Siggi
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Junior Boarder
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Re:Looking for several Sapphire BIOS's, and can anyone help? - 2008/02/29 17:53
By this large number of cards I would like to suggest a systematic proceeding. Prepare a suitable PC with video on-board, PCI graphic card or with PCI Express and AGP hybrid mainboard. Floppy drive, Ms-DOS boot disk or if possible bootable USB stick. Several ATIFlash versions, label the cards, no stickers, better with a ribbon and a small paperboard for a number and some notes. Prepare a list to make notes about the things you find out for each card...
Checklist of Question to Retain...
- Any VGA signal : Yes / No?
- If yes, display errors, at BIOS or boot screen : Yes / NO?
- If yes, reached the Windows desktop : Yes / No?
- If yes, correctly detected : Yes / No??
- Change the color depth or resolution : Yes / No?
- If no, recognized by ATIFlash : Yes / No?
If yes, use the "-ia" command and make some notes for this card. Also it is advised to dump this BIOS. Use a specific short name for a better recognition. To complete this check find out what kind of memory is use, like DDR, DDR2 or GDDR2, and also write down the vendor. Note down all information what you are able to find on the PCB. For later identification, if necessary. Furthermore search for possibly physical damage(s) .A scratch, a scorch mark or whatever as shwon below.
It shows a scorch mark on the S-Video connector of an ATI Radeon 9550. Furthermore search or collect all eligible BIOS's for your Sapphire cards, search for info on how to recover a dead graphics card, the BIOS and get a good HEX editor, for example WinHEX to read and compare BIOS's or search for changes, what possibly was made by former owner of this cards.
Also use RaBiT, and load these BIOS's and search for unusual values or maybe some warning messages about incorrect checksum or corrupt files. You can find Sapphire BIOS's on the downloads section but also on some other sites... A great pile of work. Hopefully, it's worth it. I wish you success. 
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Galaxy 9800GT PCIe 512MB - Rev 01
