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Sometimes I hate computers
May. 2nd, 2010 12:50 pmI am finally able to watch videos and blu-rays with my new computer. And I can now compute my Windows Experience Index without constantly getting "Display driver has stopped and has successfully recovered."
Turns out the bios of the graphics card was buggy to the point where playing blu-rays with the version of PowerDVD that came with the card was completely impossible on windows 7 64 bit.
A few weeks ago, Gigabyte published an update that fixed the bugs. Before that, for months they happily sold cards that wouldn't play videos and wouldn't allow you to compute the WEI. How that can have passed through their testing department is completely beyond me. This was certainly the last gigabyte product I have bought. I spent lots of time hunting down a solution to this issue.
And why on earth is it that there is no way to flash an ATI graphics card under Windows 7 64 bit, even though the card I have is perfectly current (Radeon HD5870)? Their flash utility doesn't even start under windows 7 64bit, it just starts a background process that hogs 100% CPU, so getting a task manager up to kill it takes several minutes...
Actually if you read the forums they all suggest doing it from a DOS command line anyway, because when flashing under windows you have a certain chance to fry your card.
"Just use an MS-DOS boot floppy disk", they cheerfully say.
Well... Let's go through the checklist.
MS-DOS? No check.
Floppy disk drive? No check.
I ended up having to try 6 or 7 versions of older Windows boot images until I finally found one that could be correctly transferred to my USB disk drive, and that wouldn't boot into a blue screen on my computer.
First I tried Win XP SP 3 - happened to have my old install CD lying around. Install in a VM, make a boot image. Nope. Blue Screen when booting from it.
Then I tried various MS DOS versions. Surprise, surprise, most of these I couldn't even properly extract because they came in the form of ZIP files that unpacked into a DriveImage executable. And that would ask for a floppy disk to write to and refuse to simply unpack the "#"§$% files. Newsflash: I don't have a floppy drive. This is 2010, not 1995. Nobody has them any more.
Then I tried FreeDOS. Wouldn't boot either. Plus they don't give you the files, just an installer ISO image, which forces you to once again install just to get at the three or four hidden files that you actually want to copy.
In the end, I found an iso-image of a repair CD with a USB-enabled version of Windows 98. Transferred that to USB, using a tool from HP. That booted into command line and I was finally able to flash my card.
But then, gigabyte again. They place two files on their website, essentially named
bios_f5
bios_f6a (newest date)
Which one would you have used? If I ask like that, surely there's a catch.
Turns out the a in "bios_f6a" stands for "alpha". So now I had a very unstable graphics card. Good thing I still had another computer around, so I could unpack the other bios. Boot back into my windows 98 USB disk image. Flash again.
And finally a non-broken graphics card. Only now the fan won't go below 50%. Ah well, I'll keep the windows 98 image around until gigabyte manages to produce bios_f6, I guess.
Turns out the bios of the graphics card was buggy to the point where playing blu-rays with the version of PowerDVD that came with the card was completely impossible on windows 7 64 bit.
A few weeks ago, Gigabyte published an update that fixed the bugs. Before that, for months they happily sold cards that wouldn't play videos and wouldn't allow you to compute the WEI. How that can have passed through their testing department is completely beyond me. This was certainly the last gigabyte product I have bought. I spent lots of time hunting down a solution to this issue.
And why on earth is it that there is no way to flash an ATI graphics card under Windows 7 64 bit, even though the card I have is perfectly current (Radeon HD5870)? Their flash utility doesn't even start under windows 7 64bit, it just starts a background process that hogs 100% CPU, so getting a task manager up to kill it takes several minutes...
Actually if you read the forums they all suggest doing it from a DOS command line anyway, because when flashing under windows you have a certain chance to fry your card.
"Just use an MS-DOS boot floppy disk", they cheerfully say.
Well... Let's go through the checklist.
MS-DOS? No check.
Floppy disk drive? No check.
I ended up having to try 6 or 7 versions of older Windows boot images until I finally found one that could be correctly transferred to my USB disk drive, and that wouldn't boot into a blue screen on my computer.
First I tried Win XP SP 3 - happened to have my old install CD lying around. Install in a VM, make a boot image. Nope. Blue Screen when booting from it.
Then I tried various MS DOS versions. Surprise, surprise, most of these I couldn't even properly extract because they came in the form of ZIP files that unpacked into a DriveImage executable. And that would ask for a floppy disk to write to and refuse to simply unpack the "#"§$% files. Newsflash: I don't have a floppy drive. This is 2010, not 1995. Nobody has them any more.
Then I tried FreeDOS. Wouldn't boot either. Plus they don't give you the files, just an installer ISO image, which forces you to once again install just to get at the three or four hidden files that you actually want to copy.
In the end, I found an iso-image of a repair CD with a USB-enabled version of Windows 98. Transferred that to USB, using a tool from HP. That booted into command line and I was finally able to flash my card.
But then, gigabyte again. They place two files on their website, essentially named
bios_f5
bios_f6a (newest date)
Which one would you have used? If I ask like that, surely there's a catch.
Turns out the a in "bios_f6a" stands for "alpha". So now I had a very unstable graphics card. Good thing I still had another computer around, so I could unpack the other bios. Boot back into my windows 98 USB disk image. Flash again.
And finally a non-broken graphics card. Only now the fan won't go below 50%. Ah well, I'll keep the windows 98 image around until gigabyte manages to produce bios_f6, I guess.
