Report: AMD Admits Shipping Some HD 4830 Videocards with Incorrect BIOS
Report: AMD Admits Shipping Some HD 4830 Videocards with Incorrect BIOS
Posted 10/27/2008 at 5:36am
| by Paul Lilly
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AMD last week launched its HD 4830 graphics card, a sub-$150 GPU with support for DirectX 10.1 instructions. With a budget price tag and impressive spec sheet, the HD 4830 has been positioned to compete with Nvidia's 9800 GT videocard, but some buyers may find that their HIS-branded HD 4830 isn't living up to expectations.
"AMD has identified that, in addition to reference samples of the ATI Radeon HD 4830 boards sent to media with a pre-production BIOS potentially impacting the card's performance, a very limited number of ATI Radeon HD 4830 boards were released to market with the same pre-production BIOS," AMD said in a statement. "This is no way hardware related, and an updated BIOS fully resolves the performance limitation."
Updating the BIOS doesn't perform any voodoo shenanigans on affected cards, and instead enables all 640 stream processors that the HD4830 is supposed to have. For whatever reason, a "small number of HIS-branded" cards sporting the pre-production BIOS only showed 560 stream processors as being enabled, resulting in an undue performance hit.
If you think you might own one of the gimped cards or simply want to verify that your videocard's running at full speed, download and run the GPU-Z utility.
Image Credit: HIS
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Caboose
October 27, 2008 at 9:33am
If someone were to have one of the effected cards, how would they go about getting a new BIOS? How would you update the BIOS on your video card anyway? I've always thought that something like this was possible, however I've never seen any information regarding it.
-= I don't want to be dead, I want to be alive! Or... a cowboy! =-
Paul_Lilly
October 27, 2008 at 11:05am
Taken from AMD's statement:
"If the GPU-Z utility reports fewer than 640 shaders, please visit the HIS website for information on how to update the card BIOS via a downloadable install utility."
I'm not seeing any information on HIS's website regarding HD 4830 BIOS woes, so unless they're in the process of updating the site, you'll likely have to contact HIS's customer support. Once you have the correct BIOS file and utility, flashing the BIOS should be a painless experience, just be sure not to shut down your system in the middle of an update.
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