Guide: NVidia bios flashing

llwyd

New member
Guide to flashing Nvidia bios.

What you need

• An Nvidia graphics card (duh)

NiBiTor (I recommend getting the latest version)

NVflash (again, latest version)

• A black floppy disk and a drive to run it on (I suspect that you could use a USB drive if you can format them properly)

• The bios you wish to flash (either downloaded or saved from NiBiTor)

• Know where to find your Boot –Order in your BIOS

Things that help:

Knowing exactly what alterations you want to make helps.

Some prior experience of command prompts

Getting started:

First things first, we need to produce a DOS boot floppy disk (or USB stick). Simple enough process. First make sure there is NOTHING you need on the disk/USB stick. For this I will demonstrate using a floppy disk.

The boot disk:

Head over to My Computer and right click on the Floppy (normally A:\\) and choose the ‘Format’ option.

nvg1.jpg


You will get presented with this dialog box.

nvg2.jpg


You need to check the ‘MS-DOS start up disk’ option, then start.

nvg3.jpg


You’ve now got yourself a bootable MS-DOS disk. This will cause the PC to boot into MS DOS mode if it is the A:\\ drive upon startup (providing you boot order in the bios has Floppy Drive set as priority)

Getting your current bios:

This process has been simplified quite a lot due to NiBiTor’s newer versions. Before it involved using NVflash to take a copy from the card while booted in DOS mode, now however it’s a lot easier.

Here’s what you first see when you first open NiBiTor:

get.php


As you can see its got a fair number of options that you can edit in the bios on its tabs in the middle.

To load your current NVidia bios settings, click Tools->Read BIOS->Select device

nvg5.jpg


You are provided with the following window:

get.php


Select your device and click OK.

NOTHING WILL SEEM TO HAPPEN. This is normal Now click Tools->Read BIOS-> Read Into NiBiTor. This will read your video card bios into the program and display its information.

nvg7.jpg


get.php


Now before you go ramping up clock speeds and adding insulting welcome messages to others who may use your pc, make a backup. Or 3. I can’t stress that enough.

Simply File->Save BIOS. And save it to a location on your HDD that is reasonably safe. Also I highly recommend that you take another backup on a floppy or USB drive.

get.php


Right, now you’ve got a backup(s) of your original bios you can tweak all you like, but remember for the love of god you can fry the GPU with some settings. Also I wouldn’t recommend touching the memory timings unless you know EXACTLY what you’re doing. (Don’t ask me either because I don’t know).

The most useful option in this is being able to overclock bios locked cards. Manufacturers such as PNY do this to stop us getting more than we paid for, and to stop morons from frying their cards tbh.

Once you have made the adjustments you want. Save the bios to a file to a place where you can find it easily. Name it something easy to remember, like ‘NVBIOS’ for example.

nvg8.jpg


Now you need to get the bios from you hdd to your card, along with the NVFlash utility files. To do this, go into your NVFlash.zip file and extract the two files from here, onto the MS-DOS floppy disc (leave their names as they are). Once that is done, you can then copy and paste your modified BIOS file to the disc (in this case ‘NVBIOS’). Do not rename any of the files now on the disc!

Your flash disc is now complete

To use this, insert the disc into the floppy drive and restart your PC, providing all is ok, you should be presented with scrolling white writing on a black background, wait till this writing has completely stopped and you are able to input text. Then type:

nvflash “filename.file-extension“

(you do not type those words)

So in this case you would input:

nvflash nvbios.rom

Hit Enter. You should get more scrolling writing and a ‘Y/N’ prompt confirming that you wish to overwrite the firmware, obviously, you press Y. Please do not be alarmed if this stage does not work. You simply have not followed the steps to the letter. Just remove the disc, reboot and try the lot again from the start.

If however, this step is successful, you can now remove the disc and restart the PC. Check your clock speeds and you should be running on whatever clock speeds you chose in NiBiTor, hooray. If your not, the best thing I can suggest is fiddle, keep trying and fiddling, undo current overclocks, put the card back to stop etc. Different things work for different cards.

This was a joint effort, so reps to ham for the first half of this little guide and for the screen shots :worship:

Edit: its also YOUR fault if you mess this up, so look after those backup BIOS files!
 
name='Ham' said:
Dam those shots came out rubbish. Ill have a look at getting some better ones...
Affirmative...and Yes!!!! Helpful guide for peeps though :worship:, with some better screenies to go with it :) I can't rep you, I've gotta share some lovin' with others
 
if you press ALT + Print screen, it will only copy the active screen, saves you manually cutting them out.
 
Ive sent Llwyd the better pics but hes building up his new rig tonight. So they may take a while. Stupid photobucket and theyre dam resizing.
 
Well.. it`s very much down to the individual of course, but it`s related to the pursuit of getting as much of a performance boost from u`r kit as u care to seek.

Some cards have things disabled - in this case u`ll achieve quite alot. Some are just capped in weird ways. But u can also get some roms that are optimized, and the odd 3rd party trick I guess.

U get a % from an oc, a % from a tweak, a % from a rom upgrade - it all adds up.
 
I just flashed my bios on my geforce trying to fix issues i used a flash drive if your board supports booting off a usb drive thats best way to do it and safer to. HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool and you just need a floppy bootdisk it takes the images and uses it to make the flash drive bootable. Then copy your roms to it and flash them that way. Its good to make bats to do it and save your orignal on the flash drive. And remmember the commands incase you toast your bios and need to do a blind flash.
 
name='Bal3Wolf' said:
I just flashed my bios on my geforce trying to fix issues i used a flash drive if your board supports booting off a usb drive thats best way to do it and safer to. HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool and you just need a floppy bootdisk it takes the images and uses it to make the flash drive bootable. Then copy your roms to it and flash them that way. Its good to make bats to do it and save your orignal on the flash drive. And remmember the commands incase you toast your bios and need to do a blind flash.

Yeah, I have used USB flash drives for booting once or twice. Works well!

Used it on a harddrive whipe program!

Good way of doing things! :p
 
Would it be a good recommendation to save both the backup and the new bios u want to flash to the same floppy b4 u do any flashing, so u got a quick flip back if u need one ? Size dependent prehaps.

So in effect u`r boot floppy has both old and new on it.
 
i make a bat file with stuff in it and call it backup.bat or fix.bat so if you forgot the command you got that as a fall back. To save the org and new flash on a reg floppy disk might be hard depending on the sizes on a flash drive you should for sure.
 
Ill e doing this with 8800gt when it finally comes out... if it does ok with single slot it must be awesome with aftermarket cooler!

Just wondering, can you actually increase voltage to the card through that like it sais? To get better overclocks?
 
You can, but what i remember with ppl with their 6800GTs raising their vcore, it died months after they did that.
 
yes you can but as darkorb said it will shorten the life of your card.

this guide is somewhat obsolete now as there are newer versions of NiBiTor (to work with newer cards) that work differently. the principle is still the same though
 
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