i some how ended up with 3 5870 master cards.....

And im wondering if i can use one of the 2nd ones as a slave? any reason to think that i couldn't? could i use RBE to flash the 2nd card to the slave bios? just wondering....

 

one of them is a clevo card, which obv i wont use, but the other two are A00, but i flashed the one master to A01 already.

 

Having the exact same problem...

 

what problem? im not really having a problem, i just didnt want to pull it apart and install the master in the slave spot if it has been confirmed not to work.


can someone give me a slave bios?

thanks

 

Thats what I´m saying, If you could someone how get the slave bios file It´d slove my problems and I could finally put my alienware back together.

I´ve been searching around and can´t seem to find one.

 

Genius post, thanks alot man!

So, basically what you're telling me here is that theres no physical way to distinguish what firmware the card is running or in other words which one is master or slave other than the heat sink, which for all we know could be wrong to begin with.

Kinda makes sense now why they gave me this amazing "deal" on these cards aka upgrade.

Apperently I'm having a "Master Technician" come in sometime this week, and for some reason they are replacing my entire motherboard, which I personally think is ridiculous since it's perfectly fine.


I just hope this dink doesn't realize that I upgraded my cpu to a 920xm and tell the man at Dell to void my warrenty entirely.

Hopefully I can convince him its not worth it, and have him switch just the video cards instead.

 

whoa. I know on Clevo machines, you can use 2 masters together just fine without having to flash one to a slave. Why is alienware so backwards?

 

it's very likely a mistake from previous experience we could interchange the cards role by flashing in the past bu the 5870 seem like a fiasco

 

When I burned out one of my GPU's (The Master) I put the slave in the Master slot and ran the system on one GPU. I think it will work.

 

I have a newer replacement r2 with 5870 xfire due in part to the fact that they kept sending 2 master bios cards. The new system has both cards A00, they work fine. I have also flashed to the latest vbios no issue.
Back when I was having trouble with the slave not working, a temporary workaround was to flash the system bios to A02. Both cards booted and in xfire. It was a card bios issue, not a physical card issue.

 

Its a system bios issue. If you try A02 or A04, the system will boot with 2 masters. I had to for a month until my replacement showed up.

 

Would A05 work as well?

EDIT: Doesnt work... Does anyone have the old Dell A04 bios file that they could send me? I've tried looking online for one, but all I found are .iso versions which don't seem to work properly.

 

I just checked. One of my cards is a A01 and the other is a A00.

Both are running the same vbios version and I flipped them around in every possible combination, but to no avail.

After installing bios A02, everything works smoothly. Then again, I see your point about all the previous problems that were fixed coming back.

Regardless, until Dell ships me two A01 cards this will have to do, beats having an over-sized paper weight in your room.

 

I didn't say they didn't work well either, I said my new system has A00 stickers on both cards. You cant say one must be A01 as only a small batch of the A00 cards were affected. I do understand what the problem is as I said I went through it. The cards are different , physically, but dell had a bunch that both master and slave that were setup to be master . The escalated tech mentioned that is was part of the vbios that controlled the master slave switch but the flash update doesn't modify that, only reads it and updates other settings accordingly.
A vbios modifier would have allowed us to change the second master to be reset to slave.
A02 and A04 pc bios does not query as to which card is master or slave.
You do not need A01 cards. Two A00 cards will function correctly as slave or master and if they fit, they could be swapped as long as they dont have that bad vbios. I dont see how they could be physically reversed.
But to answer the OP, a Vbios modifier will do what you need.