Flashrom To Support Flashing ATI Graphics Cards

[Melcar]

Adarion you never have been on an overclocker board. Those imbeciles RMA perfectly fine boards because they do not overclock as good as one from another random guy (thus making boards more expensive for everybody). Those idiots flash bios files from different boards&cards to get some mythical bios option or gain a 0.05% increase in superpi or 20 more points in 3dmark. And if they brick it - they complain. Very, very loudly. To the manufacturer. Hardware would be cheaper and the world a better place without this dumb f***s.

The new crop of overclockers is more like that. Back in my day things like that happened rarely. I think it's because back then one really had to know the hardware, whereas nowadays any fool can download utilities (and sometimes even direct from the manufacturer) and start pushing sliders.

[Kano]

Gfx cards die much faster than the really old ones, specially nvidia 6 series and ATI cards R300-R400 seem to fail currently very often - but usally after some years of use. I think most of em die because of overheat due to failing fans. When you find a stable oc without artefacts you can usually use that without problems, as the chips are only clocked to a well known default that works everywhere. But when you oc too fast and don't check for artefacts then you can get lockups and the cause is hard to identify.

[energyman]

Using tools like atitool (win) you can get a vga bios backup for ati cards. nvclock makes a backup for nvidia ones. In case you want to mod it Which i did for a Radeon 9700 back then, you could raise the refresh rates up to 85 hz for vesa modes (good for crt) and oc it by default - could be done with rovclock too, but i wanted more speed before that tool was developed *g*

and the backup helps you how much when the card is completly unresponsive after a flash?

[Kano]

Well i had that issue too, when i tried to flash another bios instead of modding the original one. But i made a bootfloppy that restored the backup automatically and that recoverd it. Then i used a mod tool to just change the clockspeeds + refresh rates and flashed the modded back, that worked fine. When you try different vga bios versions it is more likely that you break something, but it is not lost in most cases, with right way you can recover it.

[Adarion]

The new crop of overclockers is more like that. Back in my day things like that happened rarely. I think it's because back then one really had to know the hardware, whereas nowadays any fool can download utilities (and sometimes even direct from the manufacturer) and start pushing sliders.

I guess that's true. But back in the times of old we all had to know at least a little bit about computers, you had to be somehow dedicated to them, be a little bit of a freak; someone who had no problems reading a manual and a book about it.
Nowadays everybody can go shop for a colorful box and make a mess with it (ever noticed that a lot of people buying notebooks care a shit for the inside, they just go for the optical look). Furthermore OV today is nearly a mass sport, indeed. I often noticed that all kinds of e.g. mainboard manufractureres offer jumpers, settings, potentiometers and so on for OC purposes and also market their stuff as OCable.
But who cares about the warning signs that this behaviour is unsupported and would void warranty?

But the more people use computers the more idiots you will find. There are several funny pages about DAUs (German for luser, dumbest possible user) on the net and they show also people returning items to the shop and complaining but having used a hammer to force a CPU in a completely wrong socket. You know, even some of these failsafe to connect connectors (eg. Molex power for PATA-HDDs) inserted 180? wrong. With force. Breaking everything. But then people come complain or some of them hope the seller won't notice and refund the item. Or they come with "it was sold to me like that". Yeah.

I think a computer is far more complicated and able to do more things than e.g. a car. But when you want to drive a car you have to make a license and show that you can follow basic rules of traffic. I think something like that should be done for computers, too. Nobody needs to understand all internals (unless you want to mess with them) but some basic knowledge...
*sigh* Dreaming is still allowed, right?

[nanonyme]

Well i had that issue too, when i tried to flash another bios instead of modding the original one. But i made a bootfloppy that restored the backup automatically and that recoverd it. Then i used a mod tool to just change the clockspeeds + refresh rates and flashed the modded back, that worked fine. When you try different vga bios versions it is more likely that you break something, but it is not lost in most cases, with right way you can recover it.

Works great in a laptop without a floppy drive? ^^
Edit: Actually seems desktops are giving up floppy drive connectors too. I doubt the bypassing that skips directly to floppy boot so you can even fix motherboard BIOS problems (I don't really know how it works but apparently some good motherboards could do it with the right pin setup) would work that well with an USB floppy drive... Although graphic card BIOS is simpler to fix, laptops are a place imo where *no one* but vendors should *ever* flash anything. (so much for the fan speed and powersaving? )

[curaga]

With a desktop, no need for floppies - just insert a PCI card to see something, reflash the agp/pci-e card.

