Graphics GTX 580's successful Bios flash explained

Well after a lot of trial and error I finally managed to flash my 580's with a tweaked Bios using Nibitor. The Bios allows the voltage to be pushed to 1.213v rather than 1.15. The core clock default is also set to 825mhz rather than 772.

I've just pushed them up to 1000mhz core and run a loop of 3DMark11 withought any problems. Might give Heaven a go.

I have the .rom file with the modified Bios if anyone fancies trying it. Doing the actual flashing is a bit of a pain though.

 

Niceone! What have the temps done with the extra juice?

 

Cheers, temps have been 38 idle and 59 under load.

 

Comparative scores from benchmarks?

 

Maybe I'm getting old, but I don't think I'd dare mess with my 580. Respect to you.

 

Nibitor is a bios editor, not the flashing tool......NVflash is what you would use to flash the bios.

If it was as easy to edit the bios as it was with RBE, then I would have already posted modified bios.
The bios you are talking about is the Zotac amp edition bios.

Anyway, screenshots please of 3Dmark11 whilst having Afterburner running in the background so I can see the graph throughout the test please.

Simon.

 

Your a brave man. A 580 not cheap. Good luck.

 

The Bios that I now have on my cards is exactly the same as the Bios that was on them originally. The only real significant change that I made was increasing the max voltage. Like I said, all the changes were made in Nibitor, then flashed in DOS mode using nvflash. I can make a "how to" thread if people are interested.

I'll do some comparitive 3DMark11 runs and post the pics.

 

580 dual SLI stock results on 3DMark11 (performance mode).......






And overclocked with the new BIOS......

 

Holysh!t, I knew these cards would do 1Ghz. Awesome! +Rep

What GTX 580's are you running?

Do you have a link to the vbios and the commands you used to flash these in Dos.

Cheers,

Simon.

 

Cheers, I'll raise the memory clock a bit to hit P13000 I think.

Both cards are made by PNY. I went for PNY because I knew that they were just reference cards and I wouldn't have any problems fitting the waterblocks.

I have the Bios image file saved on my system and I can post a walkthrough of how to flash the cards if you like?

 

You can do a walk through on this thread and post the links.

Cheers,

Simon.

 

Ok first I'll just say that I take no responsibility for people potentially bricking their cards. It shouldn't happen as the flashing process is done outside of Windows and is fairly safe. Please also note that I have only tested this on Windows 7 64bit.

Right, now that's out of the way.......


1) You will need to download the following:

- Nibitor
- HP USB bootdisk format tool
- Windows 98 boot files
- The latest version of Nvflash

Google should be your friend here

2) Back up your old Bios

- Open GPU-Z and to the right of the Bios version tab, there is a button that you can click to save your original Bios to file.

- Once saved to file you will need to open it in Nibitor and save it as a .rom file so that it can be flashed to the card should things go wrong. You should also have a spare GPU to hand incase things do go wrong and you need to flash the card back.


3) Creating the bootable disk

- Use a USB stick for this and open the HP USB bootdisk format tool.

- Select FAT32 as the file system and "create DOS startup disk using DOS system files located at" (This will be the path where you saved the Win98 boot files).

-Now you need to copy both your tweaked version of the Bios (make sure it is a .rom file) and the original version to the USB stick along with nvflash.exe and CWSDPMI.exe from the nvflash folder.

- Remove the file HIMEM.sys from the USB stick otherwise it will cause a DPMI error message later on.

- Make sure that you write down the file name of your old Bios and your tweaked Bios as you will need to know these later. Save them as two totally different names so you don't get confused. Once this is complete, you should be ready to start the flashing process.

Note - I found that doing a standard format and just copying the boot files across also worked


4) Flashing the GPU

- Reboot with the USB stick connected to the machine and select "boot from USB device" upon startup. You will briefly see the old Win98 startup screen (this took me back), followed by a DOS screen.

- Keep pressing enter until you see the following command line (this will be a recurring command line if you continue to press enter):

C:/

- At this stage you will need to enter the following command to begin flashing the card/s, leaving spaces as appropriate:

C:/nvflash.exe -4 -5 -6 BIOS.rom

- Then hit enter. Note that BIOS.rom is just an example. You will need to change it to whatever you named your tweaked Bios.

- The system will pause for a few seconds and then after reading the Bios will tell you that it has found a compatible GF110 chip and ask you if you would like to continue to flash (enter) or quit (q)

- Hit enter and the flashing process should begin. Upon finishing flashing the first card (which takes a few seconds) you should receive a message saying "flash successful". If you have any additional GPU's installed in other slots, then they will be automatically recognized and you just have to hit "enter" to flash or "Q" to quit.

- Once you have flashed all your cards hit "ctrl+alt+del" to restart your machine and that should be a job well done.

- Open Afterburner and experiment with your cards new capabilities.


I think I've covered everything there. If I've left anything out, or people have any problems then give me a shout and I'll do my best to help.

 

Excellent, I had a good read up on NVflash, And I didn't realise it was a case of putting Nvflash.exe -4 -5 -6 then your rom file. I guess the flashing part is easy.

What I would have liked to have done was to create some vbios with modified clocks, so you didn't need to use Afterburner for voltage and clock adjustments. (The same as I did with the HD5970).

If Nibitor was as easy to use as RBE, I would have had modified vbios posted already.

Anyhow, Thanks! This is a start.

Cheers,

Simon.

 

Yeh Nibitor isn't the most intuitve tool to use. It doesn't support the latest Nvidia cards anywhere near aswell as the old 200 series.

You can still tweak the clock and fan speeds all the same though. And I have no problem using Afterburner to overclock

 

Just raised the memory clock slightly and cracked P13000 with two cards. I think they've probably still got a bit more to give.......

 

this just makes me happy

 

Hey guys, I've been trying to flash the bios on both of my GTX 580's, but I've run into a problem, and I was hoping you could help me out.

I've been following all of the instructions in this thread:
http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=207368

Everything seems to work alright, except for when I boot up the Windows 98 files and try to run NvFlash. I type in the command to flash to the new bios and hit enter, but every time I do this it tells me there is an error because the file is not a .rom file.

Normally this would make sense and be an easy fix, but the problem is that I did save the new bios as a .rom file, and NvFlash just refuses to read the file for whatever reason.

Any idea on how I could fix this?

 

I don't know about flashing that particular BIOS but generally speaking whenever I've done this it simply required me to change the file extension from .bin to .rom and that's it! NVFlash then recognised the file correctly.

 

So much win! You are either very brave, or very rich lol.