- Joined
- Feb 8, 2008
- Location
- Odessa, Texas
Basically anytime I open a video such as youtube the screen will quickly flicker. It does it when I open it and then after I close it, which leads me to believe it's a powerplay issue. I've set a profile in CCC and it still does it, other than the flicker the card performs perfectly. I've downloaded the latest drivers 10.10, I've tried the MSI afterburner thing. Is there anyway to fix this or do I need to send the card back and get a refund? It's not really a problem per say but is annoying.
Ok this was resolved...
I did some research and started playing around with RBEditor. I first tried setting all my powerplay clocks to the typical 850/1200 settings, which resulted in a freeze and system restart anytime I played a video such as youtube. So I was pulling my hair out as to why but it turns out the small flicker has nothing to do with the GPU clock itself, but with the memory shifting speeds and causing a refresh on the screen hence the quick flicker. So what I did was edit the original BIOS and changed the memory clocks to 1200 so they stay the same regardless of what power state. This leaves the card to be seamless when changing from 3d full screen mode and running a video, and resolves the flickering issue. Pics and steps below!
First off you need the following...
1. USB Drive and PC capable of booting to a USB drive
2. HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool found HERE
3. HP USB Boot Files found HERE
4. ATI Flash Utility found HERE
5. GPU-Z found HERE
6. Radeon Bios Editor found HERE
Now for the instructions...
First we need to set the USB drive up properly...so first things you need to do is install the Hp USB Disk Format tool(creates icon on desktop). Then extract the boot files and atiflash to a folder on your desktop.
Then Open the tool and select the following... FAT32, Quick Format, Create a DOS startup disc, and then select the using DOS system files located at and select the "..." and point it to the boot files you extracted to the folder on your desktop.
Then we need to make a backup of your current BIOS to put on your freshly formatted USB boot drive. So open GPU-Z and click the little green arrow right beside the BIOS version and a little menu will pop down, select save to file. Once you click that it will take a second or two and then will have a window to rename and browse to where you want to save it, save it to your newly formatted USB drive. I named mine original for obvious reasons!
Next we need to open up the BIOS file you just saved with RBEditor and change the clocks that are causing the problems. So run RBEditor and on the bottom left there is a Load BIOS button, click it and browse to your USB drive where you saved your original BIOS, select it and click open.
Now that we have the BIOS open in RBEditor, we can now edit it to what we want to accomplish. At the top you will notice 4 buttons Information, Clock Settings, Fan Settings, and Additional Information. We want to click on Clock Settings, now you should see several clock settings with the respective values already set, these are the powerplay settings causing problems. And if you look at the bottom they are labeled as to what power savings they work with. Now what we want to change is the RAM(mhz) which by default is 1200, and as you can see in the screenshot the default is lower due to powersaving. The two rows we are concerned with are Clock info 02 and Clock info 03. We want to change their respective 900mhz to 1200mhz. Once you have changed those two values only go ahead and click Save BIOS on bottom left and browse to your USB drive. Save it to whatever name your going to use to flash with.
Also if you want you can adjust your default fan settings on the card on the fan settings tab, which I adjusted mine to be alittle more aggressive to keep the card cooler during system startup. Just be sure to save your BIOS after you edit your fan settings.
The last thing to do is to uninstall all ATI software/drivers, as well as anything such as rivatuner and MSI afterburner. Remove all ATI profiles, folders, and files associated with the previous installation to avoid headaches. Be sure to download the latest drivers and place them on your desktop so you can install them after you've flashed your card.
Next we want to restart and select the USB drive as your boot device.
Then you want to boot to the device and you should see a C:\ after a fairly quick Windows 98 screen.
You want to type the following:
atiflash -f -p 0 flickerfixed
flickerfixed indicates the name of the modified BIOS you created and saved to your usb drive.
In the event that something doesn't work properly you can boot back to this drive and use the same command and reflash to the original.bin that is on the drive from where we saved it earlier.
Once you successfully flash it will ask to restart the system to complete the flash. Restart the system and change your boot drive back to your OS drive. Let your OS startup and it will recognize the card and you can then do a clean install of the drivers that we downloaded before we shutdown.
This should resolve the flickering issue.
