Issues with 1070 BIOS

something daft already!! · 13 Sep 2019 at 09:51

I bought myself a Gigabyte 1070 GTX Rev1 OC Windforce GPU off the bay and it arrived a day or so ago. It had been used for mining for about 10 months. It had a mining BIOS on it and the seller suggested I flash the original BIOS on it and gave me links to the TECH powerup website. I identified the correct model from the list and downloaded the BIOS.

Cut the story short here. After flashing etc, the card would run like a dog. Really slow. Much slower than my old 290x. 18FPS in furmark instead of over 100. I reflashed, uninstalled and reinstalled the driver, while running driver cleaner pro between, still the same. Furmark was reporting the clock speed of 139. It should be around 800 mark I believe?

In the end, I found another BIOS for this card, not the official one techpowerup said and this restored the clock speed after a bit of a nightmare with display port settings.

Anyone else have a similar experience? I'm not sure my troubles are over yet. I will have to check on it when I get home tonight as I have left it on all day today.

orbitalwalsh · 13 Sep 2019 at 10:05

something daft already!! said:
I bought myself a Gigabyte 1070 GTX Rev1 OC Windforce GPU off the bay and it arrived a day or so ago. It had been used for mining for about 10 months. It had a mining BIOS on it and the seller suggested I flash the original BIOS on it and gave me links to the TECH powerup website. I identified the correct model from the list and downloaded the BIOS.

Cut the story short here. After flashing etc, the card would run like a dog. Really slow. Much slower than my old 290x. 18FPS in furmark instead of over 100. I reflashed, uninstalled and reinstalled the driver, while running driver cleaner pro between, still the same. Furmark was reporting the clock speed of 139. It should be around 800 mark I believe?

In the end, I found another BIOS for this card, not the official one techpowerup said and this restored the clock speed after a bit of a nightmare with display port settings.

Anyone else have a similar experience? I'm not sure my troubles are over yet. I will have to check on it when I get home tonight as I have left it on all day today.

BIOS are here

https://www.gigabyte.com/uk/Graphics-Card/GV-N1070WF2OC-8GD-rev-10/support#support-dl-bios

willhub · 13 Sep 2019 at 10:44

I thought you need a programmer to flash bioses?

something daft already!! · 13 Sep 2019 at 13:01

willhub said:
I thought you need a programmer to flash bioses?

NVflash64.exe does it

orbitalwalsh said:
BIOS are here

https://www.gigabyte.com/uk/Graphics-Card/GV-N1070WF2OC-8GD-rev-10/support#support-dl-bios

You would think so but when I tried the latest from there last night, it said there was no compatible hardware found.

willhub · 13 Sep 2019 at 13:07

So I could flash my laptop 1070 maybe I guess hmmm

something daft already!! · 13 Sep 2019 at 13:37

willhub said:
So I could flash my laptop 1070 maybe I guess hmmm

I would not recommend it unless you really need to. Could set yourself up for a whole world of problems, expensive ones too.

orbitalwalsh · 13 Sep 2019 at 13:47

something daft already!! said:
NVflash64.exe does it

You would think so but when I tried the latest from there last night, it said there was no compatible hardware found.

mmmm bios's must have really changed it from default then . If original flashes cant detect hardware . Mind you there is Samsung and Micron FLASHES! which Memory module is your board using ?

something daft already!! · 13 Sep 2019 at 14:49

orbitalwalsh said:
mmmm bios's must have really changed it from default then . If original flashes cant detect hardware . Mind you there is Samsung and Micron FLASHES! which Memory module is your board using ?

the thing is I used the BIOS file listed as the official one from TECH powerup.

orbitalwalsh · 13 Sep 2019 at 14:59

something daft already!! said:
the thing is I used the BIOS file listed as the official one from TECH powerup.

card was still shipped with either samsung or micron . wrong bios and it'll fail. GPU-Z should state memory type or unscrew the heatsink

something daft already!! · 13 Sep 2019 at 15:17

orbitalwalsh said:
card was still shipped with either samsung or micron . wrong bios and it'll fail. GPU-Z should state memory type or unscrew the heatsink

Cool, I will check, it's Micron.

orbitalwalsh · 13 Sep 2019 at 15:42

something daft already!! said:
Cool, I will check, it's Micron.

double check bios you've used to see if its Micron one, specially one you've downloaded direct from gigabyte

something daft already!! · 13 Sep 2019 at 17:40

Yes, it is Micron and Samsung compliant.

pastymuncher · 14 Sep 2019 at 15:05

Any chance it's a fake card? The seller suggesting that you flash the bios instead of him setting the card back to default before listing it would have started my alarm bells ringing.

something daft already!! · 16 Sep 2019 at 16:35

Not judging by the performance. It's very good, however I am having an issue. When idle, intermittently the system will lock up the display. Other things such as audio continue but display is locked. I have to reset to clear. Event viewer have the helpful Kernel Power error with nothing relevant nearby.

opethdisciple · 16 Sep 2019 at 17:17

Bizarrely there are no BIOSes for my G1 1080. They used to be on the support page but they removed them well over a year ago.

And yet the 1070 has a new BIOS dated from 2019 :confused:

something daft already!! · 18 Sep 2019 at 08:48

Got home yesterday and it had crashed again. Last night I ran sfc /scannow command which usually does nothing of any use. I also ran DDU again and chose AMD to remove. I had to reinstall Nvidia drivers as it removed Vulkan support again but this morning the PC had not crashed. I will see how it is later. I don't really hold much hope as I have already raised a return and will send back Saturday if no better.

something daft already!! · 19 Sep 2019 at 16:46

It has not crashed since, so far. I have disabled the screen sleep which I think was the cause but I did make the screen sleep manually and it was OK.

something daft already!! · 23 Sep 2019 at 09:24

It crashed on Saturday, twice. I reinstalled Windows, it seemed OK but I got up at 5am this morning, checked my screen, it was frozen. I thought *** this, left it and went back to bed. Got up at 7 am and it was unfrozen. WTF?

willhub · 23 Sep 2019 at 09:29

something daft already!! said:
It crashed on Saturday, twice. I reinstalled Windows, it seemed OK but I got up at 5am this morning, checked my screen, it was frozen. I thought *** this, left it and went back to bed. Got up at 7 am and it was unfrozen. WTF?

Perhaps your PC rebooted.

something daft already!! · 23 Sep 2019 at 09:30

willhub said:
Perhaps your PC rebooted.

Thanks for the suggestion but no, my white noise app was still running as were other programs which dont at startup