Kunaak
09-01-2004, 02:02 PM
took me 6 hours last night to finally break the Bios Lock on this card. I have a 9200 here, and being bored, I wanted to see how well it overclocked.
to my suprise, I found everytime I changed the clock speeds, nothing happened. zilch, I'd finish the benchmark and see the exact same score, and then see the clock speeds are right back to where they were before the benchmark.
never having used a low card like this, I started doing some home work to find out whats wrong.
reading tons of other peoples feedback and experience with these cards, I saw alot of people had thier cards superlocked too. change the clock speeds and nothing happens, and theres no way around it...
my first instinct was... "ok so I'll just edit the clock speeds with a bios editor and flash it"
so 20 minutes later, I extracted the bios of the 9200 with Flashrom 2.40. (flashrom -s 0 original.bin) then got into windows, and started to edit the bios...
changed the clock speeds from 250/333 to 285/350.
flashed the bios and...
theres the first problem.
the memory configuration doesn't match.
it was a 0380, but the new configuration was 0340.
I've never seen this problem, but multiple attempts at flashing, and many guesses later, I found that, this was a interesting little protection.
if you open the extracted bios with anything, the memory is read as 128 megs, but 128 megs on this card, is 0340.
while the card is really a 128 meg card, the 0340 should take to it just fine, so why is the cards current configuration a 0380?
turns out the 0380 is the configuration of a 256 meg card, and even though the card is a 128 meg card, I had to set the card in bios as a 256 meg card to get it to pass the memory configuration check, so they matched as 0380.
finally passing this barrier, glitch, protection or whatever it was...
I got a successful flash with the new clock speeds.
everything looked fine, but then the biggest problem possible came up...
the driver simply never loads with the edited bios, and windows sees no indentifiable videocard, even though the bios is the exact same bios it was before the flash, just with new clock speeds.
so theres a definate protection in the driver against changing the clock speeds of these cards.
how to pass this driver lock, I didn't know yet.
I reflashed to the original bios to see if the card was FUBAR or the drivers were indeed not installed or something.
but upon rebooting, with the original bios in the card, windows loaded just like normal, so the driver was indeed fine, and this just confirmed to me, that the Driver is part of the bios protections.
I am good at modding drivers, I do that all the time, so I tried modifying the catalyst 4.7 that I had, and switched around the INI, and INF files, and the Install.INI file, installed the card by device manager manually to select the proper videocard and force the install...
reboot, and... it worked.
finally, I could change the clock speeds, in windows with the original bios, by hacking the drivers.
this was my first little accomplishment for the card, and was exciting cause I did it and 3dmark was showing a definate improvement. this card is a piece of junk, and barely functional, cause it's damamged, which makes trouble shooting it kinda tough sometimes, but I was determined at this point to change the clock speeds, and OC this card even if it killed me.
it was doing about 4800 3dmark points, with the overclock at 300/400 it was doing 5900.
it's a 64 bit card, so this seems ok for what it is.
but I still had to see if the hacked driver, would allow me to bypass the driver check of the clock speeds if I edited the Bios.
so I flashed to the edited Bios again...
reboot.
and....
nothing.
the driver again, fails to load, windows sees a unidentifiable videocard, and I am back to square one.
while modding the driver helps adjust the clock speeds manually, it's not a real solution for a bios editor.
so I still wanted to break the OC lock, that the driver had, if you change the default clock speeds of the bios.
many attempts later, I was suffering from abysmal failure.
no bios trick I could think of would allow the drivers to install in windows, no combination of drivers or anything modded would work together if you mod the bios.
this was annoying the hell outta me, so I got even more determined.
outta sheer boredom, I was looking at the softmodded drivers, that allow overclocking of the 9000/9200/9500 and 9600 series of videocard, and decieded to try those.
at first it was a complete failure, the catalyst 3.1 even modded didn't work with the original BIOS.
this was annoying, cause the catalyst 3.1 works when I mod the drivers myself...
so the drivers someone else modded don't work.
I downloaded the 4.8's modded, and tried them.
they worked with the original bios just fine.
finally...
so I flashed to a edited bios, changed the default clock speeds from 250/333 to 290/ 380.
and.... BOOM....
it worked, drivers loaded and everything.
I was booting into windows with a modified driver, and modded BIOS, completly bypassing all BIOS checks, and Driver checks.
I beat the OC lock finally.
not only on the driver side, but from a BIOS editors side too.
so thats how you do it.
you need a modded driver, to flash the 9000/9200/9500 and 9600 cards that are superlocked, if you want to change the clock speeds of your videocard from a BIOS flash.
changing in windows is always easy...
but changing the default of the videocard, from a hardware point is much harder, but much funner.
now, the card does 5700 point, on it's new default clock speed of 290/380.
not bad for a free bit of performance, from basically a piece of junk. :toast:
this 9200 is screwed up, sometimes barely works.
but with my IC7, 2.6C and 6800 all down and out, I wanted to try something new. this was a nearly useless experiment for me personally, but it was alot of fun to break the OC-lock, especially from a BIOS editing point of view.
