VGA Bios editing...

[Jeff7181]

All the recent talk about being able to flash a FX5900 BIOS with a FX5950 Ultra BIOS got me thinking about trying it on mine. Only one problem... my BIOS ROM is 61k, and all these 5950 BIOS's people are using are over 200k. So... I backed up mine and tried X-BIOS Editor to edit it... only problem is it didn't have an entry for the FX5950 Ultra, and I couldn't change the Devide ID. Then I thought, if I switch the Device ID of my FX5900 (0331) to an FX5900 Ultra (0330) I can look for a change in the hex values. So I found the change, then edited the hex value so that it now has the Device ID of a FX5950 Ultra (0333) but it doesn't list the name "FX5950 Ultra" like it did with the previous two Device ID's.

My question is... even though the X-BIOS Editor doesn't have the name, will the card understand the new value I've given in the BIOS and adjust the default clock frequencies and voltages and anything else that's different? Or would it not understand that value?

 

[Matthias99]

I'm going to guess that the (smaller) 5900 BIOS doesn't understand what a 5950Ultra is, either because that part didn't exist when the BIOS was written, or because they took out that code to make it smaller. But it's just a guess.

 

[Jeff7181]

Actually I was wrong, those other BIOS ROM's aren't over 200k... they were just in a zip file with other utlities to flash the BIOS, they're all about the same size. So I decided to go ahead and flash it with a 5950 Ultra BIOS, it worked, it was recognized as a 5950 Ultra but I wasn't able to increase the speed of the RAM by a significant amount... and increasing the GPU speed without increasing the RAM speed didn't make much of a difference in performance, so I flashed back to my origional BIOS so as not to put a strain on anything with increased voltage that doesn't even allow me to reach higher overclocks.