Flashing Radeon RX 5700 with RX 5700 XT BIOS: Guide & Performance

[bug]

In short, you'd be risking bricking your card (if you don't use the right BIOS) for 7% more juice. Not worth it, but nice to know it can be done.

 

[INSTG8R]

Shader unlocking via BIOS mod or bust! My golden standard is still the 128 MB Radeon 9500 non-Pro I had that could be fully unlocked (via Omega driver or BIOS flash) to a 9700 and then OC'd a bit to be a Pro. Glorious times and probably some of the best bang for buck I've had when it comes to graphics cards. My Athlon 64 X2 was probably the second most satisfying OC experience, since I really felt it in day to day Windows tasks and application launches (the extra core alone was a godsend).

But at least AMD allows it for the RX 5700, which I must applaud. I would like Nvidia to return to BIOS tweaking, too. Good article! If I were to buy a new card, RX 5700 (XT) would definitely be on my list (since I'm space constrained 240mm length cards are all I can run and the performance of the 5700 (XTs) and the 2070 is similar enough to make it a competitive race).

I was the 9800 Pro to XT Guru around here back in the day Last crack at it was my Tri-X Fury which I managed to fully unlock to “X” on air.

 

[Mamya3084]

In short, you'd be risking bricking your card (if you don't use the right BIOS) for 7% more juice. Not worth it, but nice to know it can be done.

Pretty hard to brick a bios on a video card. It's like putting the round peg in the square hole.

 

[INSTG8R]

Pretty hard to brick a bios on a video card. It's like putting the round peg in the square hole.

You say that but the front page has multiple “Help my BIOS!” Daily so no it’s actually pretty easy because the problem is most users seem to think BIOSs are like drivers and they need a new/different one because “reasons” not knowing that A the BIOS on the card IS the right BIOS so that leads to B people flashing random BIOSs not knowing any better and basically keeps @eidairaman1 answering posts in an almost cut and paste manner at this point. I used to be very active with helping but it’s just too many and I don’t envy eiderman at all, I just don’t have the patience anymore.

 

[Mamya3084]

You say that but the front page has multiple “Help my BIOS!” Daily so no it’s actually pretty easy because the problem is most users seem to think BIOSs are like drivers and they need a new/different one because “reasons” not knowing that A the BIOS on the card IS the right BIOS so that leads to B people flashing random BIOSs not knowing any better and basically keeps @eidairaman1 answering posts in an almost cut and paste manner at this point. I used to be very active with helping but it’s just too many and I don’t envy eiderman at all, I just don’t have the patience anymore.

I've been using PC's for years. Shoved wrong bioses onto wrong motherboards and had to do the old, bios chip swap trick.
Video cards are pretty easy to rescue if you have another laying around.
I do understand what you mean in terms of people just flashing to have that higher version number.

 

[INSTG8R]

I've been using PC's for years. Shoved wrong bioses onto wrong motherboards and had to do the old, bios chip swap trick.
Video cards are pretty easy to rescue if you have another laying around.
I do understand what you mean in terms of people just flashing to have that higher version number.

Well thats the minefield of the front page daily. I’ve been flashing since the 9800 Pto to XT it’s what brought me here so long ago and I was the eiderman of the day helping users ID there’ cards to see if they were flashable. Doing it DOS and all that fun stuff It’s been made to “easy‘ so that random users are going willy nilly and end up with bricked cards from lack of knowledg/experience and 90% of the time they ALWAYS forget to back up their original BIOS....

 

[Dalai Brahma]

Would also be interesting to see an XT flashed to non XT with power figures comparison too...

So am I...

.

 

[dflute]

Just finished trying to flash my brand new Asrock 5700 Challenger to XT bios but alas the XT has a different string on all of the available bios downloads on techpowerup. Does this mean I have a version 2 of the card maybe? My card: NAVI10 A1/A2 D19902 XL
Challenger XT cards: NAVI10 A1/A2 D19901 XT

Perhaps I just need to be patient and wait for someone to upload a D19902 XT bios. Thoughts?

 

[eidairaman1]

Pretty hard to brick a bios on a video card. It's like putting the round peg in the square hole.

You are 99% incorrect.

Flashing any bios has risk especially if you do not have a ups or a spi flasher.

Risk is less on a motherboard bios but on a gpu it is higher.

You should see the amount of users come here saying their card is bricked or a mining/modded bios is installed, I help them restore their card.

Well thats the minefield of the front page daily. I’ve been flashing since the 9800 Pto to XT it’s what brought me here so long ago and I was the eiderman of the day helping users ID there’ cards to see if they were flashable. Doing it DOS and all that fun stuff It’s been made to “easy‘ so that random users are going willy nilly and end up with bricked cards from lack of knowledg/experience and 90% of the time they ALWAYS forget to back up their original BIOS....

 

[Mamya3084]

I

You are 99% incorrect.

Flashing any bios has risk especially if you do not have a ups or a spi flasher.

Risk is less on a motherboard bios but on a gpu it is higher.

You should see the amount of users come here saying their card is bricked or a mining/modded bios is installed, I help them restore their card.

