Editing Sapphire 5850 Bios

[kakarott007]

Hi. I have a Sapphire 5850 (the reference card, no toxic, no vapor-x, y, z ), just the reference card that comes with dirt2 and with an open box ) ). Anyway, I spent some serious time about ways to overclock it, flash bios and so on. without flashing the bios I got it 100% stable and cool at 1060core/1280mem @1.35V using afterburner-amd gpu clock tool combination. And with the card being stabble, I want to use those freq 24/7, so I decided to flash the bios. But before doing something wrong, I coud use some information. So far I know how to modify, where to modify and what not to modify (the voltage only in the registers and not in the 'clock info 00' etc). What I don't know is what is the best method to flash: get an asus bios( the ones that you've been talking about around here) or modify my Sapphire bios. Because so far I don't see where is the problem modifying the clocks , voltage and CCC limits in my sapphire bios. On top of that, i feel not so comfortable about adding some other strange bios to my card, even if it'sthe same reference version. What do you think about this?

 

[BAGZZlash]

It's mostly a question of taste.
I would prefer to use my own BIOS - modified, of course. There's no particular reason to use some other vendor's BIOS for modification. Have fun!

 

[kakarott007]

Thanks. I thought it was some particular detail about the bios from Asus. I will flash my card in a couple of days, till then I'm doing some more benchmarks to test the stability, the performance and I'll try to push the clocks a little higher and see what happens. Some interesting things I've noticed when testing that might help other users too: the fact that raising the memory clock after a certain stable limit doesn't result in visible artifacts, crashes or restarts like it does in the case of the GPU clock, but in loss of performance. At least this happens to me. I'll play with the card a little more, then I'll flash the bios and I'll return with some results. Till now, all I can say is that 5850 is a wonderful card, and the makers of RBE are wonderful too. Keep up the good work

 

[kakarott007]

I've just flashed my card's bios and it went like a dream . I modified the clocks to 1065/1270 Mhz @1.35V stable as hell . I also worked a little on the fan profile (now it starts pumping at 50C instead of 55C and it reaches 100% at 93C instead of 102C) and modified the CCC limits to 1550/2250 with the 'no hash' method in RBE. Now I'm going to get some sleep since I did the flashing 5 minutes ago and it's 3 am in here ). Thanks again for those who made RBE possible

 

[muggy]

I had trouble using RBE to edit my 5850 bios, I am using the ATI-AMD stock reference card.

When I change the "Clock Info 00" to my desired overclock state, and the 0x17 register to my desired overclock voltage (1.175V), the bios flashes fine but when I use the card it defaults to the 400/900 state (UVD) and doesn't leave that state. It doesn't downclock or upclock, even if I stress the card. Checking the bios, it seems to be exactly what I want. I can get the same overclock to be stable in MSI Afterburner. I can even overclock just the "Clock Info 00" settings to a lower overclock, and everything works perfectly if I leave it at stock voltage.

Am I doing something wrong? Does my card just not accept non-stock voltages in the bios?

 

[BAGZZlash]

@kakarott007: Glad to read about your success using RBE!

@muggy: Hum. Did you disable overdrive?

 

[kakarott007]

just in case, did you modified the voltage in the 'clock info 00' tab also? you must leave that alone. you only need to modify the voltage in the register. or maybe your bios doesn't accept that voltage value. try to add a more round value and see what happens ( for example 1.2V or 1.15V). When I flashed my bios, first time I flashed it changing only the voltage and not the 3d clocks, to be sure if in case the voltage doesn't change, my card doesn't become unstable. I figured out that the voltage changed indeed when the gpu loads, so I flashed it again, this time with the clocks also .

 

[muggy]

Yes, overdrive is currently disabled for me.

I did modify the voltage in the "Clock Info 00" tab, I should leave it as a dash? I tried using 1.175 volts. This is what it looked like (configuration before I flashed it):

I had previously flashed my card to the ASUS bios, at 850/1175 for stock voltage. My card works fine under this setting, it downclocks to 157/300 for 2d mode.

If I enter 1.18V in the register value, and close the register window, when I open it back up it says 1.175 in it.

So I should try changing the voltage registry and leaving the voltage for "Clock Info 00" at 1.088V? Or should I put it as the dash?

 

[BAGZZlash]

I did modify the voltage in the "Clock Info 00" tab, I should leave it as a dash?

Yeah. Just change the clock settings there.

If I enter 1.18V in the register value, and close the register window, when I open it back up it says 1.175 in it.

Yes, that's because not all values a legal there. RBE automatically applies the closest value that is legal for the voltage controller.

So I should try changing the voltage registry and leaving the voltage for "Clock Info 00" at 1.088V? Or should I put it as the dash?

Just leave it as it was.

And keep us updated about you success!

 

[muggy]

I tried what you guys said, and I tested with the stock clocks and changing just the voltage register value, and the voltage did come up as expected. Flashed again with my overclocks and everything's working great now.

