Sapphire Radeon 4870 and flashing?

[Dragonlord]

Since I'm still having troubles with random 3D freezes under both Linux and Windows ( no problems with 2D ) I googled around a bit and found reports of users stating that they flashed a new firmware onto their Sapphire Radeon 4870 and that it helped. Now there are a couple of things that interest me.

1) People around here having done such a flashing already and can confirm this does help something?

2) How safe is flashing a graphic card?

3) What's better: flashing from Windows or DOS?

[deanjo]

1 ) Yes it can help in some situations.

2) If care is taken, it should be OK. ALWAYS SAVE THE ORIGINAL BIOS BEFORE FLASHING. There are times where flashing can make issues worse though for example if the "new" bios from the other vendor uses more aggressive memory timings due to performance tweaking or different memory chips being used on the other card. When this happens, if you have another video card handy (does not have to be the same model or make or brand) and have the slots to put in both the video cards it can usually be easily reverted too. Plus if you ever have to send your card in for warranty you want to flash it back. Another thing to note is make sure that heatsink and fan on both models are the same. If they are not (for example the card's bios that your going to be flahing too utilizes a non reference cooler), there is a good possiblity that the fan speed steps are different.

3) Always from dos.

[Dragonlord]

The report I read of the user linked to a BIOS given by Sapphire itself for exactly this card version ( you have to check with the code on the box to match it ). So I assume the BIOS I downed is precisely for this card.

Well then let's see if we get the party started. Would be great if the crashes could be killed using that flashing.

[Dragonlord]

Good god... what a drama :/

Tried to flash in DOS but do you think windumb crapshit managed to boot into DOS? Of course not. And creating a bootable USB stick is next to impossible ( why the hell can't they format+sys-copy a USB stick like a fucking floppy ). It's hilarious how many solutions people jolt around on how to make a USB bootable... using a "floppy"! Geez... nobody has floppies anymore nowadays so it's impossible.

Had then to give up after an hour of trying to get this DOS flashing done. Went then for the windows flash version... no other choice left. This did work out. Old BIOS saved and new on the card... so far so good.

Played 2 or 3 hours straight yesterday for testing. From time to time the game had a split second freeze and then continued. I could be wrong but chances are with the old BIOS it totally froze at these points whereas now it continues afterwards ( knocking on wood ). I can live with this few hickups as long as I don't have to reboot all the time. Let's see now if Linux manages to avoid crashes now too ( in Blender this happened most of the time ).

[nomaam]

if the case is for sapphire 4870 than
the bios update can be found here :
http://www.sapphiretech.com/us/support/drivers.php

there is a known issue for very certain cards
if on the box your part number (writen on a green patch) is PN: 188-01E85-001SA // SKU#:11133-00-XXR
than your default bios should be VER011.006.000.003.000000 (can be reveled with GPU-Z)
this is a buggy bios since on low graphic games the gpu tries to lower the clock rate which crash your PC
you would probbly c alot of squeres like corduray effect of some kind
in that case you should go to the link above and upgrade your bios
preferably in dos mode (use a bootable cd/flash drive)

cheers