ATI 38xx BIOS editor (Finally!)

[Sleepy Ben]

This Bios editor does work but it has a bug. I tried it with the original bios (067) from my Sapphire 3850 and changed the speeds and selected the 1.327 voltage from the drop-down box, saved and used winflash but winflash didnt recognise the file as a bios rom file. Problem was the values in drop-down boxes have a , instead of a . - so manually type in the voltages and it works just fine. No longer need to use Rivatuner!

This editor only allows tweaking of speeds and voltages *NOT* fan speed but I popped a Zalman VF900 on my card too get around that. Now I have a very quiet, very cool card with a decent overclock. I also use the "driver and CP" bundles from NGOHQ so no RAM hungry CCC or third party programs needed.

[Niccolò]

I tryed. But obviously it's not working properly. I set 1,327 and i get 1,24. So it's a 0,4 raise. I think there is no way to get the vmod done by bios, only hard mods work.

[maxmaz]

Ok, I finally got a chance to play around with this little program and get some first hand experience.

Initially I started using the v1.5 and edited my BIOS (both the card’s original 067 and the unlocked 071 versions) and flashed them without any issues. Then, I started using the newer version (1.6), and made a few more bios edits which were flashed successfully. However, I noticed some glitches when working with v1.6 (e.g. I couldn’t easily enter my values in the boxes, the values changed themselves, etc).

Now here was when things started to go wrong: I opened a bios with v1.6, made some changes, saved and flashed, but noticed that the vcore for UVD has been increased in the new bios itself. Seeing the difficulty of changing values in v1.6, I opened that file in v1.5, corrected the changes and saved it, and rebooted for a flash. Right before flashing, I noticed that the size of the new bios was different from the original one (which never happened before), but I though what the heck and went ahead with flashing, which obviously ended with a black screen. I had to recover using a PCI card.

So, for now, here are my recommendations:

- First and foremost, you should be well aware of the risks of messing around with bios. Things can (and do) go crazy, and you should be prepared for a recovery or worse. Have that PCI card handy.

- This program is by no means a professional bug-free tool, but it can be helpful if used carefully.

- Never ever save your edited bios with this program for more than once. I think that’s what went wrong in my case. Always, open a fresh file, make changes all in one session, and save it once. The bios you are opening can be already modified by some other methods (hexedit, etc), but you really shouldn’t save it more than once with this program.

- Always compare the size of the modified bios against the original one and do not use it if it's even one byte different.

- Always when you make changes and save it, open it one more time (without any further saving) to verify that all the core/mem/voltage values are what you wanted and there aren't any errors or unexpected changes.

- I don’t expect the program to make changes beyond the core/mem/voltage region inside the bios plus the message area on top for checksum correction. If it’s making changes beyond these two places, you are running the risk of messing up your bios. Forget it or have that PCI card around!

Hope it helps!

[maxmaz]

Just an update: I checked the bios that gave me black screen: It has a core frequency of 1200 and memory frequency of 1700 (that's 3400 MHz effective!!) on a vcore of 0.974!!!!

So the flash was technically successful, only the poor bastard was freezing on the spot due to high clocks and low voltage!

Take home lesson: Open up your file again before flashing and make sure everything is the way you intended it to be.