Bagzzlash, perhaps you could edit RBE for the 5850/5870, so it shows the voltage register value in the voltage boxes for each powerplay state? Maybe there should be a note about this for this, I was under the impression that RBE wasn't ready for voltage tweaking on these cards yet, and that Afterburner was the only way to go. I'm much happier using RBE and flashing those values in permanently, Afterburner wasn't able to downclock to 2d mode on my computer.

Last thing for me is the fan control, does this work properly through RBE yet? I saw another thread that showed people having problems with it, the stock ramp up for my fan is way too low for my liking right now, it goes from 20% to 30% all the way up to 75+ degrees. This is different from the graph I see in the Fan settings tab. I guess I'll just give it a try and see how it goes.

Thanks for the help, and thanks bagzzlash for RBE!

 

[kakarott007]

@muggy:Happy to hear you made it.
In my case the fan works fine after flashing the bios.

I also worked a little on the fan profile (now it starts pumping at 50C instead of 55C and it reaches 100% at 93C instead of 102C)

 

[muggy]

Are you using the transfer function? My card doesn't do the transfer function that's shown without any changes from me. It ramps up from 22% starting at 50 degrees, and doesn't make it to 30% until 70 degrees.

I'm trying to get the card to hit 40% by 70 degrees, I found that this keeps my card at a constant 68-69 degrees under furmark full load. I tried both adjusting the transfer function and using the look up table, but I found the fan always behaves the same way. Using Afterburner works when I do the user defined fan profile.

 

[kakarott007]

Yes, I used the transfer function. I'm wondering why it didn't work for you. Before flashing the bios it was working fine I suppose?

 

[muggy]

Well if you look at this thread, you'll see that most people don't have fan control working through RBE for their 5850's.

Before flashing the bios, the card was working in the same fashion. It had the same ramp up speeds (I assume this is the stock driver fan profile, as it seems to be made for much quieter use and temps are allowed to climb fairly high).

The only way I got a change was using Afterburner's user-defined fan profile.

The changes you made do seem to exemplify the behavior I witness from the card without any changes made to me through Afterburner, it starts ramping up the fan at 50 degrees. I am unsure of when it reaches 100 as I try not to let it run that high.

 

[kakarott007]

I didn't let it either to climb to 100 ). But at 70 Celsius in Furmark the fan reaches 58%, which confirms that the changes made by me in the fan profile were applied.

 

[muggy]

I'll try modifying my original bios and see if it makes any difference, I'm currently using the Asus bios (altho their fan settings look the same when I go to it)

 

[muggy]

Yeah, I tried flashing the original bios with different fan settings, and still no change

Any chance you could show me what your settings look like to see if I have anything different?

Mine looks like this:

 

[RejZoR]

Some non reference cards don't even have fan controller or they use a different one.
I once had HD4850 from Club3D that refused to obey any of my fan settings. It was just running at it's own speed minding it's own business.

 

[kakarott007]

yeap, I think you're right )Man, how happy I was to see that the fan profile works, when it doesn't work . But it doesn't work for any card I think, bios-flashed or not. That's the story: Because I cranked the voltage up, I'm always gaming and benchmarking with Afterburner opened for monitoring purposes, but the Afterburner itself controls the fanspeed ). I did set the fan profile two weeks ago when I received the card and when I begun overclocking. I figured it out now. I launched Furmark without launching Afterburner and the fan remained silent. I brought the card up to 75C, then I restarted the computer rapidly. After the restart, during POST, the fanspeed cranked up, because the card was still hot, so the bios profile works, but after the windows logon the fan got silent again. Of course, I opened Afterburner immediately and the fan cranked up again . Sorry to misinform you muggy . I didn't had time to figure that out since I flashed my bios last night and I didn't disabled the user-defined fan profile in Afterburner since then.

 

[muggy]

Haha, don't worry man, I've been using Afterburner too, it just feels like a temporary solution for me because of the screen flashes and the problems I had trying to get it to run 2d/3d profiles.

Hopefully this works in RBE soon, it seems they are having issues with the ATI drivers resetting the fan everytime. Maybe future ATI drivers or RBE versions will fix this.

 

[RejZoR]

The thing is, BIOS takes control of the fan during bootup. Once driver kicks in, fan RPM goes down.
That's why you get sudden silence. Also bootup voltages and clocks might be higher than those later on in the Windows. At least that was the case with HD4870 which booted up with higher core and memory and later on downclocked them when i got in Windows.

 

[kakarott007]

Yeah...the guys who made RBE have nothing to fix this time ), regarding RBE at least, because RBE works fine, it's the driver that sucks. I'm really curious about where we can find that specific fan profile from the driver files and how we can modify it, if we can. ("In a world where all the drivers obey the almighty bios, one day, one guy named Catalyst raised his head and said: 'F**k you bios, I do what I want' " - The Emancipation of Drivers )