Gx640 Vbios Beta

It seems like ur the only one having issues .. may be it didn't flash properly , why not give it another go before going back to the old Vbios ?

 

Well I had problems with it, screen froze roughly 45s-1m15s after booting each time. Flashed multiple times to see if it was a bad flash but it kept happening.

Hmmm tree, ur sure your usb is formatted correctly to be bootable?

 

I noticed also that it can't run at 625/1000 on battery mode.
When I want to save battery life, I put it in battery mode. Otherwise --> performance mode. In this mode, it runs at 405/100 when idle, and 625/1000 in games.

I didn't tried to overclock it, but I tried to play on my HDTV, using HDMI.
And something weird happened : when in battery mode, GPU is at 100/150 (why it's not like that when the laptop screen is on ?), and goes to 300/400 when playing. In performance mode, it's 300/400 when idle, and 625/1000 while playing. Perfect !

I hope that the final version of this VBIOS will use the "projector clocks" whether it's connected or not.
I got 2 H 20 of battery life in performance mode connected to a 1080p projector, and watching a Blu-ray movie with DXVA enabled (Shark007 Codecs) and Wi-Fi off. Battery mode was not enough to play the movie.

 

Odd, i've played 1080p content on my 4850 in power saver, the 640 should breeze through it,

 

I can play this movie in battery mode, but on the laptop screen (when it's 300/400, and 500/1000 while playing a movie).
The fact is, when a projector is connected, the GPU is downclocked to 100/150, and when a video is played, it's 300/400, which seems to not be enough to hardware decode a Blu-ray and output it through HDMI. (Note that this is true with Sjark007 Codecs, and that it could possibly perform better if I was using a Blu-ray player software such as PowerDVD.)

 

Well i use power DVD 10 and powersaver in which my GPU clocks are 300/400 also i think and it works flawless, now if they were at 100/150 that would make sense but im sure your card can do it,

I will check again if you like?

 

Warner posted a bootable iso with the old vbios on the MSI site:

GX640 (1656) & GX740 (1727) New VBIOS Pending Release

 

with the new vBios, the clocks seem to be more fluctuating,

cooler and more battery life when doing everyday tasks,

power on playing games.

Definitely recommend flashing to the new vBios!

 

i followed every instruction on the website i found. when i burned the iso to the flash it said it would delete everything already on the flash. maybe that did it?

 

yeah, well it has to delete the old bios in order to install the new one.

 

no, it deleted everything on the flash drive when i burned it to it. of course it deletes the old bios when you flash it.

 

Yesterday ATI released new drivers

ATI Catalyst 10.5
Release Notes

As ATI explains there are some fixes about PowerDVD and multi-monitor displays (somebody was complaining about it).

So I encourage everybody to do some tests like 3DMark'06 and Vantage with new VBIOS and Drivers 10.5

 

Vantage scores stayed the same for me with new vbios and 10.5.

 

Is that a good thing?

 

when is the new vbois beta expected to release the final version.

I dont want to try beta. and i heard there is heating issue with the new vbios. Also i am very new to flashing bios etc. i should just burn(??) to usb and then restart computer, is that it.

 

One person noted his temps went up, although it's unclear if the vbios is to blame. Everyone else, including me, seems to be fine.

 

I flashed my vbios and GPU-Z shows that it did indeed work, but I still cannot come back from sleep without shutting off the computer.

It stays at the black screen.

 

Did you get the newest 10.5 drivers?

 

Zaner, does the BIOS version end in 035701 in GPU-Z?

 

actually two persons, my gx started to blow heat (similar to max load) during BIOS POST and booting w7

after booting (considerably longer than usual) temps were higher, enough to keep fan at noisy level

i wasn't able to set 300/300 timings with amd gpu clock tool, getting artifacts and freezes

flashed back to old bios, waiting for final version

 

You should probably tell Warner, or MSI might not work these issues out before the proper release. I'd like to know the cause of the trouble.

 

Well that's why its beta I suppose. Hopefully they get worked out or I'll just have to stick with olf vbios and downclock manually.

 

I think the priority should be the failure to wake up from sleep - although I haven't had reason to use it yet (except for experimentation), a solution is needed since PowerPlay keeps re-enabling itself.

I'm fine with downclocking manually, though recently I bought and installed Dawn of War 2 and was wondering why I was getting poor performance, until I realised I had it clocked at 200/300. When I set it back to stock clocks I had upwards of 30 FPS pretty much the whole time on completely maxed out settings, so I was very happy, though.

