Discussion So, How Does Flashing a GPU BIOS Actually 'Brick' the Card?

[boddole]

I can guess on some 'basic' reasons:
Power Outage / System Crash - Enter incomplete and or corrupt values in memory addresses such that the card can't figure out what to do anymore.
Using a Different Card / Maker BIOS - Different order of memory addresses and or different sizes of memory addresses causing nonsense data and or overflowing and corrupting other memory addresses.
Setting some base value so high the card shuts down for protection and or constantly crashes.

1. But beyond that. I don't know. Curious to hear your thoughts / info.

Other Bits:
2) Have you ever 'bricked' a card by starting with that card's own default BIOS and modifying values from that (with non 'totally crazy' values)?
3) What seems to cause the biggest / most frequent issues with your past attempts?
4) What is preventing some cards from ever being re-flashed again?

 

[Aikouka]

My knowledge of low-level software (firmware) isn't the best in the world, but from my understanding, the BIOS can be considered the hardware management software for the component in question. With motherboards, this is the software that controls/enumerates all of your sub-devices (all the PHYs) on start-up. I would assume that it technically does the same thing when a video card receives power, but there's really one main component to establish: the GPU. An example of this is that it's the vBIOS that throws up errors if you forget to plug in your auxiliary PCI-E power cables.

 

[Stuka87]

If a card has a bad BIOS flashed to it, and the card doesn't have a dual BIOS, its done. Outside of soldering on a new BIOS chip with a good BIOS on it. As in order to flash the BIOS, the card has to be running. And in order for the card to run, there has to be a working BIOS present.

I am sure that OEM's have a means of writing directly to the chip for use in development. But that's not something that is available to us.

 

[naukkis]

Flashing non-working bios to card only means that card isn't able to boot up. So no video. If system starts without video card it's possible to flash again blindly. But it's also possible to use multiple video cards. So connect video to working videocard, IGPU too is fine, and just reflash dead card with correct bios.