help needed with gpu bios

[james50cal]

you may already know ive been having trouble with my r9 290x crashing, I contacted powercolor and they sent me a file to flash my bios. The thing is ive never done this before and im pretty nervous about it, should I risk it and flash the bios or could a future update from AMD fix my bluescreening? I got the card from ccl computers so I could rma the sucker but I will probabbly recieve a card with the same problems. Ive read on another forum that the problem is to do with the RAM on the card.......


Quote.."AMD have told me on the phone it is an issue with the Elpida ram chips in some of the r9 series cards"

power color tell me the bios flash will fix the problem.

Any help would be greatly apreciated!

Thanks in advance

James

 

[Dom_79]

If you use Powercolor's BIOS and follow their steps EXACTLY you should have no issues. If you do, contact them again and inform them about the new issues and it's going to be they who deal with it - probably going to send you another r9 the same as RMA to ccl computers.

If you want to avoid the whole BIOS flash, possibility of bad VRAM on this and another card (if it needs replacing) you can just try and get your money back and pickup something else.

 

[james50cal]

just contacted ccl and they said they have arranged a collection, i asked if i could exchange it for a gtx 770 and he said no you will have to call monday once we have recieved the card to see what your options are???
im going to contact them again now to find out what the hell hes on about. surely he should tell me what my options are before giving them my £350 gpu?

 

[Dom_79]

He has to go by store policy. So he probably can't guarantee exchanging for a 770 over the phone without inspecting the 290x.
He was a bit off to not say something to that effect or even something like: "If the 290 is indeed having "X" issue(s) we can offer "x", "y" or "z" options but I cannot be more specific until we have inspected the card and verified "x" with our supplier (power color)"

Technically they do have to give you some idea of what the outcome of their inspection will be if it isn't clearly stated on the page you bought it from or the receipt/invoice when purchased/received.

 

[james50cal]

called them and they told me to send it off and they will test it, if it is faulty they will give me a refund so i can purchase the 770, if its not faulty they will send it back.

i really hope they test it properly as it can run for a whole day sometimes without bluescreening and other times it bluescreens twice in 5 minutes.

 

[Dom_79]

Most likely they will just hook it up to a test bench (open rig for testing) and run (hopefully) a few passes with a couple different benchmark programs like valley, etc. If they know what they're about at this shop they will have 3D mark and other paid utilities to really push the GPU and get detailed feed back.

All you can do at this point is hope for the best.

Good luck, cheers!