Broke 1 video BIOS, now what? 6950 2gb

[AlbinoMonGoosE]

Ok so I got me a nice Sapphire 6950 2gb about a week ago, and of course the first thing I do is flash the BIOS. I used RBE to modify it to a 6970, than ATIwinflash to load that bios. All was working fine, but then I went to overclock it, and to do so (past about 920/1400) a voltage increase was required. TRIXX won't go past like 1.18, and Afterburner wouldn't work at all. So I tried to modify the voltage in the BIOS to 1.25mv. Upon restarting, I got a nice BSOD. Lucky, I still had my other BIOS, so problem solved.

But now I just want to get back to a 6970, but without a second BIOS isn't that really risky?? How can I repair the other BIOS? I don't want to ruin my new card, but the flash will be necessary for BF3. Is this at all possible??

Thanks in advance, and by the way this is my first post

 

[purple stain]

The card has dual BIOS or the mobo has dual BIOS?

 

[AlbinoMonGoosE]

The card has dual BIOS or the mobo has dual BIOS?

The 6950 has the dual bios switch. That's what I'm talking about

 

[inzone]

How do you know that the bios is damaged , when you get a baod it's windows way of preventing permenent damage. Did the card not work unless you switched to the other bios. If in fact you did damage the bios the only way to repair it is to replace the bios chip.

 

[AlbinoMonGoosE]

Well I guess I have no idea if it's actually damaged, or a setting is incorrect etc. But either way, how can I access the bios to edit it if it blue screens everytime? It blue screens right after windows loads up

 

[AlbinoMonGoosE]

...and I don't how I did it, 1.25 seems like a reasonable voltage to me

 

[HugoStiglitz]

Generally the BIOS only gets read at the post of the boot cycle (its not used while in windows)

I remeber with old motherboards, if u stuffed a flash. Remove the bios chip, replace with a good board's chip, boot the system, CAREFULLY REMOVE the good bios and place the bad one in. reflash and BAM u got a good bios again

Yes bios chips used to be removable.

you could try the same with ur GPU but i have NO IDEA if it would work

boot with the 2nd bios, once in windows flick the switch while its running, reflash the bad bios. reboot.

again. I HAVE NO IDEA if current GPU's function this way and u may do more damage. but its an option.

 

[AlbinoMonGoosE]

Sounds very interesting. Thanks for the reply Hugo, I think I'll give it a shot

 

[JDFan]

IF the card has dual BIOSes then normally you just have to set a switch to reflash the one from the other to recover from a failed Flash -- this resets the primary BIOS to its original state and does not do anything to the secondary BIOS --- then after doing that you can reflash the primary BIOS back again --- You normally never actually use the secondary BIOS except to recover if there is a failure of the primary -- It does not have you select one or the other it normally always uses the primary and only if the primary fails will it use the secondary to restore the primary. Read through the documentation and it should tell you how to recover the primary BIOS by using the secondary. (I'm not positive but I believe moving that switch has it restore the primary from the secondary and then afterwards you shut back down and replace the switch setting since the Primary BIOS is now back to the same as the secondary. (Much like a CMOS jumper on the MOBO that resets the CMOS to defaults from a backup of the settings - It doesn't switch between using the primary or secondary BIOS it just makes the primary get rewritten using the secondary to recover the card !)

 

[AlbinoMonGoosE]

OK, thank you all for the help. JDfan: That's something like I thought it was supposed to work, but it kept blue screening on the second bios.

Regardless, I don't know if I somehow reset the second one, or Hugo's suggestion worked, but it's working again!

I booted it up on the good bios, then switched to the bad and flashed it, and wahla! Both our back to normal. I forgot that the BIOS is only read on the post, noob mistake!

Now to get her back to a 6970... hehe
Thanks again for the responses, a very good first experience posting on tom's

 

[AlbinoMonGoosE]

Only bad news being the switch toggle cracked off well I was moving it. Fragile little ah heck. But no biggie, I can use a needle to move it

 

[AlbinoMonGoosE]

Best answer selected by AlbinoMonGoosE.

 

[Mousemonkey]

This topic has been closed by Mousemonkey