Sapphire R9 290x bios edit

[g0rg0r]

Hey, I've recently bought an R9 290x that consistently black screens on both windows and linux using stable and beta amd drivers.

On page 76 of this thread on sapphire's forums, user Cellar Door says that the cards have lower voltages than what they should have.

https://www.sapphireforum.com/showthread.php?33437-R9-290-Black-Screen-Fix!!!&p=279728#post279728

Can I use RBE to edit a bios rom for my r9 290x card and up the base voltage and then flash my 290x card with it to fix this issue?

How would you fix this? I'm sort of new to messing with graphics cards.

 

[m0nt3]

last i checked, RBE did not support R9 290 series. Out of curiosity, have you shutdown your computer and flipped the BIOS switch on your card, possibly has a different BIOS (My R9 290 DCII did, had the default BIOS for reference card with different fan profile) might just be worth a shot.

 

[g0rg0r]

last i checked, RBE did not support R9 290 series. Out of curiosity, have you shutdown your computer and flipped the BIOS switch on your card, possibly has a different BIOS (My R9 290 DCII did, had the default BIOS for reference card with different fan profile) might just be worth a shot.

Well, that is disappointing.

I'm unsure of where to go from here, the card works great when it works, but the black screen issue / monitor power down / loss of signal issue kind of throws a wrench in everything.

Edit: no, I haven't tried that. I'll take a look for the switch and update the thread with results.

 

[Outback Bronze]

G'day,

Do you know if your card has a reference PCB? If so you can try ATI Flash. You can find GPU Bioses here on TechPowerUp

Here, give this a read: http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/how-to-use-atiflash.57750/

 

[PCGamerDR]

I've set force constant voltage on msi afterburner and increased my volt +10mV and my r9 290 gives no more black screens on general video playback.

 

[g0rg0r]

G'day,

Do you know if your card has a reference PCB? If so you can try ATI Flash. You can find GPU Bioses here on TechPowerUp

Here, give this a read: http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/how-to-use-atiflash.57750/

I'm not quite sure what reference pcb means, however I did try flashing the newest bios I could find on here to my card, the newer bios seemed to flash OK, but it seemed to make the black screen issue happen more often

I've set force constant voltage on msi afterburner and increased my volt +10mV and my r9 290 gives no more black screens on general video playback.

I'll give that a shot, it sucks you have to mess with voltage and clock speeds via software just to get things working properly though, I'd like to be able to use my card with both Windows and Linux.

Edit: I've set force constant voltage and tested +25mv and +35mv with no success, still crashing. As of now I'm testing +49ish mv to bump it up to the guy in the OP picture's 1.008mv, will report back on whether this fixes anything.

Edit2:Hasn't fixed anything that i can tell even at this higher voltage

 

[PCGamerDR]

my volt is at 1.008v with the +19mV on idle and drops to at a low 0.984v with +0mV, funny thing is my twin brother also has a r9 290 and he doesn't have this issue, not to mention that his crad is stranger as it overclocks better with no voltage adjustments , his card is sitting at 1120mhz core with +0mV while mine is sitting at 1077core with +19mV both cards have the same asic quality and the same bios version the only difference being the brand of the cards, mine's Club3d and his card is PowerColor.

Fun Fact: Club3d and PowerColor are the same company, Club3d serving Asian and European market and PowerColor serving North and Latin American market.

 

[g0rg0r]

my volt is at 1.008v with the +19mV on idle and drops to at a low 0.984v with +0mV, funny thing is my twin brother also has a r9 290 and he doesn't have this issue, not to mention that his crad is stranger as it overclocks better with no voltage adjustments , his card is sitting at 1120mhz core with +0mV while mine is sitting at 1077core with +19mV both cards have the same asic quality and the same bios version the only difference being the brand of the cards, mine's Club3d and his card is PowerColor.

Fun Fact: Club3d and PowerColor are the same company, Club3d serving Asian and European market and PowerColor serving North and Latin American market.

That's strange

hmmm.. maybe if I try underclocking it, do you think that might help?

I'm pretty much out of solutions at this point, kind of wish I could send the card back no refund required, sapphire shoving it up their ass would be payment enough.

 

[PCGamerDR]

That's strange

hmmm.. maybe if I try underclocking it, do you think that might help?

I'm pretty much out of solutions at this point, kind of wish I could send the card back no refund required, sapphire shoving it up their ass would be payment enough.

Underclocking memory? yeah give it a try, stock memory clock of the reference r9 290 is 1250mhz.

You can also go to this thread at overclock.net and jump right to step 2 of the unlock guide and get "the files" in those files there's a memoryinfo app that gives u detailed info on your memory chips including model# you can goggle that model# and see what their rated speed is.

Mine looks like this:


And according to samsung their rated at 1250mhz(mine oc'ed to 1350mhz from factory) at 1.5v - 0.45v for it's idle speed.

Also if case your card uses samsung chips im going to leave this pdf with all the chips info here as well.