 

well I'd say first priority is making it so my llaptop doesn't freeze a minute after bootup, but i seem to be the only one who's experienced that problem.

The new clocks are better-ish but still not ideal. I'd downcloack to 300/300 when not in games no matter what

 

Yes, it does.

Is there anything else I should check?

Edit: My GPU Driver Version is 8.690.0.0 . I think that is the old one. Maybe (hopefully) that is the reason why this new vbios didn't seem to change much.

 

Actually, I've just realised that I've been using a trivial solution to the sleep issue for a while without even knowing it. Basically, we found ages ago that disabling PowerPlay solved the sleep issue, but a number of us have found that PowerPlay seems to re-enable itself from time to time. I can't say what the cause of this is, unfortunately, but it's probably related to the Windows power settings, or perhaps MSI's Eco modes.

In any case, I've found that the AMD GPU Clock Tool completely overrides PowerPlay whenever you use it to set the clocks - PowerPlay will no longer have any effect on your clock speeds. I've set AMD GPU Clock Tool to automatically downclock to 200/300 on startup, and even with PowerPlay enabled my laptop has no trouble with sleep. The only thing you need to do is make sure that PowerPlay is always set to Maximum Performance, because Maximum Battery life has 100/1000 as the default clocks, which stops the laptop from booting into Windows and hence stops the GPU Clock Tool from fixing the issue. If you don't want to bother with changing the clocks up and down manually, I suspect you could use AMD GPU Clock Tool to set your clocks to 625/1000 on startup, and so your laptop would be guaranteed to always be at those clocks.

Although I'd prefer it if the card would default to lower clock speeds and automatically clock itself up for games, things are fine as they are now for me. If it's proven that the new Video BIOS won't have any of the old issues (sleep / 1x PCIe) and will automatically choose good clock speeds, then I'll go for it, but otherwise things are fine already. BIOS changes are not to be taken lightly, after all.

 

That's good information Cheese. I haven't used the AMD GPU Clock Tool. I'll try that now.

 

Haha I was actually thinking about that recently. I discovered that powerplay turns itself again only when you change the power settings (i.e power saver -> balanced -> high performance). If you never change the power settings then powerplay will indeed stay turned off forever.

Although I did have some situations where powerplay would enable itself when I used the GPU Clock Tool but only on rare occasions.

 

How did you get the AMD GPU Clock Tool to automatically downclock on startup?

 

Make a shortcut to the GPU Clock tool with command line options -eng=200 -mem=300 (for clocks of 200/300, for example) and add it to the Startup folder of the Start Menu.

 

For whatever reason I cannot seem to reduce my memory clock speed below 400 MHz. When I lower it past that point the screen gets artifacts and what not.

 

The artifacting is because the card reacts differently based on the exact clock speed. I get artifacting at 400/400 but not 300/300 or 100/150

 

Hi, I have a BIG problem here...

I have flashed the VBIOS from the 1st post in this thread linked by Kosti on mediafire.com. Flash procedure seemed to be fine (erasing, flashing, veryfying) but in the end there was an error:

"Adapter not found
ERROR 0FL01 : press '1' to continue"

After that Windows7 is seeing the video card as "Standard VGA Display" and I cannot even install and use catalyst.

I have tried to go back to the previous version of VBIOS (had a copy before doing anything", but when I start my laptop with CD with it I have the same error BEFORE flash starts.

PLEASE HELP...

 

Ouch, that does sound problematic. Keep trying to apply the Vbios, things can't get much worse from here on. If there's a flashing utility that can be launched from a bootable USB drive, try that.

I hope that the failed flash didn't fry anything.

 

...that does not sound good

 

Did you check out the MSI forums?, they have a pretty good section on flashing a laptop bios. They have a general bios section, then look at the stickies in the notebook section

 

It is not fried. But I have realized one more thing. I used the ISO to flash the VBIOS and as I can see this automatic ISO is doing 3 things. Flashes BIOS, flashes EC Firmware and in the end it flashes VBIOS.

First time I used this it flashed BIOS correctly, then EC firmware and after that I had error from atiflash ("Adapter not found") which suggest that the VBIOS wasn't even touched. After this investigation I downloaded the BIOS and the EC firmware from the MSI website (in my mother language). I had flashed the BIOS and EC firmware manually but it didn't fix anything. In Win7 I have got "Standard VGA Display" and even Catalyst Installer is installing only MS Visual Runtimes and CCC - without display drivers because it thinks that I don't have appropriate hardware to install them.

