ASUS V9570 (Geforce FX 5700) - Overclocking/BIOS Flashing question

[Cronzor]

After much sleuthing, I've discovered that this card is utterly
un-overclockable because of the crappy BIOS it has - no updates from
ASUS. And by un-overclockable, I mean that ANY change to the clock
settings (1mhz) will result in about a 300-500% drop in frames per
second.

My most recent wave of googling brought me to this page:
http://forums.extremeoverclocking.com/showthread.php?t=134488

The punchline comes from the last guy who posted there:

"I have the same card as you and I had the same problem. Everytime I
OCed, the FPS drops. The problem lies in the ASUS BIOS. I solved this
problem by flashing my original BIOS with the Jaton 5700 BIOS.

I found the Jaton FX5700NU BIOS in the following website:

http://www.station-drivers.com/page/vgabios.htm

Look under NVIDIA Geforce 5700 4.36.20.35.15 Jaton

This is a zip file of an executable that makes a boot disk for you; so
you need an empty floppy disk. I used nvflash ver. 4.42 using the
followng parameters in DOS mode:

nvflash -b backup.rom - to back up the original BIOS

nvflash -p -u -f p191-0n.rom - to flash my card with the Jaton BIOS

I can now OC my ASUS V9570TD FX 5700 to 515/620"


I have my reservations about doing this and would like to know your
thoughts? Is this safe? Might it result in worse performance? Could I
even undo something like this?

 

[Cronzor]

[wish I could edit] Well, yes, I guess I could undo it with a good
backup. I'm just wondering if flashing with a different manufacturer's
BIOS is a good idea, and perhaps suggestions for better ones to try...?

 

[kony]

After much sleuthing, I've discovered that this card is utterly
un-overclockable because of the crappy BIOS it has - no updates from
ASUS. And by un-overclockable, I mean that ANY change to the clock
settings (1mhz) will result in about a 300-500% drop in frames per
second.

My most recent wave of googling brought me to this page:
http://forums.extremeoverclocking.com/showthread.php?t=134488

The punchline comes from the last guy who posted there:

"I have the same card as you and I had the same problem. Everytime I
OCed, the FPS drops. The problem lies in the ASUS BIOS. I solved this
problem by flashing my original BIOS with the Jaton 5700 BIOS.

I found the Jaton FX5700NU BIOS in the following website:

http://www.station-drivers.com/page/vgabios.htm

Look under NVIDIA Geforce 5700 4.36.20.35.15 Jaton

This is a zip file of an executable that makes a boot disk for you; so
you need an empty floppy disk. I used nvflash ver. 4.42 using the
followng parameters in DOS mode:

nvflash -b backup.rom - to back up the original BIOS

nvflash -p -u -f p191-0n.rom - to flash my card with the Jaton BIOS

I can now OC my ASUS V9570TD FX 5700 to 515/620"


I have my reservations about doing this and would like to know your
thoughts? Is this safe? Might it result in worse performance? Could I
even undo something like this?

It would be good to know if his card has the exact same
memory chips as yours. While memory is usually the same,
they don't guarantee it, only the spec'd speed. Further,
you should compare the default GPU and memory speed of your
card to the default GPU and memory speed set by the new
bios.

"Probably" the GPU will be fine, as (IIRC) the bios can
even spec a different (higher) voltage for 3D mode in some
instances (but with Asus, harder to say as they sometimes
did proprietary designs instead of sticking with the nVidia
reference card... do you know if your card is a reference
(looks virtually identical as to layout of the PCB, even if
cosmetic things like capacitor sleeves are different?).

Ideally when one is experimenting with different video bios,
they'll have a PCI video card handy and set the motherboard
bios to consider the PCI card the primary video card. That
way, if your flash goes badd or the card doesn't like the
bios, you just unplug the system, toss in the PCI card
(leaving the AGP card in), connect the PCI card to the
monitor to power up and reflash the original bios.

Does your card have other chips besides the GPU and memory?
I mean other video-function chips, perhaps a capture-input
or output chip? If so, the bios may need to match those,
unless you don't use this functionality of the card. A
regular FX5700 may not have any such chips, I don't
remember.

