｜霜の狼｜人面獣心」🐺❄️
@frostwolf If it was underclocked and/or undervolted it was likely used for cryptomining as it is common to do it to reduce power consumption since it does not need graphics processing.
There should be GPU utilities that can tell you the case.
If this is the case it probably will need to get firmware flashed with stock firmware, or settings adjustments.
@XerTheSquirrel Thanks! Hmm.
We can get the clocks with info in /sys (sayd it goes up to 1366 MHz right now IWRC), but we're not on Windows so we don't have access to the fancy tools. Are basic clock settings stored on the card itself, or on the computer side?
How do we tell whether it has a custom BIOS in the first place? When we looked into flashing before, it looked like we'd need some kind of sketchy Windows-only program. I hope we don't have to mess with that.
@XerTheSquirrel Okay, it looks like our VBIOS is one for the Sapphire Pulse version instead of the Nitro+ one.
It looks like Pulse doesn't have lighting, though, and ours does, which means I don't /think/ it could be a shroud swap...? just a BIOS flash?
There's also the BIOS switch on the card. I could try flipping it, maybe it's set on the lower-performance setting or something.
@XerTheSquirrel It was set on high performance, which means the low performance setting is probably higher! I flipped the switch, booting back up now.
While we were in there I took off one of the fans for cleaning (decided the other wasn't worth it). Really great that you can do that on this card.
@XerTheSquirrel Well now it only goes to 1340MHz. What the fuque??
@XerTheSquirrel Did we get sold a Pulse card with th- [Pulse doesn't have the BIOS switch, I don't think.] Oh, yeah. I guess they flashed BOTH BIOSes, for some reason??
@frostwolf The default clocks and such would be stored on the firmware generally. It was probably flashed to lower clocks, really only way to tell is to dump the firmware and check it against official ones. But they probably flashed both just in case, or maybe for different usages and such.
@XerTheSquirrel Thanks! Yeah, this looks like an official BIOS from a different SKU of the card.
@XerTheSquirrel Huh. Looks like our BIOS /is/ slightly modified. I dumped it from /sys and it has a few changes in the middle.
Unless that's an artifact of the ROM dumping process.
@frostwolf It should not be an artifact for dumping, the values were probably explicitly changed to reduce energy consumption.
@XerTheSquirrel (Weirdly, the dump from /sys and the dump amdvbflash made are slightly different from each other, too.)
@XerTheSquirrel I downloaded a BIOS file that looked similar, flashed it, and... it didn't work. (Still usable through software rendering though, interestingly.)
there were two very similar ones on the site though, and I tried the other one, and it worked!
Neither one matched our exact part number, though. So I emailed Sapphire to see if they can give us the proper BIOS. It doesn't matter a whole lot, because we have the rated clock speeds now, but it'd still be nice to have the right one.
@frostwolf Yeah stock firmware can be nice, especially with the used GPU market since firmware changes are all over the place.
@XerTheSquirrel yeah, whoof! Eventually we're gonna have to upgrade for Blender, and perhaps even for proper VR (don't have a headset to test this card with), and that's not gonna be fun. (Super miffed that Blender straight-up dropped support for all AMD GPUs older than RDNA architecture.)
But what we need more is a new CPU. The one we have now is a wimpy Athlon 200GE. Fortunately those don't get the wacky firmware changes!