Sapphire 4870 graphical glitches

[Rexter]

I did som searching on the forum about this issue, and it looks like im not the only one with my particular problem. Though there never really was any solution.
So right now i am using my second sapphire 4870, the first was highly unstable and had a fried ram chip apparently. It was the red pcb version.
Got it RMA'ed and recieved a new one, the blue pcb version. It works fine and dandy and all, but at random times in various games, Fallout 3 is the latest, it crashes, displaying graphical glitches and many small squares on the screen.
Then i have to reboot before it returns to normal.
Now its been doing it so often that its royally pissing me off. Ive waited so long for fallout 3, and now it crashes every single time after 5 minutes of play, the last drop filled the cup.
(its actually been doing this error since i got it, with varying timeslots between the glitches and in different games)

I looked at sapphire's website and found a bios that matches my cards sku precisely. But that was when i searched the forums and other have the same error with sapphire cards. Some suggested flashing it with the bios from sapphire, but there are no clues about how the new bios works.

So, dare i flash to the new bios? Should i RMA that sh*t and get something else?

halp

<---- BTW, you can see my specs to the left if that helps.

 

[ArchStupid]

well I'm new here so I don't know if it's 'legal' talking about this stuff; but I have to ask - is your Fall Out 3 copy original?
also, what other games do these things happen?

I've got an HD4870 myself (Gigabyte, red pcb) and right now I'm using a Zalman GV1000 cooler.
I can pretty much say that the stock cooler was HORRENDOUS!!! it was extremely ineffective at cooling this little oven and the bigger problem was that the default speeds were 45% fan speed at full load.

the tempratures would reach 90C+ degrees , a few times it would even make the computer stop responding due to overheating... after setting the fan speed to 100% during full loads the tempratires dramatically dropped to around 70-75 degrees.
although I gotta say my case (CM690) wasn't cooled very good at the time so that added to the pressure.

with the current setup (GV1000 + 120mm fan attacked directly above it) I rarely reach around the 48-50 degree area (with stock speeds) and can say that this solved a lot of problems for me

 

[Rexter]

FYI fallout3 was released on steam a couple of hours before i posted.

Anyway, i decided to solve the problem myself since i couldnt get help or advice anywhere.

I made a usb-key that could boot into dos, loaded the contents of sapphires zip file onto it, replaced their atiflash with atiflash 3.60. I booted into dos, and ran the batch file. My heart skipped a beat when i rebooted and waited to see it post. and it worked! i immediatly started playing the games which usually did not work, and they did! Mind you i only got to try for about an hour because it was 2:30 am lol, but still an hour is way better results than before. Anyway, from the looks of it, it seems that sapphire has fixed the infamous glitch.

I will hope these results will come in handy to anyone else who has this problem.

 

[Widjaja]

Reply back if anything bad occurs again.
Otherwise thankyou for confirming the end result.

 

[Rexter]

Alright after further testing i can now conclude that the "squares" graphical artifact and system case is in my case GONE! All thanks to the bios update. The games with the most noticable errors, Dead Space, Fallout 3 and Spore, now play without any bugs or errors. And i think it even helped with performance at some places. Though i dont know for sure yet if it really is faster or i am just fooling myself.

Anyway, i hope this thread will come in handy to other with the same error, hopefully they will find answers here.

 

[8bit_terror]

Hello Rexter. Well it seems that I have the same problem as you had. My card is the exact the same to yours SAPPHIRE 4870 512Mb red version. It freeze on every 5 to 10 mins playing Fallout 3 and FIFA 09' even fifa '08 is unplayable. I getting out of my mind when that happen. Will try to solve the problem as you did but first could you guide me which bios version you used for the flash? Thank you.

 

[Rexter]

Hello Rexter. Well it seems that I have the same problem as you had. My card is the exact the same to yours SAPPHIRE 4870 512Mb red version. It freeze on every 5 to 10 mins playing Fallout 3 and FIFA 09' even fifa '08 is unplayable. I getting out of my mind when that happen. Will try to solve the problem as you did but first could you guide me which bios version you used for the flash? Thank you.

First of all, flashing a graphics cards bios is REALLY tricky, and if you do it wrong you will end up with an expensive paper weight. If you dont feel comfortable doing this, then just dont do it!

Though i had the blue version, the bios should work. But to bev 100% sure, check either the side of your box, or a sticker on the card itself, if it has product number (N/B) 188-01E85-001SA and SKU: 11133-00. If so, then the bios will work.
Download it here:
http://us.sapphiretech.com/driver/478.zip

And here is how to use it:
http://forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?t=57750

I wont go into much further details as there is plenty of threads around this forums about this particular flashing. I made this thread just to confirm that the new bios works.