I am in no way responsible for damages this process can cause, please understand that this can void your warranty. Ultimately it is your responsibility once you cross this threshold.
I can only guarantee that this type of fix will be more stable than downloading a predone BIOS that someone else created that may or may not work with your card.
Ok this was resolved...
I did some research and started playing around with RBEditor. I first tried setting all my powerplay clocks to the typical 850/1200 settings, which resulted in a freeze and system restart anytime I played a video such as youtube. So I was pulling my hair out as to why but it turns out the small flicker has nothing to do with the GPU clock itself, but with the memory shifting speeds and causing a refresh on the screen hence the quick flicker. So what I did was edit the original BIOS and changed the memory clocks to 1200 so they stay the same regardless of what power state. This leaves the card to be seamless when changing from 3d full screen mode and running a video, and resolves the flickering issue. Pics and steps below!
First off you need the following...
1. USB Drive and PC capable of booting to a USB drive
2. HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool found HERE
3. HP USB Boot Files found HERE
4. ATI Flash Utility found HERE
5. GPU-Z found HERE
6. Radeon Bios Editor found HERE
Now for the instructions...
First we need to set the USB drive up properly...so first things you need to do is install the Hp USB Disk Format tool(creates icon on desktop). Then extract the boot files and atiflash to a folder on your desktop.
Then Open the tool and select the following... FAT32, Quick Format, Create a DOS startup disc, and then select the using DOS system files located at and select the "..." and point it to the boot files you extracted to the folder on your desktop.
Then we need to make a backup of your current BIOS to put on your freshly formatted USB boot drive. So open GPU-Z and click the little green arrow right beside the BIOS version and a little menu will pop down, select save to file. Once you click that it will take a second or two and then will have a window to rename and browse to where you want to save it, save it to your newly formatted USB drive. I named mine original for obvious reasons!
Next we need to open up the BIOS file you just saved with RBEditor and change the clocks that are causing the problems. So run RBEditor and on the bottom left there is a Load BIOS button, click it and browse to your USB drive where you saved your original BIOS, select it and click open.
Now that we have the BIOS open in RBEditor, we can now edit it to what we want to accomplish. At the top you will notice 4 buttons Information, Clock Settings, Fan Settings, and Additional Information. We want to click on Clock Settings, now you should see several clock settings with the respective values already set, these are the powerplay settings causing problems. And if you look at the bottom they are labeled as to what power savings they work with. Now what we want to change is the RAM(mhz) which by default is 1200, and as you can see in the screenshot the default is lower due to powersaving. The two rows we are concerned with are Clock info 02 and Clock info 03. We want to change their respective 900mhz to 1200mhz. Once you have changed those two values only go ahead and click Save BIOS on bottom left and browse to your USB drive. Save it to whatever name your going to use to flash with.
Also if you want you can adjust your default fan settings on the card on the fan settings tab, which I adjusted mine to be alittle more aggressive to keep the card cooler during system startup. Just be sure to save your BIOS after you edit your fan settings.
The last thing to do is to uninstall all ATI software/drivers, as well as anything such as rivatuner and MSI afterburner. Remove all ATI profiles, folders, and files associated with the previous installation to avoid headaches. Be sure to download the latest drivers and place them on your desktop so you can install them after you've flashed your card.
Next we want to restart and select the USB drive as your boot device.
Then you want to boot to the device and you should see a C:\ after a fairly quick Windows 98 screen.
You want to type the following:
atiflash -f -p 0 flickerfixed
flickerfixed indicates the name of the modified BIOS you created and saved to your usb drive.
In the event that something doesn't work properly you can boot back to this drive and use the same command and reflash to the original.bin that is on the drive from where we saved it earlier.
Once you successfully flash it will ask to restart the system to complete the flash. Restart the system and change your boot drive back to your OS drive. Let your OS startup and it will recognize the card and you can then do a clean install of the drivers that we downloaded before we shutdown.
This should resolve the flickering issue.
I am in no way responsible for damages this process can cause, please understand that this can void your warranty. Ultimately it is your responsibility once you cross this threshold.
I can only guarantee that this type of fix will be more stable than downloading a predone BIOS that someone else created that may or may not work with your card.
Last edited:
