Your GPU BIOS flash that worked

[qubit]

I see a lot of threads on here of people flashing their graphics card BIOS, bricking it and then asking for help. I'd hate to be in that situation. What I'd like to hear about in this thread are your successful BIOS flashes, why you did them and if they achieved everything you wanted. This thread applies to any brand of graphics card, NVIDIA, AMD, Intel (rare), other.

The only time I flashed a card in recent memory was on my current RTX 2080 (see review below) with the official NVIDIA BIOS patcher from the NVIDIA website to fix some bug in one of the video outputs. Note that the card worked fine before and after this, so it effectively made no difference to me.

MSI GeForce RTX 2080 Super Gaming X Trio Review

MSI's GeForce RTX 2080 Super Gaming X Trio is the quietest RTX 2080 Super card we tested today. It not only runs quieter, but also significantly cooler than the competition. MSI still includes an overclock out of the box, and manual overclocking works very well, too.

www.techpowerup.com

 

[hat]

I used to do it all the time prior to Pascal. I would find my desired overclock settings and fan profile with EVGA Precision or something, then dump the BIOS with nvflash, edit with nibitor, and flash the edited bios. Then I could uninstall whatever overclocking tool I used and the card would stay at the settings I set with the BIOS flash. Unfortunately, now I have to have Afterburner running all the time...

 

[Shrek]

I flashed an ASUS HD7750 to get UEFI support

 

[Solaris17]

All the time. I just got done doing it for some z690s in flashback mode for 13th gen support.

• I have dumped all the BIOS (manually via reader) for the ARC GPUs iv bought.
• I will update the vbios on my 4090s because there are some floating around with updated power limits (higher)
• In further recent memory I have flashed me rx580 a few times to see if it was possible via eGPU enclosure and to restore the original bios from the mining bios that was on it when I got the card.
• I flashed my titan RTX because there was another revision with higher default clock rate.
• I flashed my wifes Asrock x299 taichi manually (programmer) because the BIOS got corrupted on it.
• I have flashed an Asus board that I received back from Asus from RMA because they put a bios chip back in it after a reflow that had a lower revision than what was on it which meant my AMD cpu wouldnt boot.
• I have manually flashed an MSI skylake board I got for free because they kicked the plug out during a bios update and corrupted it. Then I built a machine from it and gifted it to a friend.
• I flash the BIOS of micro controllers all the time.

I have a spare soic 8 32mb chip in my closet that literally has a meme.png flashed to it, I use this chip to test my aligator clamps etc from time to time.


Flashing imo isnt really that dangerous and the tools to get yourself properly out of trouble are cheap. I own a few programmers but the ch341a is like $10 USD maybe.


The main problems are:

No one for whatever reason backs up there BIOS prior.
They always shut it off after they fuck it up (dont do this just try to flash again)
They panic when it doesnt post after the reboot and just mentally shut down.


This is further caused by the mean age of this forum going down imo. Everyone now used amdflash, or nvflash in windows mode (this used to be a big nono) sometimes they even use some fancy gui shit. Thats where their expertice stops though. As soon as an error pops up after they hit the start button they have no idea what to do because they dont understand how it works.

This forum, and this site used to be filled with flash threads and there used to be a bunch of people that would do it all the time. There were few if not 0 threads about failures because people knew how to recover.

Thats more or less lost now though.

 

[qubit]

Crikey @Solaris17, you do like to live dangerously!

It's funny how the enthusiast community has become deskilled at this sort of thing, isn't it?

Also, note that I said "recent memory" in my OP. That's because I did successfully flash two graphics cards in the 2000 era, so long ago now:

1 a 9800 SE to Pro (4 pipelines to 8 when the softmod drivers stopped being available from TPU) Incidentally, the softmod drivers for this card are how I first discovered TPU, but alas didn't register a forum account until 3 years later. Silly me.
2 a HD 2900 Pro 1GB ("big memory" in those days) to the XT version with higher clocks. Works just fine like that to this day.

 

[Deleted member 185158]

According to my hardware library.

75 video cards.
43 motherboards.

At least 75% or more of the video cards where flashed with custom roms.
At least 90% of the boards updated with oem or custom firmware.

At least 5% with failed and recovered flashes.

And not all hardware is actually in that library unfortunately.
Chose to reply the above format instead of listing all the hardware.

 

[cvaldes]

I flashed an ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 3080 to enable Resizable BAR using the BIOS (V5) from the ASUS support website. Early production units did not have Resizable BAR support enabled.

Otherwise nothing else in recent memory.

 

[outpt]

flashed a xfx 5600xt from 12gbs to 14bps memory