5600 driver nightmares

[Roguestar191]

Hello. I got what appears to be an NVIDIA Geforce FX 5600 Ultra with 256 megs DDR SDram.
Underneath the heatsink the gpu is labeled geforce fx ultra, but in windows is reported as a regular geforce fx 5600.
Now, this seems to be the least of my problems, with my asus A7v600 mb (KT600 VIA chipset)
I had the system running stable for a while, with old 44.03 drivers, every other driver I tried made my system very unstable.
the bios on the card is version "
Nvidia Geforce FX 5600 VGA Bios
4.31.20.39.00



My system became unstable when I started messing with drivers to see if I could get TV-Out to work again.
I've tried everything but flashing the vga bios(which (if possible) is a very last resort)
I've looked around and the highest bios version I could find for any geforce fx was
4.31.20.38.00 .. which makes me wonder if I got a hacked up card..

Any help would be appreciated.

--I'll try anything.
Asus A7v600
Athlon 2600 Barton @ 1.9ghz
Samsung DDR400
Nvidia Geforce FX 5600 (ultra?) (256megs DDR)
WD 80gb 5200 rpm





One last note, the card booted up in my linux box just fine, Xorg started with the .6111 drivers, everything seems fine, and it's still reported as a 5600 without the ultra (I usually keep a tnt2 in it).

[Roguestar191]

Ok well, I've found some bios I'm going to try, and I found a program called "vgabios" that will allow me to test the images before I flash them to see if they'll work. I'll make a backup image of the current rom and post how it goes.

[Lfctony]

The 5600 Ultra 256MB runs at different memory speeds than the 128MB, ie much lower. Use a 256MB bios or you'll fry your ram.

[ragejg]

There were no 5600 Ultra's with 256mb RAM... it's either a 5600 or a 5600XT...

[Lfctony]

I remembered there was one, I googled it and found quite a bit of matches, but I can't find anything official on it. :(

[Roguestar191]

the gpu itself says it's an ultra.. but there's no specific information on it, got it from some cheezy company in cali..

[ragejg]

Do you have a pic of the card?

[Roguestar191]

gimme 20 mins to make one

[Roguestar191]

1 full photo -heatsink/fan and 1 closeup of the gpu
http://www.roguestar.dynu.com/gallery/view_album.php?set_albumName=Puters

[Slyder]

If Windows do's not read the card as a 5600 Ultra with the latest drivers from nvidia.com, then I would question this cards authenticity. Having said that, you are using drivers that are pre-historic and I am not sure if these would detect the card as an ultra. They may do thou.

[Roguestar191]

actually right now I may be sitting on a brick. both nvflash and wwflash are telling me there's no nvidia card.. it won't post now.. I hope it's not fried. (It's the card, I've tried other vid cards to make sure the system works.)
When I hook in my old voodoo3 pci card to try to reflash the bios with what I backed up, say's there's nothing. I've tried nvflash with -p -u -f backup.rom and wfflash nm backup.rom to no avail.

[Kev1]

Nice card. I bet with the right tweaking it would do amazingly well. JUst need to figure out which driver is best.

Have you tried the 56.72 forcewares? Or any 50 series? You may want to look at StarStorm 56.72 XQ drivers as they are really good too.

[Kev1]

That sucks. Dont think bios flash was good idea in this case, but you should be able to flash back.

Hope you backed up your original bios.

[Roguestar191]

I did back them up, but..
I backed up my old bios, and tried to flash the new ones.
It said it timed out waiting for the eeprom to clear, and quit.
I tried again, same error.
I rebooted, no post. I put in my pci card, nvflash reports no nvidia cards on the system... is there any way I can override it and force it to install ... a bios? Right now I think it's blank... or just seriously Mucked up. :lame:

[Roguestar191]

with nvflash is there a way I force it to flash to whatever's in my agp slot regardless of what's in there? If it doesn't work again it's not a huge loss because the card was very unstable and the fan...what a joke. But I would still like to try to restore it.
Nvflash 4.41 - I've tried nvflash -u -p -fbackup.rom
Nvflash 5.06 - nvflash -5 -6 -fbackup.rom
wfflash - wfflash nm backup.rom

All of them say they can't detect an nvidia card on the system.. Me thinks it finally bricked.

