OK. This one you guys gotta hear 3870 lost its marbles

[nanohead]

So I have 3 of these Visiontek 3870s. Been an abysmal failure getting tri fire to run.

So I start looking at each card in depth. Turns out, one of them (an early ATI reference board), has NO BIOS. You cannot make this stuff up.

All the others show device IDs, PCI IDs, etc. This one has those too, but it shows the BIOS part number as "-", ie, no ones home.

If I explore the card with ATIflash, I keep getting strange errors (the very descriptive 0FL01). It can't erase the ROM, because as far as the card and ATIFlash think, it HAS NO ROM

Now thats what I call awesome.

If you pass the command atiflash -ai, which gives all relevant info, it says "No VBIOS". Totally gnarly.

This one has a PMC ROM asic, which is the only one ATIflash cannot force via a bypass algorithm (oh joy, oh rapture).

Back to Visiontek I guess. I imagine the Asus M3A32 LVP (least valuable piece of shyte) decided to munch the ROM on this board. Maybe it was hungry

[Sound_Card]

What do you mean by early ATi reference board? Is it a engineering sample or just a early retail product? You can find bios at techpowerup.com. FYI.

[nanohead]

Originally Posted by Sound_Card

What do you mean by early ATi reference board? Is it a engineering sample or just a early retail product? You can find bios at techpowerup.com. FYI.

early retail product with the ATI reference cooler. I've got plenty of BIOS files.... not the issue.

What I believe happened is that the PMC Sierra PM25LV512 serial flash memory (which is where "BIOS" is stored on this particular card) somehow lost its programming.

When I try to reprogram with ATIFlash, it says "ROM not erased", because it cannot erase something thats not there! ATIFlash is set up to erase first, the reprogram.

If I could simply PROGRAM it, instead of having ATIFlash try and erase it first (which it must do based on the way its set up as a field tool to update firmware), I bet I could get the thing reset. I can't find any reference to either ATIflash, or any other GPU type tool where I can isolate the programming routine without having it try to erase first.

I looked for PMC software to do this, but there is nothing that I can find that will do it via a PCI express bus through DOS. Mostly via standalone programmers.

This is an amusing thing I must admit!!

[Sound_Card]

hey I'm not saying it's not weird. This is one strange case but at the same time I think it's kinda funny. All that hell in trying to figure what is going on and it ends up being something you least expected.

[SSXeon]

Send it back and get another. Its defective if you are getting those problems.

[nanohead]

Originally Posted by Sound_Card

hey I'm not saying it's not weird. This is one strange case but at the same time I think it's kinda funny. All that hell in trying to figure what is going on and it ends up being something you least expected.

I see you changed your avatar , is that Eliot Spitzers girlfriend?

Yep, its too funny. I feel like the guy in the DaVinci code that beat himself with a whip until he was bleeding

I have no idea why I do it to myself, playing with all this stuff. I used to collect cars for years, then the kids came. This is cheaper and cleaner (except the liquid cooling systems on my machines, at least I can still smell the anti freeze!)

[SSXeon]

Originally Posted by nanohead

I see you changed your avatar , is that Eliot Spitzers girlfriend?

Not worth 4k, but i would take her in a heartbeat.

Originally Posted by nanohead

Yep, its too funny. I feel like the guy in the DaVinci code that beat himself with a whip until he was bleeding

I have no idea why I do it to myself, playing with all this stuff. I used to collect cars for years, then the kids came. This is cheaper and cleaner (except the liquid cooling systems on my machines, at least I can still smell the anti freeze!)

This is odd, i would send it back for another and test. If i know for sure i can run another ill be testing some tri-fire.