Palit HD4870 Review Comment Thread

[3.0charlie]

Originally Posted by SKYMTL

I am telling everyone RIGHT NOW:

DO NOT FLASH THE BIOS ON THESE CARDS!!!!!!!!!!!!

What? Did you bork a bran' spankin' new card?

[DK2]

Sounds like a cry for help!


edit: there goes the damn good award.....

[magictorch]

Originally Posted by belgolas

Well took the plunge of the great lowering of my account balance and ordered 2 HIS radeon 4870's. Well hopefully I get them by Tuesday unless companies ship Monday.

Well NCIX says they are getting a large HIS shipment next week. Some card were available today but were gone in a few minutes. Some cards are coming in tomorrow.

Nicemoving to the maximus was a great idea. I ordered a HIS one too but doesn't seem to be much action at NCIX at the moment.

Seems like others have been getting them locally.

As for the bios flashing-id hate to be the one holding the card if it went wrong

[SKYMTL]

Originally Posted by 3.0charlie

What? Did you bork a bran' spankin' new card?

No, but there are plenty of people with the "me too" thought who now have bricked cards.

[Frost]

Wait, what do you mean do not flash BIOS with this card? If I need to update the BIOS on my Rampage, it'll fry the card???

But... but how am I supposed to flash the BIOS?

As for whoever asked about how hard it was to mod the 4870, not very hard at all. I have the Sapphire 4870 to be clear. The stock cooling solution came off easily (except the fan power plug which was really annoying tightly in) and I noticed they overapplied thermal paste onto the heat spreader.

Oh god, now what am I supposed to do with this rig...

EDIT: Wait a second, you talking about the video card BIOS or the motherboard BIOS?

[MacJunky]

Wait, what do you mean do not flash BIOS with this card? If I need to update the BIOS on my Rampage, it'll fry the card???

See? This is exactly why the card's "BIOS" is much better referred to as a ROM or something. People get confused.

[magictorch]

Originally Posted by Frost

EDIT: Wait a second, you talking about the video card BIOS or the motherboard BIOS?

Its the GPU bios but you never know there could be some bum rampage bios's floating about. Im curious to see what these guys have been up to-im assuming they are trying to break through the overcooking barrier set by the ATI overclock software.

[kirk_d]

He means the bios on the vid card.

It's an extremely bad idea to alter the bios on anything

Why, the next thing you know, you'll have a ruby red brick

[SKYMTL]

Originally Posted by kirk_d

He means the bios on the vid card.

It's an extremely bad idea to alter the bios on anything

Why, the next thing you know, you'll have a ruby red brick

Truer words have never been spoken.

Here is the story:

Basically, people used a version of the RBF tool (Radeon Bios Flash) which flashed their cards without a problem but when they shut down their computer, the card would not boot anymore.

Every GPU has a BIOS which is used to determine everything from fn speed to vcore voltage. The reason people do this is to overclock their card beyond what the Catalyst Control Center's Overdrive utility allows them to.

It seems like quite a few people did this with their HD4870 cards after some people had some very positive results. Unfortunately, cards have now been going tits-up because of this. The reason is not fully known but it seems to affect people who have flashed the BIOS and those who have pushed for high clocks in the CCC.

I should note that myHD4870 with its maxed out clocks through the CCC is running fine in my gaming system for about a week now but after reading this, I have taken the safe route and clocked it back to stock.

[MacJunky]

Has anybody tried to replace the EEPROM on the card yet and flash a fresh copy to the card? Has anyone tried to blind flash or use another card to boot off floppy/USB and flash or does the computer not POST when the buggered card is in?