What are your throughts about the best tweaker for a Radeon 8500 (retail). It seems most people are using the rage3d tweak, but I see a few others out there.
Also, I thought I had seen some posts talking about a bios update for the 8500, but didn't find it anywhere. Is there one, and do I want to bother?
Rage3D Tweak, without a doubt. Radeonator is also quite good.
Don't flash the BIOS unless you have a problem. The reason that it's been talked about recently quite a bit is that there's a BIOS out now (7.006 I think) which appears to fix stability problems that people have been having with certain motherboards for months. Their are some other very small improvements (mainly regarding IQ) that can be had by flashing your BIOS to a later version, but it's not worth the hassle, IMO. You can also flash an edited BIOS to rasie the default clockspeeds of your card (e.g. to 300/300MHz) or to toggle the ouput between NTSC/PAL. I would only do this if I had done a permanent voltage/cooling modification to the card.
Incidentally, the ATi cards that will be launched on July 17th-20th (RV250 and R300) will be able to toggle between PAL/NTSC formats using a DIPswitch.
Originally posted by MitchSchaft You have any info on flashing the bios, MF? I've been having stability issues ever since I got this 8500. Latest drivers as well.
Not a Gigabyte Socket A DDR or Epox 8KHA mobo is it? They are the two main "problem mobos".
I just downloaded 7006. It's the only one for the 128MB version, so I guess it's right. I read the .txt and it looks easier to flash than the nVidia except I'm supposed to uninstall the drivers first. I'll let you know how it goes in about 15 min. I'm gonna go ahead and install those beta drivers as well for the hell of it.
As far as I'm concerned, that 7008 BIOS sucks. I flashed my Radeon 8500LE 64MB 250/275 card with it, and I still have a picture, but I can't reinstall drivers. Even though I did remove them before I flashed the BIOS. It says the drivers are not compatible with my card anymore. Looks like I have to flash back to either the old BIOS (which I don't have on this computer at the moment) or I'll try the 7006 BIOS off of that site as well. First I have to find a working floppy drive in my room somewhere and make another disk to flash the 7006. If that doesn't work, I'll just wait til tomorrow to flash the original back on
Sorry Mitch. But at least you're not the only one having problems with flashing these BIOSes
Intel Pentium 4 2.53B C1 @2.85GHz (stock volts), watercooled @ 27*C load
MSI 865PE Neo2-P (i865PE + ICH5), 1GB PC3200 DDR RAM
ATi Radeon X700Pro 256MB AGP8x
Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 160GB SATA, Maxtor DiamondMax 9 Plus 80GB
NEC DVD-RW (ND-3520A), Lite-On 52/32/52x CD-RW (LTR-52327S)
Microsoft Windows XP Professional SP2 My Heatware | My Beerology | My eBay rating
K, well I fixed my system's problems. All it took was a reflash using a 7006. I've discovered that my card, the 250/275 version off of newegg with 3.3ns RAM ships with the 7005 BIOS.
I realized I skipped a minor detail that ended up being very important. When I saved the original BIOS from my card, it was 52.0kB. The 7008 that I flashed to was 64.0kB and didn't work properly. However, the 7006 BIOS is 52.0kB and works flawlessly. I can now run my resolutions and color depths normally again with my drivers installed properly! My advice would be to check the two file sizes against each other to make sure they are the same.
They also mention "blind flashing"...does that mean you don't need a PCI card? It's a bit late here (1AM) and I have cross country camp tomorrow morning, so I'm gonna get goin'! Good luck man!
Intel Pentium 4 2.53B C1 @2.85GHz (stock volts), watercooled @ 27*C load
MSI 865PE Neo2-P (i865PE + ICH5), 1GB PC3200 DDR RAM
ATi Radeon X700Pro 256MB AGP8x
Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 160GB SATA, Maxtor DiamondMax 9 Plus 80GB
NEC DVD-RW (ND-3520A), Lite-On 52/32/52x CD-RW (LTR-52327S)
Microsoft Windows XP Professional SP2 My Heatware | My Beerology | My eBay rating
Best Radeon Tweaker
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I run a VP6 mobo.
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