Gigabyte Radeon 9550 128MB (error when trying to flash bios)

[sweeper2]

Hey all, new here, but not new to pc's... anyway, i have a Gigabyte Radeon 9550 128MB vid. card.

i have read up on flashing it to a 9600 etc... I started out low by flashing it to a 9550 with a slightly higher core/mem. Promlem is i get an error, followed by some numbers (about 5)

nothing happens to the card, still works fine, but everything works on the floppy

using Flashrom, i backed up the bios, did a info check, and it says bios is Locked...is this the problem ?
if so how can i unlock the bios...

thanks

 

[sweeper2]

anyone ? nobody knows about flashing a bios for an ATI card ??

man, this is the 3rd forum I've tried...

 

[ati.bob]

I seem to come across a lot of these "unflashable" Gigabyte 9550 cards.. what I can conclude is that Gigabyte seems to have locked the BIOS to prevent it from being flashed with other BIOS... maybe you should try using the flash utility provided by Gigabyte instead of using FlashROM...

 

[sweeper2]

i was unaware of one from gigabyte...I will look into that...thanks for the suggestion...

 

[sweeper2]

as it looks...Gigabyte has yet to offer a bios flash... "comming soon" is what the site says...., so i guess if you have another type of 9550 you might be able to, but as far as Gigabyte goes... maybe in the near future... Oh well, the Omega Drivers seem to do the job anyway... 3480 in 3d2k3 isn't bad for a budget card

 

[ati.bob]

Maybe there's one provided from the driver CD supplied.. try to look for it.. it's usually come with the card driver CD or something..

 

[sweeper2]

ati.bob .... I see you have a Saphire 9550 ...did you run flashrom to flash the bios, and what kind of mem do you have in your card ?

 

[ati.bob]

I use FlashROM 2.40.. as for the RAMs.. it's Samsung 5.0ns RAMs.. crappy RAM chips..

 

[sweeper2]

hmmm, mine is Hynix 4... wierd....

 

[ati.bob]

Hynix 4ns RAMs should clock much higher.. it should have the default clock speed of 250MHz..

ns = nanosecond rating
f = frequency in MHz

f = (ns / 1) x 1000

ns = 1000 / f

so.. (4/1) x 1000 = 250MHz..

Your card's memory should have a theorical max speed of 250MHz..

Anyway.. maybe there's a hacked version of FlashROM you should try.. not sure if there's one that would work though...

 

[sweeper2]

it's got the lower clock speed... 250/ core - 194/ mem

i was trying to flash it with gigabytes Hynix bios for the 250/ core - 200 mem first to see if it would work, but no go, then tried the 9600 NP and still no go... problem is, the 9600 pro is samsung mem, so it's hard to find a proper flash for the Hynix mem and if it does have it, the clock speeds are way to high for my card to support... think the highest before artifacting was 395 core / - 280 (?) mem (can't remember)....

 

[ati.bob]

You can actually edit the BIOS using BIOS editors like RaBIT (Radeon BIOS Tuner).. with that, you can tune and wite a BIOS to set your card to run at that speed..

 

[sweeper2]

might try that... thanks for the suggestion and the responses...