The ATI Radeon 3850 FLASH Fix project
Alright. You guys know those types of people right? That think they know everything there is to know so charge headlong into something all half assed and under informed?
No, no; were not talking about my moving experiences. :)
Well one of my roomies has these Radeon HS 3850 cards. They are actually pretty nice... well at least they look nice with enough copper on em to do the plumbing for a small apartment.
His ex bought him a horribly overpriced machines (long and very stupid story). Supposedly his ex also took the liberty of flashing some proto-type cards BIOS (a then future ATI release) on these cards in an effort to speed them up. (Lazy, lazy, lazy hardware overclocking)
These cards can be crossfired and also these cards are PCIE 2.0. I only have one PCIE slot (and it's not 2.0). I am hoping this attempt at repair will work. Apparently one of these 2 cards (when used one at a time) crashes (bluescreens XP!) every so often when in a 3d game and the other crashes either immediately or constantly.
So, I volunteered to try and fix these things. It took me a day and a half of research to: A: Find out how to flash a video cards BIOS B: Find and download the appropriate software C: Find an ORIGINAL stock BIOS for these video cards and then D: Figure out a way to turn a USB flash drive (data stick) into a boot disk; and for it to work!
That last part, I would have to say, was the hardest part. I'm lucky enough to have a motherboard that allows me to boot from USB. The big deal was making the bloody thing bootable. I luckily found a website (page) dedicated to this apparently 'new and crazy idea' of booting from one of these things. After a lot of testing I ended up using HP's drive key boot Utility. What it does is give me the option to turn one of these critters into a bootable HD or format as a floppy and overlay a disk image on the thing. (I don't have a floppy drive in my machine anymore)
So I grabbed a 98SE boot disk image from the same page (For reference 98se is my favorite pre XP windows. People can argue, but I found it more stable than any other pre XP version.) But had one more problem: It worked, it boot to the DOS like command promt; but I didn't have enough room on the stick left for the ATIFlash utility and the BIOS image. (Since formatting it as a floppy was the only way to get it to work).
What did I do? Ripped out some of the 'useless to this project' DOS utilities. (QBasic was the first to go; then anything else till I had 500k of space back). and BAM I flashed the stuff.
I found out that indeed, the BIOS part number was different, but every other number was the same. I've been getting conflicting reports on what's actually been done to this card, so I didn't find that surprising. I also have never done this before; so I guess that's all I should have expected to see? The incorrect BIOS.
Of course there is a P/N listed on the card that's terribly similar to the format of the BIOS P/N's But that's different from the BIOS I put on the thing! I am not worried, it had 3400 in it somewhere instead of some Axxx in the same spot.
So, what I am doing now, is running tests. I have only worked with one out of two cars so far. Haven't had a single blue screen. However I am not sure if the games I'm playing would normally bluescreen! :D Though since Fallout 3 runs, a rather graphically intensive game, I think I am safe.
So today I may actually flash the other card and test it. I'm just hoping there's no permanent hardware damage on either of these cards. I'm almost gambling that this other card may actually be the extra glitchy one; so may even have a different BIOS than the other one had!
Regardless, we shall see. At any rate, I'm glad I'm doing this. It's something I haven't done before and was somewhat of a challenge. :)
And the even neater thing is now I have a way to replace my old 'emergency repair' floppy with something new. I'll likely start to re-assemble my old computer repair kit. :)
No, no; were not talking about my moving experiences. :)
Well one of my roomies has these Radeon HS 3850 cards. They are actually pretty nice... well at least they look nice with enough copper on em to do the plumbing for a small apartment.
His ex bought him a horribly overpriced machines (long and very stupid story). Supposedly his ex also took the liberty of flashing some proto-type cards BIOS (a then future ATI release) on these cards in an effort to speed them up. (Lazy, lazy, lazy hardware overclocking)
These cards can be crossfired and also these cards are PCIE 2.0. I only have one PCIE slot (and it's not 2.0). I am hoping this attempt at repair will work. Apparently one of these 2 cards (when used one at a time) crashes (bluescreens XP!) every so often when in a 3d game and the other crashes either immediately or constantly.
So, I volunteered to try and fix these things. It took me a day and a half of research to: A: Find out how to flash a video cards BIOS B: Find and download the appropriate software C: Find an ORIGINAL stock BIOS for these video cards and then D: Figure out a way to turn a USB flash drive (data stick) into a boot disk; and for it to work!
That last part, I would have to say, was the hardest part. I'm lucky enough to have a motherboard that allows me to boot from USB. The big deal was making the bloody thing bootable. I luckily found a website (page) dedicated to this apparently 'new and crazy idea' of booting from one of these things. After a lot of testing I ended up using HP's drive key boot Utility. What it does is give me the option to turn one of these critters into a bootable HD or format as a floppy and overlay a disk image on the thing. (I don't have a floppy drive in my machine anymore)
So I grabbed a 98SE boot disk image from the same page (For reference 98se is my favorite pre XP windows. People can argue, but I found it more stable than any other pre XP version.) But had one more problem: It worked, it boot to the DOS like command promt; but I didn't have enough room on the stick left for the ATIFlash utility and the BIOS image. (Since formatting it as a floppy was the only way to get it to work).
What did I do? Ripped out some of the 'useless to this project' DOS utilities. (QBasic was the first to go; then anything else till I had 500k of space back). and BAM I flashed the stuff.
I found out that indeed, the BIOS part number was different, but every other number was the same. I've been getting conflicting reports on what's actually been done to this card, so I didn't find that surprising. I also have never done this before; so I guess that's all I should have expected to see? The incorrect BIOS.
Of course there is a P/N listed on the card that's terribly similar to the format of the BIOS P/N's But that's different from the BIOS I put on the thing! I am not worried, it had 3400 in it somewhere instead of some Axxx in the same spot.
So, what I am doing now, is running tests. I have only worked with one out of two cars so far. Haven't had a single blue screen. However I am not sure if the games I'm playing would normally bluescreen! :D Though since Fallout 3 runs, a rather graphically intensive game, I think I am safe.
So today I may actually flash the other card and test it. I'm just hoping there's no permanent hardware damage on either of these cards. I'm almost gambling that this other card may actually be the extra glitchy one; so may even have a different BIOS than the other one had!
Regardless, we shall see. At any rate, I'm glad I'm doing this. It's something I haven't done before and was somewhat of a challenge. :)
And the even neater thing is now I have a way to replace my old 'emergency repair' floppy with something new. I'll likely start to re-assemble my old computer repair kit. :)