unflashing

[marc2003]

a couple of months ago i bought an x800pro vivo pre-flashed to xt pe off the members market. in all the time i've had it, it's behaved impeccably. played hl2, ep1, flatout2, cod2, gta:sa flawlessly.....

....you know what's coming.... tonight i spotted a few artifacts when using firefox so i fired up a game and the artifacts were even more noticeable. so my first thought was to find the original bios and flash it back to stock speeds. so i found one over at techpowerup.com and have successfully flashed it from 526/526 back to 475/450. and the artifacts are gone -for now (they were very minimal to start with).

now i have 2 questions. firstly the bios i just used was an x800pro bios but according to everest i still have 16 pipes open. shouldn't that be back at 12 now?

and secondly, has anybody else flashed a card back from x800xt back to pro because of artifacting? i'm just wondering how much longer i'll get before it really dies. i really can't afford a new gaming gpu at the moment. i do have a backup mx4000 for windows usage at least...

 

[p4radox]

Weren't they the cards where you had to do a pencil mod on the Chip to open up the extra 4 pipes? You could then flash the XTPE bios to gain full XTPE clocks etc.
You could remove the heatsink and rub off the required pencil line. That's assuming I'm correct of course...

edit: See here:
http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=17230558&

 

[marc2003]

Weren't they the cards where you had to do a pencil mod on the Chip to open up the extra 4 pipes? You could then flash the XTPE bios to gain full XTPE clocks etc.
You could remove the heatsink and rub off the required pencil line. That's assuming I'm correct of course...

edit: See here:
http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=17230558&

i see. i thought it was just a bios flash that unlocked the pipes. anyway that doesn't seem to the problem so i'll leave that alone. i think it's the memory that is failing. anyhoo it *seems* to be ok at these lower speeds. i wonder how much longer i have......