Page 2: Upgrading Process
<b>The upgrading process</b>:<br>
I WILL NOT BE RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY DAMAGE THAT OCCURS TO YOUR CARD!<br>
Before I start saying anything about upgrading your BIOS, let me say this: SAVE YOUR CURRENT BIOS! I can't stress this enough! Also, there is another thing you should keep in mind. The ram on your card should be of the 3.6ns variety or you can forget about updating your BIOS. Now that I have stated what you should keep in mind, lets continue with the upgrading of the BIOS. At first, I ran the numbers on the original BIOS and then I installed powerstrip. I then determined that the card WAS at 230/230! I couldn't believe that ATI would release a card that is lower than the OEM part! This is strange since the part number is the same as the OEM. People are calling these underclocked OEM's, Radeon 8500 LELE. I first pumped power color up to 250/250 and noticed it was fine. I then started up the BIOS upgrade program and loaded the real OEM BIOS into the card. I started to bench the card. I ran into some crashing, but no artifacts. I tried again and again. I then thought that I had failed. Spec was the only bench that would crash, 3Dmark and Vulpine ran fine.<br><br>
Tempting fate, I wanted to at least see if I could run the retail BIOS for a little bit. It crashed on Spec only again! I noticed it was crashing randomly though, but usually after a specific point. This got me wondering for a bit. I shut down every program that I could, including powerstrip. I then proceeded to benchmark again. It worked! I made a loop for 12 hours, no crashes! Success!! It was powerstrip that was crashing me, I don't know why or how so please don't ask. I also tried to run at a lower setting in the retail BIOS but that didn't work because it would crash in SPEC with powerstrip running. I destroyed that install of powerstrip and reinstalled it. Viola! It worked at 250/250, so I benched it with that also.<br><br>If you want the flashing tools, check out Rage3D or you can email me and I'll steer you in the right direction .<br><b>UPDATE</b> You can now download this file off my server, you must be a registered user. The file is the flasher program with retail and OEM bioses included. <a href="/download.php?downloadid=1">Click here for the download!</a>