I guess I just haven't had many issues in my dealings with video card bios flashing.
Usually if the program won't flash, I just abandon brute force (IE, round peg, square hole)

 

[eidairaman1]

I

I guess I just haven't had many issues in my dealings with video card bios flashing.
Usually if the program won't flash, I just abandon brute force (IE, round peg, square hole)

You are 1 person out of 7 billion+ people on this Earth.

 

[W1zzard]

Just finished trying to flash my brand new Asrock 5700 Challenger to XT bios but alas the XT has a different string on all of the available bios downloads on techpowerup. Does this mean I have a version 2 of the card maybe? My card: NAVI10 A1/A2 D19902 XL
Challenger XT cards: NAVI10 A1/A2 D19901 XT

Perhaps I just need to be patient and wait for someone to upload a D19902 XT bios. Thoughts?

I would think 19902 vs 19901 is their way of specifying non-XT vs XT SKU.

I'd say try the 19901 BIOS

 

[Tradition]

I've flashed my 5700 non xt with 5700 xt aniverssary edition about 2 months ago the issue is when i play amy dx12 game ir instantly freezes once the gpu hits 100% the same game on dx11 runs fine up to 2ghz i still havent figured out whats wrong

 

[HwGeek]

there was a time that I learned to use ATIflash on blind with Dos on usb, I remembered the timing and the commands and it works for me every time I bricked the card, that was when I had only 1 PCIeX16 and no igpu and no 2nd bios switch on the GPU ;-).

 

[Mamya3084]

I've flashed my 5700 non xt with 5700 xt aniverssary edition about 2 months ago the issue is when i play amy dx12 game ir instantly freezes once the gpu hits 100% the same game on dx11 runs fine up to 2ghz i still havent figured out whats wrong

Have you tested using the non anniversary bios? Maybe the target clocks are too high?

 

[moob]

I do not believe being an enthusiast and overclocking are mutually exclusive. I believe there are plenty of entusiasts who would prefer to not OC and there is nothing wrong with that, they are not any less of an enthusiast for it.

<<<This guy. Along with my friends. We're old and busy and just want great out-of-the-box performance without any hassle. But also...

Did you even read the article? This is NOT related to typical overclocking at all. Yes, the GPU will run at a higher clock, but there's no manual tuning involved.

^^This guy. A BIOS flash is simple enough that I'd do it if I were willing to take the risk and the card had a dual-bios. I did it back in the day on a 6950 > 6970.

Out of curiosity; did you happen to get any power consumption numbers?

This isn't an exact comparison and as he notes you'll likely see better numbers using a reference BIOS but:

 

[dflute]

I would think 19902 vs 19901 is their way of specifying non-XT vs XT SKU.

I'd say try the 19901 BIOS

I did try the 19901 one and I got the subsystem ID mismatch error.
I’m happy with my card running at 1810 undervolted at .987 but it’s running very cool, 52c, and I can’t but help but dream of pushing it past 2Ghz .

 

[Raven Rampkin]

How many DisplayPorts are going to be sacrificed this time, I wonder

 

[dflute]

How many DisplayPorts are going to be sacrificed this time, I wonder

I’m new to flashing vga bios’s does this adversely affect them?

 

[Raven Rampkin]

I’m new to flashing vga bios’s does this adversely affect them?

Thinking there were some reports of flashes from 56 to 64 going dirty and borking one of the DisplayPorts, accompanied by a writelock getting triggered and the lack of option to flash back without some shaman magic

 

[Jism]

In short, you'd be risking bricking your card (if you don't use the right BIOS) for 7% more juice. Not worth it, but nice to know it can be done.

All you need is a spare PCI-E or even PCI videocard. Boot up on that while having the "bricked card" into your PCI-E slot. Flash back the old bios and voila. Flashing video cards is more safer then motherboards.

 

[W1zzard]

the subsystem ID mismatch error.

ah right, that's not unexpected. You can use the command line version of atiflash with the -f parameter to force flashing

 

[Chrispy_]

Is the cooler any better or worse on the 5700 reference card than the one on the 5700XT? I'm using a 5700XT at the moment and my 75Hz/1440p monitor would be comfortably driven by a 5700 if the end result is a quieter card.

But RAY TRACING!

I chuckled at this! As someone working with/testing RTX hardware for work reasons I find the applications where it's useful to be limited, both in quality and quantity.

As far as gaming and RTX are concerned, console development drives adoption by game devs, and with zero RTX console design wins, the Cryengine raytracing demo running on a modest little Vega56 says everything you need to know about how unnecessary RTX hardware will be for the next generation of game-engines pushed by the PS5 and XBox n+1.

RTX seems to be a label applied to some generic Turing datacenter/compute silicon that Nvidia was trying to repurpose for gaming. The problem is that it's not really particularly well-suited to gaming, but I haven't sold my 2060 yet, just in the off-chance that I'm wrong about that in the near future.

Oops, I made myself laugh again with that last sentence.

 

[Easy Rhino]

Oh man, this post reminds me of the good old days of TPU. Flashing BIOS and what not. We still need ATItool though to do that benchmarking.

 

[Tradition]

Have you tested using the non anniversary bios? Maybe the target clocks are too high?

Yes even with just the power table mod i get the same error só either my card is broken or my windows build