Anyway, you should be able to try the bios, it is expected
that it will at least be accepted by the card and the card
will at least run at same speeds it did already. Maybe it
will overclock good after that, or maybe not, but I do
tend to think the odd behavior with a mere 1MHz memory bus
increase is due to the bios. Generally there would be
artifacting for a few dozen MHz before that happened, if it
did at all. However, I have never had an Asus FX5700, and
the FX5700 I do have in a system did not exhibit this
strange behavior yours does.

I ended up modifying the stock bios, setting higher clock
rates as the defaults, so that coolbits then showed a larger
range of adjustment. Mine is a Personal Cinema card though,
it has a different bios than yours but it still hit over 620
on the memory... think it ran aat 640 but it's been so long
since I tested it that I might have slowed down the memory
bus some just because there was no need to have it as fast
as possible after I was no longer gaming with it. I do
think the ceiling was under 700, probably closer to 650.

As for the GPU, it might depend a little on what heatsink
yours has but FX5700 wasn't such a hot running card like the
earlier FX5800 was, but then again for most gaming you will
not benefit much from raising the GPU speed, the memory bus
is the larger bottleneck. IMO, there will be little if
any noticable gain in performance between 515MHz and 450MHz
GPU unless you only run at lower resolution, low FSAA.

 

[Cronzor]

It would be good to know if his card has the exact same
memory chips as yours. While memory is usually the same,
they don't guarantee it, only the spec'd speed. Further,
you should compare the default GPU and memory speed of your
card to the default GPU and memory speed set by the new
bios.

"Probably" the GPU will be fine, as (IIRC) the bios can
even spec a different (higher) voltage for 3D mode in some
instances (but with Asus, harder to say as they sometimes
did proprietary designs instead of sticking with the nVidia
reference card... do you know if your card is a reference
(looks virtually identical as to layout of the PCB, even if
cosmetic things like capacitor sleeves are different?).

Ideally when one is experimenting with different video bios,
they'll have a PCI video card handy and set the motherboard
bios to consider the PCI card the primary video card. That
way, if your flash goes badd or the card doesn't like the
bios, you just unplug the system, toss in the PCI card
(leaving the AGP card in), connect the PCI card to the
monitor to power up and reflash the original bios.

Does your card have other chips besides the GPU and memory?
I mean other video-function chips, perhaps a capture-input
or output chip? If so, the bios may need to match those,
unless you don't use this functionality of the card. A
regular FX5700 may not have any such chips, I don't
remember.

Anyway, you should be able to try the bios, it is expected
that it will at least be accepted by the card and the card
will at least run at same speeds it did already. Maybe it
will overclock good after that, or maybe not, but I do
tend to think the odd behavior with a mere 1MHz memory bus
increase is due to the bios. Generally there would be
artifacting for a few dozen MHz before that happened, if it
did at all. However, I have never had an Asus FX5700, and
the FX5700 I do have in a system did not exhibit this
strange behavior yours does.

I ended up modifying the stock bios, setting higher clock
rates as the defaults, so that coolbits then showed a larger
range of adjustment. Mine is a Personal Cinema card though,
it has a different bios than yours but it still hit over 620
on the memory... think it ran aat 640 but it's been so long
since I tested it that I might have slowed down the memory
bus some just because there was no need to have it as fast
as possible after I was no longer gaming with it. I do
think the ceiling was under 700, probably closer to 650.

As for the GPU, it might depend a little on what heatsink
yours has but FX5700 wasn't such a hot running card like the
earlier FX5800 was, but then again for most gaming you will
not benefit much from raising the GPU speed, the memory bus
is the larger bottleneck. IMO, there will be little if
any noticable gain in performance between 515MHz and 450MHz
GPU unless you only run at lower resolution, low FSAA.

Hmm, thanks. Probably the best response I've gotten on the issue
everywhere I've asked. I'm gonna check out the layouts and see if I can
find a decent PCI card (I think the only one I have lying around is a
12mb Diamond Monster 2!! lmao). I might just give it a shot, though I
might also wait some time as I'm not sure I want to experiment on the
only card I can afford :| Thanks again for significant help.