Fixing a Bad BIOS Flash on the 4870

[wiak]

Unfortunately it seems to be happening out of the blue -> http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...7&postcount=17

and

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...postcount=3956

I don't think OC'ing thru software should cause this ing crap. Let's see who else get's "lucky".

yes got a point, software oc is alot safer than bios flash, and well i hope you guys get them working again, are you guys sure if they arnt overheating?

[Marvin_The_Martian]

yes got a point, software oc is alot safer than bios flash, and well i hope you guys get them working again, are you guys sure if they arnt overheating?

What's their thermal envelope? I can imagine that great increases in shader counts might mean it will be more sensetive to cooling? Naw come on, if it were so simple Ati wouldn't have released them they would have noticed during QA..

*looks at thread tittle*...

maybe not?

[SNiiPE_DoGG]

well i am positive it was a ram issue in my case (symptoms linked by AriciU) because even when the card that died was working properly ATItool artifact scan gave me errors ever 3 sec's or so. my 2nd 4870 does not have this problem at all so i figure the card that died was bad all along :\

[Marvin_The_Martian]

What I gather is that it might be something about crossfire to since it seems to happen when people change profiles to but I'm ony guessing..

[ceevee]

Unfortunately it seems to be happening out of the blue -> http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...7&postcount=17

and

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...postcount=3956

I don't think OC'ing thru software should cause this ing crap. Let's see who else get's "lucky".

and this is why i didnt go with xfire. i used to have 2x x1950xtx in crossfire a couple years ago and had nothing but problems.

every time AMD/ATI comes out with a new gen of cards there are people that proclaim that all the problems are fixed and everything is perfect now.

but every time there are more problems.

anyway hope they fix this stuff soon because the cards seemed really great, at least on paper.

[dehx]

Oh, the card was f-in amazing.. I got 9027 points in 3D mark Vantage... it beats the crap out of my OC'd 3870 crossfire... and thats just one 4870.

[dehx]

ok, I put the card in an athlon 64 x2 system w/ a 550W PSU... set the board to do onboard gpu, and it boots with the card in the system... but its not in device manager or anything... atiflash in DOS doesn't even detect it. I beleive the card to be stone cold dead.

[Kensek]

At least ATI Flash sees my Dead Sapphire HD4870s. I backed up the original BIOS before card 1 died.

I reflashed it into the first card also. But, the fan only spins still and there is no Video or POST happening.

That's when I have another model ATI VGA in the Primary PCI-e slot.

[Theta]

Any new information?

Got 4 dead here, as well.

To fuel the fire and speculation, both sets we have died in Crossfire mode. (may be a trend from the looks of it)

[Garrett]

You have 4 dead 4870 cards... omg...
Just great... I've been looking for 2 of those cards since I want some new toys again... NVIDIA is ridiculously expensive and ATI cards just die for no apparent reason... just perfect

[Edin]

Well aint this just great... I'm loosing any hope these cards will run again since I can see now some of you have dead cards even without flashing the BIOS... very bad neews indeed... looks like it'll be RMA time for me monday morning...

[Theta]

Not trying to stir the pot at all, just curious to see what progress has been made.

Playing with 4850s in the mean time...

Oh, and if this helps... ALL four have three red lights that illuminate upon power on, not all 4 of them.

All exhibit the same no-POST behavior, but can be seen by ATIFlash as a secondary adapter (just checked for the hell of it).

EDIT: HIS brand, BTW.

[AriciU]

Hope all of this gets sorted in one week when i'll buy two of them. It sucks to be a guinea pig.

[Papu]

well none of these problems came up when they were being tested by review sites?

[jimmyz]

This is indeed a bummer of a thread, but keep in mind a problem caused by a bad flash can be corrected by a proper flash. in a little while the software should be out to fix the cards up, more than likely it is going to involve a pci card boot and flash or similar, but it should be correctable.

I feel the culprit is not realising that you can't add voltage to the cards through bios,( only about .01v) so the speeds won't boot. then when the card gets powered down and tries to reboot it lacks the voltage to do so properly. could someone please report back the vcore on boot of a "dead" card. and some hi-res photos of the bottom of the card in the voltage area..

[keiths]

Have there been any cases of this happening to 4850s as well?

[xMrBunglex]

it sounds like these guys need instructions on how to do a pencil mod on these cards so they can see if they boot. then they can just erase the pencil mod after they flash back to a working BIOS.

and for the record, i have two 4870's in CrossFire and everything is working like a champ. i haven't flashed and i haven't tried to OC yet, but i haven't exactly been going easy on them. i've been playing Crysis and CoD4 pretty heavily during our Southern California heatwave and the cards are doing great.

i have two Sapphire 4870's and it looks like they have different BIOSes. the top card will let me underclock its memory to 810 and the bottom card won't go below 900. the top card also idles 5-7° hotter than the bottom card, but that is probably just due to heat rising.

my top card's BIOS is 011.003.000.001 and i don't know how to find my bottom card's BIOS number. i can't check it in CCC.

[Miwo]

I am thinking DDR5 is the culprit

Remember that you are pushing the memory twice as hard with every MHz vs the DDR3 on the 4850s
900Mhz = 3.6GHz
1000MHz = 4.0GHz
1100Mhz = 4.4GHz

Guess killed his 4870 almost instantly by going to 1200MHz
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...d.php?t=192696

Thats a 33% increase in memory speeds without additional volts. Be reasonable! So perhaps either a quick death @ 1200MHz, or a slower death @ 1100MHz like I see many people doing?

[Kensek]

I don't think so. I only Oc'd 1 card to 790/1050 for 15 minutes.

The second card was never OC'd. On the initial bootup with both cards inserted and powered up and with the cF bridges installed XP would not load.

Hence, I removed 1 card thinking a Corsair 750TX was insufficiently powering the cards. However, after this neither card never worked again.

Though they can be seen through ATI Flacs when another ATI model card is used as the primary.

[keiths]

Been trying to determine GPU vs memory performance in this thread: http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...d.php?t=192690 Could use some more results at higher resolutions and aa to tax the memory, as so far it's GPU dominated, with memory not having any impact at all.

[Kensek]

It's like a circuit breaker has been tripped in these HD4870s. And someone needs to devise a way to reset it.

AS for OCing - I use to run my HD3870s at 890/1360 and never had a problem. But as you eluded to, that wasn't GDDR5 ram.

But reviews say GDDR5 Ram is capable of 5600, which is 1400.

[Edin]

I didn't overclock my two cards either...

[GoldenTiger]

I still don't get why even flashing back properly won't fix this... I just went out and bought a 4850, going to send the 4870 back if no solution is found shortly. I was offered a full refund for it, while I'd prefer to have a 4870 I'm going to just stick with the 4850 if no one figures this out by the time I send it back . Monday probably, 4850 isn't as fast as I'd like but *shrug*.

[halo112358]

bah stop bitcing about 4870 going out in less than 24hours when its YOUR own foult that didnt get or read the memo about
"flashing modified bios = asking for truble"

w1zz to teh rescue!

anyway am getting 4870 on monday

It's not just people who've flashed bios, random cards are dying too.

[mr2sw21]

just wonder is it now the card killed the mobo or just the card dead? And how many got a dead card now?