bios for you.

 

[Mrs varsnia]

Mezza 5.0
How you know that?
An if you do get it can you let me know. I NEED that bios

ud be so so so much of a great help an actually save me buying a new card.

EDIT. Ok looked under the bios collection here again an noticed that all the 9550 mezza ones are 5.0 So anyway i tried a 9550Se ( duno what the se stands for ) Seems to work a lot better then it did b4. just sometimes a slight hang. but like i said. no where near as bad as before.

 

[tkpenalty]

Yep. Its only in the 5.0 Flavour, cept' don't use the 9550SE Bios, because you will brick your card doing it (unless you do the ultra-tiring hot-swapping).

 

[Mrs varsnia]

Im still using the 9550SE bios an i still get the slight hangs in xp. but if i use vista i get no hangs works fine.. plus i get like 40-50fps where as without it been flashed id get 25tops ( On this game i often play on both vista and xp )

 

[Towly]

Sorry I know its in the wrong categorie of Cards but, I've overclocked my Radeon 9200SE from (200/166) to (300/230) it runs ok and then 20 min. later its raining with missing artifacts on my games. Cooling that i use is just a 80mm case fan blowing air on it thats all.
Its an old card so i'm letting it die speed fully and quietly.LOL...

 

[emresumengen]

Sapphire 9550 bios mod (different approach?)

Hi all, and thanks for all the info

I've been reading for a long while and finally I had the chance to do smth positive and want to share it...

I have a Sapphire Radeon 9550 with ELPIDA ram on it. (The following are the only info I could get from the card, nothing else on Google)
SAPPHIRE
R9550 256M GDDR2 AGP VGA/TVO/DVI-I
PN 87-1C83-01-SA
SKU# 11032-37

ELPIDA TWN
E2516AB-6E-E
0615A9293

Made in China
A064720004000

I nearly tried all the 9600Pro bioses on the archive, then the NonPro ones. Unfortunately, none worked for me. I guess the RAM chips onboard are 5.0 (as they work at 200mhz). With AtiTool I had it working stable at 390/280Mhz but no bios could work even lower than those speeds.

But, I wanted my card to be seen as a 9600 so much (that I run other OSes than Windows and also need some extra Mhz in them too), I came up with another idea. I dumped my original bios (attached) and edited it with RaBit-2.0a. It gives an "BIOS CRC is not correct" error upon loading it, but just passed. Then I changed the original device ID from 4153 to 4150 (which I know is the ID of a 9600Pro - Powercolor) and left the SubVendorID alone. Also changed the core and memory clocks to around 300/240Mhz. Left the memory latency at 4.0 (which I had no idea about, but know that real 9600 bioses had a value of 1.0) and saved the new bios and flashed the card with it.

On the next reboot, Windows behaved as if I replaced my gfx card and I had to reinstall all the Catalyst drivers (I wanted to try 7.4 tho). Then, after a reboot, It's just running fine. Both AtiTool and CCC show the card as a 9660, running at speed I had set in the bios. Running MacOS-X 10.4.8 on the PC, I saw that, it also sees the card as a 9600 XT...

So, I seem to have accomplished my aim, somehow. But, it still has the overclock-lock.

That said, I'm still searching for a compatible "original" 9600 bios for my Sapphire.

Good luck, good oc'in...

 

[dazzi]

I just want to post my Radeon's specs.
GeCube Radeon 9550XT Extreme Platinum Edition.
Stock:
400mhz core RV360
500mhz DDR Speed Samsung 2.8ns RAM 128mb
4 Pipelines
Mine OC'd
480mhz Core
600mhz Memory
This is I think the top 9550 you can find overall its good it runs every game out some on only low but most of them on high.

 

[tkpenalty]

Wow i look back at this thread and realise how much of a noob i was before...

HOLY SHIT@ CLOCKSPEED.

reason why u cant get past 480 is because of the voltage... ull need a voltmod, but as the criminal trodas would say "crappy caps = death"

 

[wiz_heero]

voltmode is risky...