Why not flash the original gts450 bios?

1) Did you reference the part numbers on the actual memory chips (assuming they haven't been tampered with) and determine the real size and speed of the memory?
2) It sounds like you may have already tried flashing the BIOS from other GTS 450 cards, but did those detect the correct memory size or not?
3) I recall that red-ray posted in a thread one time about how to detect memory bus width on GeForce FX cards (via some register bits). Maybe he knows how to detect memory size on a Fermi card...

Error 0x7CF wrote on 2021-07-03, 08:47:

Why not flash the original gts450 bios?

Quick answer: doesn't work.

Long answer:

These fake boards are OEM, which means it's as if you could choose a series of variables, directly from the manufacturer, such as: vram manufacturer, type (ddr3, gddr5), speed, thermal solution, pcb design, etc. Any of these variations will require specific firmware to handle these choices. The PCB design, and the bios header, is very similar to the Palit boards, but I downloaded a lot of firmware and none worked. Unusually, this card is ddr5, but its clocks are 700/750mhz, which are typically ddr3 clocks. This could mean that faulty dr5 memory chips were used, which can work at low speed without any problems.

I downloaded ALL firmware from techpoweup, even used a tool to compare the similarity, and find the ones that were most similar (binary). I found only 2 hex positions that are able to change the amount of memory, but it only works to decrease memory down to 2GB.

bakemono wrote on 2021-07-03, 09:31:

1) Did you reference the part numbers on the actual memory chips (assuming they haven't been tampered with) and determine the real size and speed of the memory?
2) It sounds like you may have already tried flashing the BIOS from other GTS 450 cards, but did those detect the correct memory size or not?
3) I recall that red-ray posted in a thread one time about how to detect memory bus width on GeForce FX cards (via some register bits). Maybe he knows how to detect memory size on a Fermi card...

Yes, it is 1GB GDDR5, but it works with ddr3 clocks.

Any firmware will cause graphical corruption, or even show an image. The device manager will tell you that windows has disabled the hardware due to problems found. GPUz will show almost no information if the driver is not working

my post on techpowerup forum about my extensive research on this: https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/fa … ect-bios.280962

Is the dump of your (fake) BIOS online?

https://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/216543/216543

could it be that the ram size setting isn't just set by the bios, but also by some resistors on the board ?

weedeewee wrote on 2021-07-04, 14:44:

could it be that the ram size setting isn't just set by the bios, but also by some resistors on the board ?

I've read once about configuring resistors to define the model, but I've never read anything about the vram. In the case of the model, I found that it is not defined by resistors, as I found the "model" addressing.

Surprisingly, there is some information about BIOS data structures on nvidia's own site. Maybe this can help uncover something: http://download.nvidia.com/open-gpu-doc/BIOS- … tion-Table.html