[msxyz]

Very Odd: I've never seen a 5600Ultra with TSOP RAM. RAM available in that kind of package never exceed 3.3nS maybe 2.8nS at best, while the 5600Ultra used 2ns (400MHz) DDR.

Probably it's one of those cheap boards where the GPU itself is clocked like an Ultra but the RAM speed is the same of a vanilla 5600.

[Roguestar191]

who knows, the only reason I decided to try flashing it in the first place is because it would not work stable with any drivers except the old 44.03 that came with it (probobly hacked up), with bad performance at that. It's only a loss of money, not a decent working video card.. but if I could get the bios working again .. somehow .. I'll love nvidia forever.

btw, the ram on the card is
Samsung 410
k4D551638f-tc50
AUB381Gc korea
which appears to be ddr400..


http://www.samsung.com/us/Products/Semiconductor/GraphicsMemory/DDRSDRAM/256Mbit/K4D551638F/K4D551638F.asp

[Kev1]

There is a way to force the flash, but Im not sure what it is. Your best bet is to read the threads about flashing 5900 cards to 5950s, as many had problems and were in same boat as you. Fortunately most everyone with similar troubles could fix the bad flash, so hopefully you can too.

[Roguestar191]

I don't know if I can, the eeprom seems to be missing. After I backed up the bios image, I tried to flash the new one, without passing -r. Then, it gave me an error "Timed out waiting for eeprom to clear". Which leads me to believe it cleared, and stayed gone.. So nvflash doesn't detect the nvidia card anymore, only the old voodoo3 pci card I have in. So is there a way to tell it to flash the card in the agp port, even without detecting it?

The only other thread I found with the exact same problem, the guy was able to take back and lie his way to a new card. I'm also looking for more detailed documentation on nvflash, but can't find much more than the small "readme".

[Kev1]

I used WF Flash, and you can force the flash even if it dosent see the card. Not sure how tho. Check the threads at Guru3D.com also.

You may want to post this question in other forums here just to see if more people read it, like maybe the Forceware forum.

Sorry I cant be of more help. There is way to do it, just must find the directions. If I find out anything Ill post the info.

[pingu]

use nvflash (version 4,2) i think

version 5 is pants.

i think the force commands are nvflah -u -p -2 *.rom

il double check

with winflash = wfflash nm *.rom

[Kev1]

Read this thread:

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=75483

Its 66 pages long so lots of reading.

Also:

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?threadid=75221

Its 44 pages long. Lots of good info at Guru3D.

Im going to look tonight and see if I saved my flashing instructions (Im sure I did), as I think I had info on what to do with a bad flash. I am still hopeful we can get your video card working again :)

[Kev1]

Also look at this thread here at NVNews:

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=29230

Jimmor and some others in that thread might be good persons to pm and ask about reflashing your card!

[Roguestar191]

I might just start a new thread about this. But I found someone who was able to fix the same, or I think the same problem, but he posted "Dos Mode>all" Whatever that means. I thought it could mean, the dos program Mode.com > all , but that just pipes the output of mode.com to all..

For those of you who keep say -5 -6, -p -u, or -nm, those are to force it to write even if the chip id's do not match, it however does not force it to flash when it can not find the chip id. I need to tell it to flash whatever lies in the agp port, with no id's. When I run: nvflash -a -o2, or -o3 I can see my voodoo3, but the nvidia card is still missing from the list.

*Sigh*


http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=33777


NeIdeas? Thanks in advance.

[Kev1]

Well, I looked and I didnt have any info on how to force flash the video card using wfflash. Might do goggle search and see what comes up.