Question How similar are different mfrs' BIOS for same model cards?

[jhsachs]

Some advice, please, for a person who is planning to flash a graphics card's BIOS for the first time.

The card is from NVIDIA. I can't find a BIOS for it, but I have found a BIOS for the same model card made by HP.

I know that the HP card is based on the NVIDIA chipset, and so must be architecturally very similar. But what does this mean for the BIOS? Is it going to be the same except for the copyright notice and power-on message and perhaps other trivial differences? Or is it liable to be different in ways that would impair its usefulness to me?

This may sound odd, but I'm not concerned that the reflashed card won't work at all. It doesn't work now, but I believe the BIOS is corrupted and I hope that reflashing will fix it. If the experiment fails completely -- well, I'll have tried and I'll have lost nothing. I'm more concerned that it will appear to work, but will have problems that are troublesome and difficult to identify.

 

[rgd1101]

used gpuz to id the card.
upload the screenshot to imgur.com and post the link here

 

[jhsachs]

I identified the card by looking up the part number on the back. It's a Quadro P1000.

GPU-Z does not recognize it. It leaves the "card type" field empty. The card works with Ubuntu's Nouveau driver and the Windows generic driver, but I cannot install NVIDIA drivers. That's why I believe the BIOS is corrupted. I can get a CPU-Z screen shot if it's useful anyway, but probably not until the weekend.

 

[jhsachs]

Here's some more information, which may make things more clear to someone else -- to me it makes things less clear.

When I posted the first message I was running nvflash64 under FreeDOS. Later I found some forum posts which implied that it will only work properly in Windows command line mode, and since then I've been testing that way, using Windows 10.

I tested a GeForce 8800 GTX which has similar problems. nvflash64 --list didn't list the card but said, "A device attached to the system is not functioning."

Then I tested an 8800 GTS which, as far as I can tell, is functioning perfectly. nvflash64 --list didn't list that card either but said, "No NVIDIA display adapter found."

I am now reasonably sure that nvflash64 is not working right, and I'm trying to figure out why.

These are old cards; I wondered whether nvflash64 supports them. The only compatibility statement I found on NVIDIA's web site says that it supports a handful of new cards "and many more," which is completely unhelpful.

I found a forum post which testified to using nvflash successfully with an 8800 GTS. When I tried that, it told me that on 64-bit Windows I have to use nvflash64.

It seems likely that nvflash64 supports the same cards as nvflash, but I can't be sure. The problem I'm having seems unlikely, so I don't think I can dismiss unlikely causes. But to rule out that one I'd have to install a 32-bit Windows system to test on. I think I'm going too far off-road now. I hope someone can suggest a more effective way to make sense of this problem.