Dead X800XL AGP please help me diagnose it

[Per Hansson]

Hi, Bought an "as-is" X800XL AGP on eBay... Unfortuantley (for me) it's not working so well...

If I start my computer with it my Port 80H device stops at "25" and I get the "ambulance sound" from the pc speaker... This is on both a Epox 8RDA3+ and 8RDA+ mainboard plus a Abit KT7A mainboard (no Port 80H on it though)

If I add a PCI VGA adapter and tell my computer to use it I can boot to Windows and it finds a new VGA hardware, installing the ATI drivers is however impossible because they tell me I do not have any supported hardware installed... Note that simply switching the monitor cable to the X800XL at this stage only results in a blank / no signal screen...

Booting to DOS and starting ATI Flash v3.09 with the -I paramter results in this output:


I saved the BIOS file, the checksum was 0x1200 and it was 0xE600 bytes long, I then hex compared this with the BIOS here at Techpowerup:
ATI X800 XL (AGP) 256 MB and they where exactly the same... I tried flashing that BIOS on Techpowerup anyway, ATIFlash then told me that it will not flash it because that BIOS is the same that is on the card so I forced it with -F and got this output:



Of course nothing good turned out of this, the card still not worked... So I took out my multimeter and measured the voltages on the card according to this image @ Techpowerup. The results where prefect, all voltage values where normal:

VGPU: 1,361v / 1.31V - 1.41V
VDD: 2,013v / 1.95V - 2.05V
VDDQ:2.096v / 2.04V - 2.10V

I then tried disabling AGP 8X in the BIOS and fast writes, because my mainboard only provides 1.5v no matter at what AGP standard... This did not work either, the hardware monitor shows the card getting 1.52v...

Last here are some screenshots of how ATITool and Powerstrip see the card in Windows...

Anyone with more ideas on how I can revive this poor card?

[Tatewaki]

although the bios flash seems to have worked, your GPU and mem clks are way too low. I suggest to try flashing with another bios file

[Per Hansson]

Just noticed that the PCB's Part Number is 109-A49001-00 and the BIOS reports 113-A49001-100.

On the ATI homepage I get a hit on the BIOS part number, however the "102" number on the sticker does not match that BIOS... And neither can I find that "102" number in ATI's database...

Product Description	BIOS Part Number	102 Part Number	
RADEON X800 XL AGP	113A49001100		102A4900102

The "102" Part Number on my card is 102A4900100 000001

Also to me the Device ID "7A7A" just plain looks wrong, some googling brings up the device ID "554d" which should be for a "R430 [Radeon X800 XL] (PCIe)" I've found no device ID's matching "7A7A"
But maybe the Rialto AGP bridge makes this a bit more complicated?

[Per Hansson]

although the bios flash seems to have worked, your GPU and mem clks are way too low. I suggest to try flashing with another bios file

I've HEX and MD5 compared all BIOS files on Techpowerup that are for AGP cards (except the VIVO one for bovious reasons) they are all the same...

[Per Hansson]

After some further googling and thinkering I've come to the conclusion that 7A7A is an invalid device ID, it is not in ATI's drivers so it will not be recognized as an ATI card...

On this site they talk about modding the BIOS of X800 cards to make them work in MAC's, to do this they hexedit the BIOS and change the Device ID...

Though what I need to do is pretty much the reverse, I only need to use the Device ID that is in the BIOS I have and flash it to my card, the problem being that the Device ID section does not get written, this works for example like a NIC's MAC address on your mainboards BIOS; it is saved even though it is stored in the BIOS because the flash program reads it before the flash and then inputs it in the new flashrom aswell...

According to a Techpowerup article it should be possible to force a "complete" flash using ATIFlash with the switch "-newbios" this does not seem to work for me though, they also provide a modified version of "flashrom" but this app does not even identify my ATI card...

EDIT; just verified that Device ID 554d is what I want, at offset 0x7B in the BIOS the value determines the Device ID, the value is 0A which with this table translates to 554d:

So all I need to do is reflash my existing BIOS somehow without keeping the old Device ID value, easier said than done...

[Per Hansson]

Flashed using the empty bin file at the Techpowerup page linked above, the flash went ok, but the Device ID was not overwritten!

And a reflash of the original BIOS of course did not change it either...

See this image for the output..

[Per Hansson]

I tried replacing all instances of the device id 554d with 7a7a in the ATI display driver, upon rebooting PNP identified the card as a X800 Series card, after installing the drivers and reboting the driver had a yellow mark and said that "the hardware could not start"

A second note; the computers BIOS does not even show the graphicscard during POST

I also tried Gigabytes modified ATI Flash tool and it hard locked the computer...

[Kasparz]

Show please everest Graphics processor screen.
I got same problems as you, and everest shows mystical frequencies.

[Per Hansson]

Sorry, I have just sent off the card for RMA...

Yes, the pic you PM:ed me do indeed look similar to mine... Though yours is a PCIe and mine an AGP so the results are a bit different; your device ID for example is correct...

[Per Hansson]

Got the card back from RMA today, it's working great...

FJust for reference here is what ATIFlash should report when the card actually is working...

http://hem.spray.se/hanzzzon/PICT2617.JPG