I purchased a 2600xt on ebay that has arrived DOA. I have tried to give it an oven bake however it hasnt had any effect so next I considered maybe the gpus bios could be bad.
I have an identical 2600xt and was wondering what the best method would be to copy the bios from the working 2600 to the dead one. Does the dead one have to show up properly in windows in order to get a new bios or is it effectively bricked?
ATIFlash would be the program to use and no it doesn't need to be fully recognised under Windows and infact you can use a USB boot stick. It obviously needs to be working sufficiently for the BIOS to be written to.
No expert but have a search for shorting a couple of legs on the BIOS/ROM chip to force a wipe it works on later GPUs though the legs are tiny.
https://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/
You can also make a backup of GPU BIOS via GPU-Z. Look for the Arrow on first page.
If you have 2 GPUs installed on motherboard at same time, make sure you flash the correct one. Read help for ATIFLASH how to do that.
atiflash /? OR --help, something like that.
well right now if you stick it in a board the bios will give a beep code indicating that there's no gpu. would a gpu with a broken bios do somthing differently than that?
I was able to copy the working gpu's bios and now have the dead gpu in a system with onboard graphics. The ati flash utility can't find the dead card. how do I force flash the card?
I was going to say use two GPUs but you've done that.
The link below is an example of how the RXxxx GPUs can be recovered from a bad flash. Though of course it ma just be dead.
You'll have to search to see if your GPUs also have a similar BIOS chip that can be shorted. Just a last chance effort.
Sounds like a brick of silicon, metal, and fiberglass at this point. A VRM, capacitor, or even the microprocessor itself could've been damaged in some way; who knows?
I can't tell which chip is the bios chip as there seems to be at least half a dozen of those chips on the card , hmm..
It really sucks as this specific model is very rare and I can't seem to buy another one currently
Never give up hope!
Until, of course, there is logic and reasoning that can convince one that that is the best option.
there is a possibility i could buy a similar one and just swap the heatsinks and it would work. however these two 2600's are the fastest models and have a unique built in factory overclock and I'd like both cards to be the exact same. If i buy a similar model it won't have the factory overclock which will be kinda lame.
If you really need to push to have a certain firmware of a card, with all the spec, and you just hate having money, and assuming your first 2600's BIOS survived, you could find some way to a specialist who could manage to read the BIOS NAND directly with a IC(integrated circuit) reader machine. I've never had this done, but assuming they specialize in that very specific line of work, I'm imagining you could get the BIOS image written onto some separate drive as one would store any file, subsequently flashing that image onto your new 2600. All probably much more expensive than it's worth. This is all theoretical, though.