:D
to my suprise, I found everytime I changed the clock speeds, nothing happened. zilch, I'd finish the benchmark and see the exact same score, and then see the clock speeds are right back to where they were before the benchmark.
never having used a low card like this, I started doing some home work to find out whats wrong.
reading tons of other peoples feedback and experience with these cards, I saw alot of people had thier cards superlocked too. change the clock speeds and nothing happens, and theres no way around it...
my first instinct was... "ok so I'll just edit the clock speeds with a bios editor and flash it"
so 20 minutes later, I extracted the bios of the 9200 with Flashrom 2.40. (flashrom -s 0 original.bin) then got into windows, and started to edit the bios...
changed the clock speeds from 250/333 to 285/350.
flashed the bios and...
theres the first problem.
the memory configuration doesn't match.
it was a 0380, but the new configuration was 0340.
I've never seen this problem, but multiple attempts at flashing, and many guesses later, I found that, this was a interesting little protection.
if you open the extracted bios with anything, the memory is read as 128 megs, but 128 megs on this card, is 0340.
while the card is really a 128 meg card, the 0340 should take to it just fine, so why is the cards current configuration a 0380?
turns out the 0380 is the configuration of a 256 meg card, and even though the card is a 128 meg card, I had to set the card in bios as a 256 meg card to get it to pass the memory configuration check, so they matched as 0380.
finally passing this barrier, glitch, protection or whatever it was...
I got a successful flash with the new clock speeds.
everything looked fine, but then the biggest problem possible came up...
the driver simply never loads with the edited bios, and windows sees no indentifiable videocard, even though the bios is the exact same bios it was before the flash, just with new clock speeds.
so theres a definate protection in the driver against changing the clock speeds of these cards.
how to pass this driver lock, I didn't know yet.
I reflashed to the original bios to see if the card was FUBAR or the drivers were indeed not installed or something.
but upon rebooting, with the original bios in the card, windows loaded just like normal, so the driver was indeed fine, and this just confirmed to me, that the Driver is part of the bios protections.
I am good at modding drivers, I do that all the time, so I tried modifying the catalyst 4.7 that I had, and switched around the INI, and INF files, and the Install.INI file, installed the card by device manager manually to select the proper videocard and force the install...
reboot, and... it worked.
finally, I could change the clock speeds, in windows with the original bios, by hacking the drivers.
this was my first little accomplishment for the card, and was exciting cause I did it and 3dmark was showing a definate improvement. this card is a piece of junk, and barely functional, cause it's damamged, which makes trouble shooting it kinda tough sometimes, but I was determined at this point to change the clock speeds, and OC this card even if it killed me.
it was doing about 4800 3dmark points, with the overclock at 300/400 it was doing 5900.
it's a 64 bit card, so this seems ok for what it is.
but I still had to see if the hacked driver, would allow me to bypass the driver check of the clock speeds if I edited the Bios.
so I flashed to the edited Bios again...
reboot.
and....
nothing.
the driver again, fails to load, windows sees a unidentifiable videocard, and I am back to square one.
while modding the driver helps adjust the clock speeds manually, it's not a real solution for a bios editor.
so I still wanted to break the OC lock, that the driver had, if you change the default clock speeds of the bios.
many attempts later, I was suffering from abysmal failure.
no bios trick I could think of would allow the drivers to install in windows, no combination of drivers or anything modded would work together if you mod the bios.
this was annoying the hell outta me, so I got even more determined.
outta sheer boredom, I was looking at the softmodded drivers, that allow overclocking of the 9000/9200/9500 and 9600 series of videocard, and decieded to try those.
at first it was a complete failure, the catalyst 3.1 even modded didn't work with the original BIOS.
this was annoying, cause the catalyst 3.1 works when I mod the drivers myself...
so the drivers someone else modded don't work.
I downloaded the 4.8's modded, and tried them.
they worked with the original bios just fine.
finally...
so I flashed to a edited bios, changed the default clock speeds from 250/333 to 290/ 380.
and.... BOOM....
it worked, drivers loaded and everything.
I was booting into windows with a modified driver, and modded BIOS, completly bypassing all BIOS checks, and Driver checks.
I beat the OC lock finally.
not only on the driver side, but from a BIOS editors side too.
so thats how you do it.
you need a modded driver, to flash the 9000/9200/9500 and 9600 cards that are superlocked, if you want to change the clock speeds of your videocard from a BIOS flash.
changing in windows is always easy...
but changing the default of the videocard, from a hardware point is much harder, but much funner.
now, the card does 5700 point, on it's new default clock speed of 290/380.
not bad for a free bit of performance, from basically a piece of junk. :toast:
this 9200 is screwed up, sometimes barely works.
but with my IC7, 2.6C and 6800 all down and out, I wanted to try something new. this was a nearly useless experiment for me personally, but it was alot of fun to break the OC-lock, especially from a BIOS editing point of view.
:D