9700Pro Bios Update (sapphire - ati)

[seburu]

hi everyone.

i have been using my 9700pro now for about 2 years on several different platforms (amd, intel) and i always had problems with bluescreens and system hangups from time to time - the same thing with my nearly new system (athlon64 on asus a8v deluxe).

i thought, that it may help if i update the bios of my radeon - it is a sapphire radeon 9700pro. so i backuped the original bios and downloaded this one:

http://www.techpowerup.com/bios/ATI...ng28.030408.bin

because it is the newest one. my bios is this one:

2002/10/17 13:33 R300 Samsung DDR BIOS P/N 113-94206-102

the new one:

2003/04/08 16:40 R300 Samsung DDR BIOS - P/N 113-94209-106

when i want to update 2 the new one i get a error - wrong SSID.
my card has a ssid value of 0002, the new one 1002. i was afraid of damaging the card when forcing the new bios to be written onto the card.

another interesting thing is that i cant read my original bios with RadEdit - it only works with BiosEdit. (error message: This is not a valid ATI BIOS)

what is the meaning of this SSID (Substystem ID)? Anything to do with the Vendor ID?

my question now - should i upgrade to this bios? is it possible that the new bios gives me a bit more stability?

i am absolutely sure that the radeon causes the problem! (psu - tagan 480w, everything @ stock clockrates)

i'd be happy about a reply, thnx in advance.

greetings

 

[W1zzard]

should work fine ..

i'm a bit sceptical if upgrading the bios is worth it. there might be some fixes but they are for some very specific situations .. if you dont have problems, dont upgrade your video bios is my advice

 

[seburu]

thnx 4 ur reply.

>> if you dont have problems, dont upgrade your video bios is my advice

i'm having problems - my computer freezes from time to time, sometimes when playing a game sometimes even while writing something in word or surfing in the internet. (about 2 times a week) my lcd monitor has a "source-view" when changing the resolution - a few times the resolution suddenly jumped to 25xx*1xxx.

in the last year the VPU RECOVER function of the new catalyst drivers was able to get the computer working again after a few seconds (10-20) of blackscreen, even in games. in the last time this seems to not work any more... (the computer was formatted and reinstalled a few times meanwhile)

i had this video card in several different systems, everywhere it was behaving like this. in the current system the radeon is the only "old" part. although i bought it in an original sapphire package (retail) i think that is a prerelease version because i was not able to find a similar looking sapphire 9k7pro card in reviews...

i'll try to force the flash.

greetings

 

[seburu]

flashed the card yesterday - like wizzard suspected it to it workes fine, no problem so far. i'll report in some time if this solved my stability problems.

 

[seburu]

amazing

just wanted to let you know - not a single crash since i updated my card to the new bios !!