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I was playing around with the Radeon Bios Editor in windows. (I mine on linux, but my cards had a hard limit of 900mhz memory clock so I used RBE in windows to lower that value.)

I lowered the minimum memory clock to 150Mhz on all of the cards, noticed an increased hashrate without any noticeable lag on the desktop, got greedy, booted into windows again and lowered the minimum memory clock to 75Mhz.

After that... I can start booting any operating system... but JUST before it begins to load the desktop (on windows and linux) the screen freezes and I am unable to even reboot the computer by pressing and holding the power button for 5+ seconds. I have to manually switch off the power supply.

I have tried to use an un-modified card as card number one, and 3 over/underclocked cards as the second, third and fourth cards but I receive the same result.

I do have a backup of all the GPU BIOSes (thank goodness!).

Any way to flash the GPU BIOSes to my backups without booting into an OS?

Any help would be appreciated.

Is this all I need?? http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/showthread.php?t=57750 (http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/showthread.php?t=57750)

Edit: It seems backing up the bios wasn't necessary, gigabyte keeps a record of them on their website! http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=3355&dl=1#bios (http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=3355&dl=1#bios)

Does the motherboard have onboard graphics? Have a look in the BIOS and see if you can switch it on, then boot without a card in and plug it in once you've booted up, another thing would be to try booting a livecd without a gui.

Thanks for that!

The motherboard that I own does not have onboard graphics, no. It's an MSI 790FX-GD70.

I could however plug in one card that is un modified, boot up into windows, plug in another card and see if it recognizes it?

You should be able to recover the cards by flashing them from a bootable USB stick or CD. IIRC the 3D clocks don't get applied until the driver is loaded by the OS. (which would explain crashing just before you get to the desktop)

You could also try booting in safe mode, since that doesn't load the GPU drivers.

Sorry, most cards use same profile for booting and 3D. Generally it's a bad idea to flash with values you haven't already tested using Afterburner or similar.

lol do a blind flash

you can google to do that

or just flash since i guess its fine before OS loads

so google up how to flash bios ati

Boot under DOS and restore them with ati flash utility.

Put any good video card (buy another cheap one if you have to) in the first slot closest to the CPU. Then put one or more bad cards in the other slots. Use the good card to boot all the way into the operating system and proceed to rework the bad cards.

Long story short, at least they're only temporarily ruined.  When I first read this topic I thought you were going to say your power supply blew and took out four 5870s.  So it could always be worse  ;D

I "bricked" my cards a few times while trying out different BIOS's on them. Put a cheap PCI card in the PCI slot closest to the CPU, go into the BIOS and change primary video to PCI and set bootable flash drive to primary hard drive. Boot dos from bootable flash drive and flash cards with working BIOS. Reboot, change primary video option back to Auto. Boot and try again.

I'll buy 3 of them from you for $150/ea since they're ruined!  8)

What if you try booting Windows in plain VGA mode?

Why are you flashing BIOS in Windows?  Never flash your BIOS in windows.  Or, if you must, have a backup bootable DOS version of atiflash and boot to that and flash.

My whole Win setup started acting some what only way i can explain is sort of in slow motion and was very unstable after I lowered mem clock to 150MHz
opening msi afterburner would just freeze the screen.   after removing and reinstalling video drivers it slowly came back to normal operation.  300MHz is limit for me now and works great

When running linux do you see the bios and boot screen ? if so I think I can help you out :D

How'd u flash the 4 cards at the same time? If you're flashing your control card, you're just asking for it. Now go get yourself a DOS bootable usb with ATi flash and a functional bios.

You did not breaked anything, OK do this.

If your cards boot fine intro dos, them:

1) Download this http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/1968/ATIFlash_3.86.html
2) Download Ultraiso 9 premium trial http://download.cnet.com/UltraISO-Premium/3000-2646_4-10177302.html
3) Download a windows 98 bootdisk image http://www.allbootdisks.com/downloads/Disks/Windows_98_Boot_Disk_Download49/Diskette%20Images/Windows98_SE_No_Ramdrive.img
4) install ultra iso 9
5) Open UltraIso9. File->Open and select the win98 image
6) Click on "bootable->Write disk image"
7) Here you will need to put a pendrive (it will be formated)
8) Once the pendrive is detected as a "disk drive" just press write, the process take a few seconds.
9) extract the atiflash.exe and copy it to the pendrive
10) copy the backup bios of you card to the pendrive.
11) Put the pendrive on the mb with 1 card and boot from the pendrive (select boot menu, and search for the pendrive, is on the hard disk list generally).
12) once you booted with the pendrive you will see the windows 98 logo, just wait until it gone.
13) write atiflash -p 0 xxxxx.bin (where xxxx.bin is the name and extension of your backup bios)
14) reboot, the card should be working now.

do this for all cards one by one.

*IF you cant boot intro DOS whiout freezing, them you will need to active onboard video and set is as primary, them use atiflash -i to idenfied the device number of your card (it should be 1), them use atiflash -p 1 xxxx.bin

Trying that now jedi95, thanks again!

Edit: Ok so I was indeed able to boot into windows safe mode, but unfortunately I was unable to flash the cards using RBE inside of windows safe mode due to administrator rights restrictions. I am able to load the RBE software as an administrator, but it loads the WinFlash utility separately and that needs to be run as administrator as well.

I tried to edit the compatability options of the winflash utility to force it to start running as an administrator but apparently "you cannot add to compatability options in safe mode, only disable them".

Which makes sense I suppose....

Ok now I am going to reboot into windows using only one good working card, change both RBE and WinFlash's compatability options to force them to start as administrator, and then boot back into safe mode with the dead cards. Wish me luck!

Edit: No luck. Even though both programs started in safe mode, I received the same message... perhaps another .exe file somewhere requires to be an administrator as well but I am not going to bother looking for it...

On to trying to flash the bios using atiflash and a usb drive.

You don't need RBE to flash, only winflash. RBE is only meant to mod the bios. Run RBE, mod your bios to usable speeds, save the bios. Run winflash as admin, load the bios, upload it. Unless you're saying you can't run winflash alone in admin.

Worst case scenario I can show you how to make a DOS bootable usb with atiflash on it.

If safe mode works you could uninstall the drivers then reboot in normal mode. However, it's probably easier to try running winflash as admin by itself instead of going through RBE.

How about booting in VGA mode? It is like a graphics only safe-mode