Cards revert to clocks from OLD vbios. What on earth?!?!

Long story short - this is pretty complicated - it's hard to explain well.

I bought a borked 6990m to upgrade my 6970m in my CFX array pending that I was able to fix the 6990m. I fixed the 6990m - that might be a whole other thread.

Anyhow. During the troubleshooting/repairing process, I flashed both of the 6990m's to different vbios with modified clock speeds. The master was flashed to 715mhz core 900mhz mem, and the slave (the borked one) was flashed to 710mhz core and 900mhz mem.

Since I fixed the slave 6990m, I decided to flash the cards back to the original (modified) vbios's I had on them to begin with. These vbios's are exactly the same except the core clock is 800mhz and the mem is 1000mhz.

When the computer first boots up and I open gpu-z the clocks are represented correctly - both default core and memory clocks and actual core and memory clocks match the 800mhz and 1000mhz respectively. After a matter of minutes however, the actual core clocks reduce to the respective clocks from the PREVIOUS vbios - master 715mhz core, 900mhz mem and slave 710mhz core, 900mhz mem respectively!

Since the cards were flashed, there is no way the old vbios's are present to dictate those clock speeds. The old vbios was overwritten with the new vbios so how on earth are the old unique clock speeds still being represented?!

I've double checked the new vbios to make sure its clocks are correct and they are. I've reflashed the cards twice so far - both successful.

I've tried re-installing the drivers. However, when I install 13.5 beta, when it's finished, ccc displays that 13.4 is installed. What on earth? Someone help!

Other than that everything is working fine.

 

If I overclock with AMD overdrive, then the new clocks hold . . . but I'm limited to 740mhz core and 1000mhz mem. If I overclock with SapphireTrixx, the clocks do not hold and revert to the old vbios clocks. . . . since the AMD overdrive works, then my guess is it's something to do with the driver . . . having stored the old clocks from the old vbios . . .

 

Fixed it - seems as if the old clocks were being stored in one of the registry entries. Using driver sweeper in safe mode fixed that.

 

So you found the culprit

+1

 

Well done. This is very common with AMD and their drivers/vbios. i had to completely uninstall catalyst and reinstall it to fix mine. if you want a simpler fix for next time without playing in the registry.