[yesterday]

I will never understand, why someone (today) would want to try and enable extra features on GPU's/CPU's. They are so cheap today, and even thought AMD have planned to release a dual core Phenom, which actually is a quad core Phenom, I would never want to trade a 100% working CPU for a maybe running CPU.

Then there's those that say that it is so easy to enable the extra cores on e.g. a triple core to become a quad core, and AMD wants users to do that. But still, a AM2+ quad core costs almost nothing now a days.

And with the AMD/Intel case yesterday, we might even see even cheaper quad cores due to increased sells

Not all people who flash the BIOS do so coz we wanna be l33t hax0rs.

In the Utopian fantasy that bridgman describes, there would be no reason to flash the video bios. Then again, there would be very little reason to flash the system bios either.

However that world is just that, fantasy. People DO come across cards that have problems that can ONLY be solved flashing the BIOS. I have two examples from the same NVIDIA card. On a Galaxy 7900gt that was factory OC'd (ie not by me), the fan controller for a bizarre reason turned the fan OFF after 50 deg C. This means when playing a games in , the card fan would turn off just when it was needed most. This problem was in the BIOS. The controller wouldn't respond to changes in the driver. Unfortunately, I could never fix this problem, because no-one was really sure how the thermal management was done in the BIOS, and Nvidia (and Galaxy) by then had moved on to the 8000 series and forgot about us.

My second problem with the card was due to the factory OC settings. Cards with a factory OC didn't play nice with the NVIDIA drivers on Windows, resulting in the dread scrambled screen when starting any 3D app. This problem still persists for the 7900gt. The only permanent solution was to the flash the BIOS and change the core or memory clock.

Flashing the Video BIOS is often the last resort, but how stupid is it not to have the tools to do it on your OS of choice? Just imagine if the only way you could flash your system BIOS was by using Windows...

[yesterday]

Adarion you never have been on an overclocker board. Those imbeciles RMA perfectly fine boards because they do not overclock as good as one from another random guy (thus making boards more expensive for everybody). Those idiots flash bios files from different boards&cards to get some mythical bios option or gain a 0.05% increase in superpi or 20 more points in 3dmark. And if they brick it - they complain. Very, very loudly. To the manufacturer. Hardware would be cheaper and the world a better place without this dumb f***s.

I don't know why you have to spew vitriol at overclocking. I used to overclock, because I found it fun and it's fun to find the limits of your hardware. Having an 1.8GHz Dual Core A64 running at 2.7Ghz is pretty nice, and it DOES make a difference. None of the overclocking communities I was a part of would ever condone RMAing parts you broke overclocking, so please don't tar people with same brush based on your few experiences.

And please, the overclocking communities are important to hardware companies. They help establish performance leaders, and foster brand awareness. Intel for example, leaked a number of benchmarks for the Core series on xtremesytems before the launch to create buzz.

Additionally, companies actively sell expensive "OC" products to tap into this market, so I have little sympathy for them when products DO get returned after being busted. I'm sure you can agree that selling a product based on its overclocking potential, then fully trying to disclaim responsibility when said product is overclocked, is just plain stupid.

Oh, and enthusiasts and overclockers can really help pinpoint the future viability of current products. The lack of OCing headrom in Phenom I gave the impression that the processor speeds wouldn't scale well, and this was right. Similarly, the OCing performance of the next gen Phenom gave people hope that AMD would come out with a more competitive product sooner rather than later, and this proved true as well. And the popularity and performance of OC'd Pentium M Desktop boxes made Intel look at that "old" technology. The result was the dropping of Netburst and the birth of the Core architecture.

[energyman]

no, Intel dropped Netburst because it was slaughtered by Amd's A64 and did not scale half as well as hoped ( you might remember when Intel released the P4 and talked about reaching 5Ghz and more). Also everything I wrote is true - just visit the different oc forums like ocworkbench. 'I only reached XY so I RMA'd the board' is a common theme. And last but not least - most people do not overclock. But the companies cater for this very small and stupid market. Why? Because magazines are stupid. Way too much weight on useless overclocking, not enough on noise, heat price/performance. The points most important for the vast majority.