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Custom BIOS on new card?

seinfeldaddict78

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A while back I bought a Powercolor 9250 tha came programmed with a custom BIOS. Since the card was a little over twice the regular going rate for the 9250 at the time, I backed that BIOS up and then began to use the card. After a several months of regular usage, some big storms in the area took out the surge protector that system was connected to, and toasted the motherboard, video card and monitor (stinking surge protector).

What I would like to do at this point is to upload the BIOS I backed up onto another Powercolor 9250 that I bought locally. The only difference between the boards is that the original board was a PCB revision 1.4 and my replacement is version 1.3. However, when I tried to flash the old BIOS onto the new board, the system will not boot. Knowing the BIOS is somehow incorrect, I was wondering if it was possible to lock a BIOS so that it would be difficult to copy it from one card to another? I'm pretty sure from a visual inspection of the boards that there aren't any "hard-mods", so that only leaves me with working with this BIOS file right? Thanks for any input you guys may have!
 

Changis

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Processor AMD Opteron 165 (ccbbe) @ 3000 (CPU-Z ID: 125237 )
Motherboard Sapphrie A9RD580 (the White One) (with leaked ATI manta ref, board Bios)
Cooling Cpu: Corsair Nautilus 500 Watercooling Northbridge: T/T spirit II 2 80mm fans 1for HDD one for door
Memory 2x512 Kingston Hyper-x 3500 ddr434 2-2-2-5-1T
Video Card(s) Sapphire X1900XT 256MB
Storage Main: Samsung SP. 160G SataII Storage: 2x WD 320
Display(s) Fujitsu e212 / Daewoo 28" widescreen / dad's 42" HD-TV (when they are away;) or 1 of my 2 projektors
Case Custom Glow-in-the-dark painted PC Case! PM ME IF YOU KNOW ANY1 WITH THE SAME
Audio Device(s) onboard
Power Supply Mist 600W 4x12V@20A
Software Xp Pro
First of all; a surge protector is used for precisely that, surge protections from surges in the power grid, A lightning will take out probably anything that is connected to a power outlet.

as for flashing the bios..
"Since the card was a little over twice the regular going rate for the 9250 at the time"
Guessing that means it has twice the clockspeeds..
Every card is different in some way.. out of 2 9250, one card may be able to overclock to twice the speeds, the other one only a few mhz.. all depends on the chips used.

Best bet: flash back original Gpu bios, clock in AtiTool until you find max OC, then use rabit, and edit the biosclocks to no more than 2/3 of max stable OC (in case you experience a heatwave, or heat up the room you may overheat the card if i'ts clocked at Max OC)
then just use CCC or ATiTOOL (or similar) and clock it back up to max OC (now you can always downlclock the card if it becomes to hot.)
 

seinfeldaddict78

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The cards actually have pretty much the same clock speeds. The more expensive one actually ran a bit slower. The real advantage to the card that was so much more expensive was that it displayed at frequencies unsupported by regular VGA monitors. The goal isn't really to obtain a faster card than delivered, just to allow these unsupported frequencies.

I've opened the two files in RaBiT and took some screenshots. The first two screens are the only ones that contain differences - Every other screen is identical. Something that is interesting to me is the padlock icon at the top right of the screen. Does anyone know what that means?
 

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Changis

New Member
Joined
Jun 21, 2006
Messages
314 (0.05/day)
Location
Norwegia
Processor AMD Opteron 165 (ccbbe) @ 3000 (CPU-Z ID: 125237 )
Motherboard Sapphrie A9RD580 (the White One) (with leaked ATI manta ref, board Bios)
Cooling Cpu: Corsair Nautilus 500 Watercooling Northbridge: T/T spirit II 2 80mm fans 1for HDD one for door
Memory 2x512 Kingston Hyper-x 3500 ddr434 2-2-2-5-1T
Video Card(s) Sapphire X1900XT 256MB
Storage Main: Samsung SP. 160G SataII Storage: 2x WD 320
Display(s) Fujitsu e212 / Daewoo 28" widescreen / dad's 42" HD-TV (when they are away;) or 1 of my 2 projektors
Case Custom Glow-in-the-dark painted PC Case! PM ME IF YOU KNOW ANY1 WITH THE SAME
Audio Device(s) onboard
Power Supply Mist 600W 4x12V@20A
Software Xp Pro
hmm, guessing the one without any info is the flahed one...

For unsuported Resolutions.. try a standalone program like multires (comes with omegadrivers) or powerstrip or maybe even Ati Tray Tools or rivatuner.
I think Windows is blocking out non-standard resolutions
 

seinfeldaddict78

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I blocked out the header information on the modified BIOS because I'd rather not disclose the manufacturer of the modified BIOS. Don't want any legal type issues. Does this header information keep the BIOS from being flashed to another card somehow?

The problem isn't that windows is blocking out resolutions, it's that the modified BIOS will not flash successfully to the new card. I force the flash, it says it was successful, but when I reboot, I get no video. There's gotta be something in the BIOS that is causing it to not be able to be flashed on another card somehow.

The card still uses the standard resolutions, but at a frequency that is unsupported by standard VGA monitors. It would be possible to use windows software to force the card to use the unsupported frequency, but the monitor that I am using would have issues displaying the normal VGA frequency (during BIOS display and windows bootup) to the point that it may become unusable after a few times. I'd really rather get the BIOS up and working correctly.
 
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