BIOS Flashing

There are special flashing programs than can be downloaded from the Downloads section of the radeon2.ru website.

Before flashing, it is strongly recommended to:

  1. Save your old BIOS image.
  2. Check that you card works at the frequencies you are flashing without artifacts by first testing the frequencies with PowerStrip or another tweaker.  Be sure to check carefully to make sure there are no artifacts in the High Detail Game2 and Game3 tests and the Vertex Shader and Dot3 tests in 3Dmark2001.
  3. If you use PowerStrip, be sure to disable its clock setting auto-load or even remove its ini-files, otherwise it will load you card settings as before flashing and you will not note any difference.
  4. Check your new BIOS image settings with this editor or the BiosInfo utility.
  5. Use pure DOS mode when flashing (without himem.sys, etc.).  In other words, do a clean boot from a floppy if necessary.  There should be no programs running in memory during the process of flashing the BIOS.
  6. If you are trying to flash a non-native BIOS (from another video card), check to see if it works with the RamBios utility.
  7. Always have a PCI or ISA video card available for use in recovering your system in case anything goes wring with the flashing process.

Recommended flashing procedure:

  1. Download the flashing utility.
  2. Unzip flashrom.exe and flashrom.rom to a clean DOS (or Windows) floppy. Also copy RadClk.exe if you want to view or modify bios directly from DOS, and rambios.exe if you want to test bios image before flashing. If you already have a bios image you want to flash, also copy it to the same floppy.
  3. Reboot your computer from this floppy.
  4. Execite:
    flashrom -s 0 old_bios.rom
    command.
  5. View bios info with:
    RadClk old_bios.rom
    command.
  6. If displayed information is correct, and it has "Core clocking" and "Memory clocking" lines, set the desired frequencies with:
    RadClk old_bios.rom 285 265 new_bios.rom
    command. In this example core clock is set to 285, and memory to 265. Or reboot to Windows and edit your bios with RadEdit.
  7. Flash your new bios with:
    flashrom -p 0 old_bios.rom r
    command. It will restart automatically.