Bikerbob said:
OK, so lets assume I want to upgrade the bios of my Powercolor 9550 with the Mira -5ns ram.
What bios should I use? I have not seen anyone post which 9600 bios people used. Do you use a powercolor 9600 pro bios and then change memory timings as in Ripsaw's posting?
I am not an overclocking guru... but I have used the modified drivers and atitool to get my 9550 up to 425/225... which I am pretty happy with.. but I would prefer to use this in a bios and not worry about ati tool all the time.
anyone help with this?
Thanks
James
Just use your own BIOS. Here's how:
1. Use ATITool: settings, then miscellaneous, to dump bios image. It will create a filename BIOS.BIN of your card's BIOS.
2. Get RABiT v1.6 here:
http://www.mvktech.net/index.php?option=com_remository&Itemid=26&filecatid=450&func=fileinfo
3. Install it and run it.
4. From within RABit select the 'open' button and browse to wherever ATItool saved BIOS.BIN from step 1. (usually program files/atitool)
5. Once you've loaded up your bios.bin file, use RABit to set the device clocks (VPU and memory) and also if you want, change the memory timings. The settings will only take immediate effect if you check the "realtime" box, otherwise it just sets them up to be saved. Suggest you use ATITool to thoroughly test for optimum memory timings before you change them in RABiT and save them.
6. Select to Save As and give the file a new name-- don't overwrite your default bios.bin file that atitool dumped, you want to keep that for future reference if you ever need to flash the card back to factory bios. Suggest keeping the filename to 8 characters or less since you'll be working in MSDOS for the flash-in.
7. Make a bootable floppy, you can do this in wi xp by putting a floppy into A: drive, selecting to format it through right clicking its icon in explorer or my computer, then check the box in the format dialog to Create MSDOS Startup Disk.
8. From this website (tech powerup) grab ATIFlash from the BIOS image page (at bottom of page), un pack it onto a the bootable floppy you just made
9. Copy the bios.bin file to the floppy (the dump from atitool) and also copy the new bios file you saved to a different name from RABiT in step 6, to the floppy.
10. Making sure your PC is set to boot from the floppy drive first, put the floppy in and reboot. PC will boot into MSDOS. To see command line options for ATIFLASH.EXE type "Atiflash /?". But the option to flash is "atiflash -p <device number> <filename to be flashed-in>" For mine as example it was "atiflash -p 0 optibios.rom" where 0 is device number for my 9600 pro, and optibios.rom is the optimized bios image. there is a command line tag for atiflash that will make it show what device # your card is in your system, but its almost always zero (0).
11. ATIflash will confirm the byte count, something like 65535 of 65535 bytes confirmed or similar statement then it's done and you can reboot. Suggest reinstalling drivers for the card in windows after flashing.
NOTE: You have to reflash back to the default factory bios image (bios.bin) before you can flash in another modified bios image. if you try to flash another modified version in on top of a modified version, atiflash will report that the EPROM has already been programmed and will quit to command prompt. Just flash in the factory bios dump from atitool, bios.bin, then go back and flash in the newly modified version right after.
DISCLAIMER: Flashing your card voids any warranty and the risk exists of killing the card.