PC Drivers & Software

[Davejc83]

I recently picked up one of these off eBay for $60 just to play around with while waiting on GPU prices to drop. I added an aftermarket cooler ($23 bucks on Newegg) Its a decent specked card for a budget build and puts out decent frames on low and mid settings on most AAA titles. the problem I'm having is with drivers. when I install the latest driver it reads the card as a FirePro w7000 instead of a Radeon sky 500? I poked around and found the pro driver for the fire pro w7000 and installed it for S&G and it read as a sky 500!?! but it wants to update to a newer driver and when it does its right back to the FirePro w7000.

[will86]

same thing happened to me,  i flashed mine to w7000's with unlocked vbios and they are a crazy deal for $60.00 especially with gpu prices in  2021. and in games that support crossfire they are super smooth 

[will86]

If you don't mind me asking what cooler did you go with ?

[Davejc83]

Arctic Accelero L2 Plus $23 on Newegg

[goslackware]

* My SKY 500 card came with this vgabios:

https://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/210582/210582

I was having stability issues with the latest amd drivers.

Fix (reboot between each step):

* I installed to the "latest" sky 500 drivers (which are actually old drivers from 2015), so I can have a stable system to do the firmware update:

https://www.amd.com/en/support/professional-graphics/legacy-products/radeon-sky-series/radeon-sky-50...

15.201.2401-whql-firepro-retail.exe

(rolling back to the original Win10 windows inbox drivers probably would have also worked.) 

* I then updated the vgabios to "AMD FirePro W7000 4 GB" to the version below:

https://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/193902/193902

https://www.techpowerup.com/download/ati-atiflash/

* Then installed the latest amd drivers.

win10-radeon-pro-software-enterprise-21.Q2.1.exe

I now have a stable system, and gpuz shows the video card now has more available features.  It's a sky 500 card, but now shows up in Win10 as W7000.  I may consider an SLI setup in the future...

[goslackware]

Maybe I have a bad card, but uninstalling the vulkan runtimes seems to have improved stability so far.  Could be a coincidence.  Before uninstalling the vulkan runtimes, I did notice that chrome would show all black when the chrome flag for vulkan was force enabled.