Sapphire HD 5770 BIOS Botchup Leaves Users with Just 720 Stream Processors
Several users of the recently released Sapphire HD 5770 Vapor-X graphics cards have found that GPU-Z showed the shader (stream processor) count of their cards to be 720, instead of the advertised 800.
Our friends at TechPowerUp has confirmed the issue by using the BIOS (BIOS version: 012.014.000.004, dated 2009/12/03) offered by an affected user on an HD 5770 Vapor-X sample – the device ID and clocks are correct, but there’re only 720 operational stream processors enabled by the video BIOS.
When asked about this, Sapphire tech-support responded:
“I just tested one of the cards I have here, and yes it does have the 720 shaders, the if you are comparing the stream process which is at 800, it is different the GPUZ software does not tell you the stream process the GPU unit has.”
The response is obviously unsatisfactory - ATI usually uses the word ”shader” to refer to stream processor in thier official slides, and all the SPUs form Unified Shader Core. It seems an entire batch of HD 5770 Vapor-X carries the BIOS which enables only 720 stream processors. If you’re encountering the same problem, please contact Sapphire support to resolve it. Expert users can download the corrective BIOS (Ver012.013.000.001.034705) right here.
December 28th, 2009 at 4:21 am
What a eff’in PITA! It is not that I am uncomfortable in flashing bios, even though I have bricked a motherboard in the past (with supported BIOS and tools), this process was a pain. But seeing as this was a completely unsupported endeavor I really took my time. But I really had no choice any way. Used Techpoweredup’s quide for flashing video BIOS and in the long run it was a wise if frustrating choice. The worst part was all the broken links plus utilities that had been taken down at the request of AMD.
And of course when I went to flash the BIOS on my 5770 Xfire config I got all sorts of errors (but no bricked video cards). But in the end I used the most risky option:
c:\atiflash -p -f N 5700new.bin Where N is the video card number for each card. Had to do that because there was new mismatches in two different identifier strings, sigh.
And as I finally figured out this was a BIOS “downgrade”. The “new” BIOS is actually a slightly older generic ATI BIOS, but so far the only downside to that is that sitting at idle the cooler fans are spinning noticeably faster (I couldn’t discern them from the rest of the system before).
To add insult to injury my Catalyst install didn’t recognize them on reboot in to Win7. Thankfully a uninstalling, rebooting, a fresh install and another reboot everything is working. One interesting note is that even after the re-flash my custom Overdrive settings were retained. Strange, no?
Now to tackle the fan issue.
John