It is crazy. Please help....

I will check it now...

 

Try to flash the vbios only with atiflash.
Warner (MSi) posted the vbios-only files in the msi thread.

These are non bootable, but you sure can prepare a bootstick

 

It only leads to "Adapter not found" "Error 0FL01 : press '1' to continue" and that's it.

I did once again clean flash of BIOS and EC (manually and separately). I also did a EC reset after each (removed the power cord and battery for over 5min).

Still the same. Win7 keeps thinking that it has a "Standard VGA Display" instead of ATI HD5850.

I have also restored the whole system from recovery partition - just for having sure that this fault is not system dependent.

PS Kosti - if you read this, can you contact Warner and ask about my case please? I am really worried...

PS2 maybe I have the wrong versions of bioses? I don't know...

 

hmmm did you have display drivers installed before the original flash?

 

I did a clean install of my own licence of Win7 and I installed Catalysts 10.4 drivers on it. Everything was working fine (I mean that system saw the HD5850 hardware, but there of course were issues with black screens and inappropriate clocks when using PowerPlay). So after spending a lot of time reading this and other forums, I decided to flash the VBIOS to fix these issues.

I prepared 2 DVDs, one from the 1st post of this thread (new VBIOS), and the 2nd from the 3rd post in this thread (just in case).

I booted the first ISO and it flashed BIOS, EC and did not flashed the VBIOS because of the error that I mentioned before. After booting the Win7 again I thought that it is normal that I have to install display drivers again (after flashing) because I did't realized that that error meant that VBIOS wasn't really flashed at all. I downloaded Catalysts 10.5 but I couldn't get them work (system saw only "Standard VGA display"). I thought that it is a fault caused by bad drivers. But when I wanted to go back to 10.4 ones, I realized that I can't do this too....

Rest of the story you know.

I have to admit that I am quite stressed...

 

I know what you mean, when I flashed to the new vbios i had freezes 45-75seconds after boot every time. If i didn't have my old laptop with me to formulate a solution I would've gone crazy. Safe to say i got little to no sleep that night.

Okay so lets work on this problem of yours. When you flashed the first time what did it say exactly for vbios? You got the error during flash as in it started to do the vbios then failed?

 

Are you sure you flashed using the right vbios? You said that you used the one in the first post and it updated your BIOS, EC, and then failed at the VBIOS. However, the file I linked in the first post is for a bootable ISO that ONLY contains the VBIOS beta and no other files. All I can say is retry the flashing using the VBIOS beta I linked on the first post and not the one on the MSI site.

 

ok, just for being sure I will download once again the ISO from mediafire.com that you have linked and will flash it again. I will double check what exactly is on that ISO, just give mi 15mins

 

An update about the effects of my vBios flashing -

It went well, no issues, confirmed it's success with GPU-Z.

Sleep still does not work (cannot resume from it), and I have noticed absolutely no change from the update.

 

with all respect, but this iso from mediafire.com does contain BIOS, EC Firmware and VBIOS. Please see the attached 3gp movie that I have made while flashing again...

flash.zip

If you have trouble downloading this link, try this one (easier):

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=1VHN65FB

Nothing helps....

and besides, in the description while flashing from this ISO there is a note that this is a BIOS for GT740... version xxx.020 (?), and EC 4.04 (?). It is clearly visible on my movie. Just take a look...

 

Actually, the ISO does not contain anything except the vbios. The text that's appears on the screen is just that...text. It was never updated by whoever created the ISO therefore it reads the wrong info. It should be ignored. On to the real problem you are having, perhaps your video card was bad to begin with.

 

(?) But it is clearly visible that firstly the 4MB BIOS is being flashed, then EC (line EEEEEEEE means Erasing and WWWWWW means writing) and then there is an error in "Step 3" - when trying to flash VBIOS. And all this is happening whe I boot from ISO that we are talking about. So how can you say that this ISO contains only a VBIOS when I am attaching the movie as a proof that there is not only VBIOS?

I really do not understand

 

I stand corrected. It does update all 3. Take a look here, this may be of help. It involves using ATIflash to force the old BIOS back on.

[Solved] Updating 4850 BIOS failed - ATI - Graphic-Displays

 

The only VBIOSes that I have are from Internet. And I can't flash any of them because atiflash.exe is not seeing the hardware. "0" in the command line as a parameter means that Video Adapter which ID is 0 (basically first in the system) is to be flashed. But even when I try to list available adapters with "atiflash.exe -i" command - all that I have is "Adapter not found" message.