sorry to be that hobbyist dude who jumps on a forum, reads the first ten posts of a 14 page thread, and then asks noobish questions... but here goes.
I followed the directions in this video that i found (haha fake news russia ha ha)
https://ruclip.com/video/EXLahUxmTOI/how-to-optimize-amd-rx-470480570580-cards-for-mining-full-guide.htmli used the right rom to flash the bios on my card (RX 570 Elpida 1750MHz). i made sure to get the most recent win7 64 bit version of all of the tools and utilities involved. nothing fails during install (i have not scoured log files as i don't know what is normal or what to look for). when i'm done, gpu-z looks happy, windows is happy, but none of my miners will run. all of the benchmark test on nicehash fail. i was on a smartcash pool and that won't work either.
i revert to original card bios and wipe the drivers again and put the factory DVD driver install disk back in... and I'm back up and running. weird thing though, when the factory drivers / bios are installed and everything works, GPU-z says the Bandwidth is Unknown, GPU Clock Memory reads 0 MHz, everything else appears normal.
so it appears to just be that the AMD blockchain driver doesn't work on my machine and/or i need more or fewer windows updates. it's an older machine (2011 intel board that i had to flash the bios on to get it to recognize the PCIe 3.0 card), so maybe i just need an actual properly built modern computer...
anyone have any ideas, instructions, links that i can't find with my own googling skills, snarky and cutting but true replies about my stupid noobish post?
thanks folks!