PC Graphics

[bluntforcellama]

So my old system blew up a few months back and the only things that survived was my rx480 and some ssds. so i rebuilt with the following...

Asus prime x470 pro motherboard

Ryzen 5 2600x (only slightly overclocked at 3.7)

Corsair lpx 16g 3200

evga 850 g2 psu

So ive been waiting for the next gen gpus to come out so i thought i could get a little extra performance just getting another 480 for now while i wait. i did find a deal on a used one on ebay that was in great shape and im pretty sure didnt come from a crypto miner. his ebay history says otherwise.

so when i first got this thing and installed it along with my other one, it seemed to work just fine. ran a timespy benchmark with nice results. but then shortly after i kept getting so many crashes. some time in a game, some times in windows, some times in the windows log in screen. all times was total crash, had to force restart. so at first i thought i bought a bunked up card. so i pulled everything out and tried it with just the "new" card. and it seems to work fine. can run timespy and other benchmarks just as good as my other card. so for the past week ive been googling the hell out of this and nothing is working. ive updated drivers, ive moved the cards around the mobo, i even bought a bigger psu thinking it was just crashing under full load (started with a 650 but now have 850 as listed above) but it wont stay stable with both cards in.

if anyone has had to deal with this and has some insight i would love to hear it!

[bearcat22]

If it was mining card the seller might have done a bios mod on it making it incompatible to run with a stock bios card. Running a crossfire setup will probably be more of a headache than a help anyways.

[bluntforcellama]

ok. if it was a mining card how can i tell it has this bios mod you speak of? and how can i fix it? it will be up to me if its "more of a headache than a help"

[bearcat22]

If you are going to flash your bios make sure you are using the EXACT bios for your vid card.

ROG STRIX-RX480-O8G-GAMING Driver & Tools | Graphics Cards | ASUS USA

Edit

My bad. I removed the link for checking to see if the bios chip was removed.

[bluntforcellama]

well. ive closely inspected the card and i highly doubt this card has been opened. it is in very good shape cosmetically. i mean not a scratch anywhere and all the screws are in perfect shape. it actually looks like its never been used. so im starting to think the crashing is happening for other reasons. if i really have to open it up myself to look at the board, ill try.

[grimbloodwolf]

You don't need to open a card to flash a modified BIOS.... you just download the BIOS editor and the flashing tool, and you're good to go.... I have no idea why anyone would think you'd need to go in and start jumping pins or replacing the actual BIOS chip..... lol this isn't 1980 anymore..... I've edited and flashed GPU BIOS hundreds of times including on Polaris cards, there's no need to do anything special.

[bluntforcellama]

ok sry that other link said so... i didnt think that was quite right either.

[grimbloodwolf]

Yeah.... I know, that's what I was talking about, the info in that link is just ridiculously bad.

[grimbloodwolf]

I think if your card had an edited BIOS, the drivers would refuse to load without first being modified/patched to bypass the verification check...... however, it's possible the BIOS for a different card has been flashed, and it would likely pass the verification check and allow the unpatched drivers to be loaded.

If you suspect your card might be using an edited BIOS or has been flashed with the BIOS of a different card, you can probably grab a copy of the correct BIOS for your card from the techpowerup VGA BIOS collection......... also make sure to grab a copy of GPU-Z, and ATIflash from the same website.

The first thing you'd want to do is remove the other card that you're crossfiring with so that when you flash the BIOS it doesn't end up flashing it to the wrong card
Use GPU-Z to dump your current BIOS so that you'll have a backup in case anything goes wrong(or you accidentally flash the wrong BIOS to your card).

Then use ATIflash to flash the BIOS you downloaded from techpowerup.

In the unlikely event that anything does go wrong , you can use ATIflash to flash back to your backup BIOS....... if for some reason something goes REALLY wrong and you get no display signal from the card, you will have to temporarily install another card alongside your 480 to flash back to your old BIOS..... to be on the safe side, it should be an Nvidia card so that you don't accidentally end up flashing to an unintended AMD card.