5900 --> 5950 BIOS Conversion Hack

[MargaritaIce]

I just completed this BIOS hack, and was wondering how long this has been out ?

For those of you that dont know what I am talking about...Basically the only difference between 5900 Ultra and 5950 Ultra is BIOS, so just flash your 5900 with a 5950 BIOS instead, and.....voila! You are now the proud owner of a 5950 Ultra, new clock settings are preconfigured...

Now I am running it @ 475/960, and I am running my AMD 3000XP @ 360 fsb.

So far Ive noticed a 15% increase in benchmarks.....not too shabby !

 

[Sazar]

I posted it on the front page hardware news a few weeks ago...

btw do you have a 5900 or a 5950 in your system @ the moment?

 

[Unleashed]

Its called a softmod 😉

 

[MargaritaIce]

I posted it on the front page hardware news a few weeks ago...

btw do you have a 5900 or a 5950 in your system @ the moment?

I have a PNY Verto 5900 Ultra 256, I used the Leadtek 5950 BIOS ...

 

[MargaritaIce]

Sazar, I know this is off topic, but do you like the 64-bit 3400 ? I am wanting to upgrade my CPU, I dont want to go to the fx version because I dont want to basically throw away all this RAM I have, and I cant bring myself to paying $950 for the Extreme Edition P4, so I am thinking of going to the 3400 64-bit ...

What CPU did you have before ? And how much of a performance boost do you realize ? I know XP doesnt really use it, but it will; and I hear SP2 will use a little 64-bit technology. I am using the SP2 beta now and I hate what it did to my IE settings. So I switched my browser over to MyIE2 .

 

[Sazar]

its a heck of a lot faster than my p4 3.0c that I just upgraded from a month ago...

and yes I like it...

 

[Dogfighter]

I have just flashed the bios of my MSI FX 5900 128 mb to FX 5950. It went smooth without a hitch. I used the Leadtek flash utility WFFLASH with a MSI bios I got off some kind sole in another forum. Before I was getting 5000 3Dmarks Stock 400/850, 5500 @ 460/960. and now 5550 @ 475/950 which is the stock speed for a FX5950, I will run it for a few days to make sure it is stable and then should be able to clock it up to around 530/1000 going on what other people have been able to do with there’s after the softmod.
The only down side is that if you cant find the same make of bios the VIVO dose not work. I don’t need it or use it, but as I got a MSI FX 5950 bios there is a good chance that it will still work.
I just turned a £170 Card into a £340 Card. The only thing I am missing is extra 128 mb of RAM that is on the Real FX5950 Cards, which I don’t need anyway at the moment for todays games.
🙂

 

[MargaritaIce]

I used the Leadtek BIOS for my PNY Verto 5900 Ultra 256. All went well for a few days, then like a dumb ass, when OCing with Powerstrip, I pushed it way to hard a fried it. So I went out and bought an actual 5950 Ultra 256 (PNY Verto again), and it may just be psychological but I think its doing better than the soft modded one. Even some of the games look better. I run all games at the highest res w/ all the options enabled, and for some reason Call of Duty seems to look better than before. I know the only difference is supposed to be the BIOS and the subsequent clock settings, but I think there might be something more to it ..... Well so far, I am happier with this one.

Oh yeah, remember the fan / heatsinks arent really made for those higher clock speeds so be careful, one major difference betweek the 2 cards is the 5950 has a much better heatsink an 2 fans instead of 1. The PNY Verto 5950 has a huge gold heatsink, and 2 fans with red/blue neons; whereas the 5900 had just a small fan and a black metal heatsink. I am gonna check the Koolance site for a GeForce FX watercooling add-on for my rig.