970/980 Custom bios flashing now working!!!

I'm going to let them play with it for a few days... I already have power limit disabled (hard mod). I need more voltage and maybe kill off that boost garbage. :)

Cards at 50C OC'd with the fans as low as they can go on my radiator.
 
I'm going to let them play with it for a few days... I already have power limit disabled (hard mod). I need more voltage and maybe kill off that boost garbage. :)

Cards at 50C OC'd with the fans as low as they can go on my radiator.

Yea I am going to wait as well. I can now finally order my last NZXT bracket and memory/vrm sinks

My 2 H55' are ready to go!

Edit: Blah was turning my fans down so I can have a quiet pc, and my damn Scythe fan controller LCD screen died....damn you!
 
I'm probably NOT going to wait. I plan to see if I can make/flash a custom bios on my card/s tonight with a 1.3V set at boost at a maximum power limit allowable via bios modifying.

Hopefully in it's current form Kepler bios tweaker or some other utility can allow for some accurate modifications.

I'll report back.
 
Yay! Now eagerly awaiting a reference 980 BIOS with boost removed, increased voltage limits, and power limit either removed or jacked to the moon.
 
Yay! Now eagerly awaiting a reference 980 BIOS with boost removed, increased voltage limits, and power limit either removed or jacked to the moon.

This is all I ever wanted.... and less coil whine.
 
I'm probably NOT going to wait. I plan to see if I can make/flash a custom bios on my card/s tonight with a 1.3V set at boost at a maximum power limit allowable via bios modifying.

Hopefully in it's current form Kepler bios tweaker or some other utility can allow for some accurate modifications.

I'll report back.

Please do!

I couldn't help myself. I can confirm it works... I have to mess with it more but my voltage is at 1.275 now which is the max of the slider on the keplerbiostweaker. I guess I'll have to look at the rom the old fashioned way? I have a EE degree but first time messing with bios flashing.

So I made min and max voltage both 1.312 (which ends up 1.275 on afterburner but perhap's it higher.AB seems to round to 0.025V.) I did this to avoid voltage drops.
I can now boost up to 1600 Mhz, doubt it's stable but fluid mark is running lol. Been at 1592 for a while. Yeah had some slight artifacts in 3dMark... not too surprising since the voltage isn't much higher than stock.

Hopefully someone comes along that knows what the hell they are doing! :)
 
Last edited:
I'm reviewing my bios right now but I'm not sure what to set in the Power table tab that would be safe. There are about 9 different profiles each with their own

Min (mW)
Def (mW)
Max (mW)

The numbers represent a % e.g. 125% power

I've got no way to know if e.g. 150% is stable to try or not.

Can you show a pic like this and show me what voltages sliders you used in the voltage tab please

n9UDExG.png

Sadly without understanding how to push the TDP wall further back any boosting of any kind will be useless as my cards will run into the TDP wall. Also this version of kepler Bios tweaker seems to not be fully compatible as many options are grayed out. If I can figure out how to boost my voltage to 1.3v and push my TDP to the max this PCB can handle I'll be a happy camper. ;)
 
@Lord if those voltage tables scale with the boost and Power Target any increase could be potentialy damaging if the boost voltages is too high. I would wait and see what comes out in the next few days If it were me. We just don't know how those voltages scale with boost without trial end error and the wrong error could be a bad one,lol. I am sure there will be a ton of info tomorrow on Overclock.net about the vTable, etc.
 
I'm reviewing my bios right now but I'm not sure what to set in the Power table tab that would be safe. There are about 9 different profiles each with their own

Min (mW)
Def (mW)
Max (mW)

The numbers represent a % e.g. 125% power

I've got no way to know if e.g. 150% is stable to try or not.

Can you show a pic like this and show me what voltages sliders you used in the voltage tab please

n9UDExG.png

Sadly without understanding how to push the TDP wall further back any boosting of any kind will be useless as my cards will run into the TDP wall. Also this version of kepler Bios tweaker seems to not be fully compatible as many options are grayed out. If I can figure out how to boost my voltage to 1.3v and push my TDP to the max this PCB can handle I'll be a happy camper. ;)

I'd just max out the mW on all of them and let the card thermally throttle :)
Without a significant voltage mod you're likely going to just CTD before you max out thermally anyways. All those sliders I just made the min & max 1312.5 mV if it was over 1100 mV for the max. That way if it's in active 3D at all it'll always be at max voltage and not modulate around.
 
I'm reviewing my bios right now but I'm not sure what to set in the Power table tab that would be safe. There are about 9 different profiles each with their own

From ocnet responses and a few flashes I can't get the voltage to work no matter what it's set to.
 
From ocnet responses and a few flashes I can't get the voltage to work no matter what it's set to.

Voltage gain is so minimal right now... My slider goes up to +100 mV now. Whoop de doo.

I'm waiting for someone smarter than me to come out with a BIOS with +300 mV or at least more than +100.
 
Voltage gain is so minimal right now... My slider goes up to +100 mV now. Whoop de doo.

I'm waiting for someone smarter than me to come out with a BIOS with +300 mV or at least more than +100.

That sucks. I mean hell we get +86 now and when we set +86 we only really get +50. Hopefully we can actually get +100 which should = 1.315. (my cards stock voltage is 1.215v) The thing is if I can't figure out how to boost the power limit with something correctly then I doubt my card will boost to that higher voltage as it is since I'll hit the TDP wall.

I was thinking this way. My Card is probably a 250Watt TDP board but it is capped to 145 Watt. Basically I should be able to squeeze an extra 100 Watts of power out of my card. So that's 66% more or 2/3 of my current TDP. So I was thinking about going into the Power Table Tab and setting all of those settings to = 165% if 100% = 145Watts then that should be right. (By the way I'm rounding values for safety) That should put my boards to each use 240 Watts more or less.

Hey we all wanted a 250 Watt TDP maxwell board hopefully when more info comes out we'll get them :D
 
dda3f739_kbt-power-table.jpeg


In the pictures above it shows 6 of the 9 Power Table values. The top 3, the middle 3 but not the bottom 3. I wonder what the bottom 3 are for and do? I noticed he said that it's not taking and I'm wondering if it is because he's not setting up the bottom 3 power tables properly.
 
Maybe I'm missing something but even the stock Gigabyte G1 970 BIOS sets 100% TDP to 250W, and with AB you can increase it to 112% for a whooping 280W, or almost double that of spec 145W.

So where is this capping to 145W you're referring to?
 
Maybe I'm missing something but even the stock Gigabyte G1 970 BIOS sets 100% TDP to 250W, and with AB you can increase it to 112% for a whooping 280W, or almost double that of spec 145W.

So where is this capping to 145W you're referring to?

Reference cards have much lower power limits.
 
So approximately how many watts are these bad boys actually running at with these insane power targets?
 
Maybe I'm missing something but even the stock Gigabyte G1 970 BIOS sets 100% TDP to 250W, and with AB you can increase it to 112% for a whooping 280W, or almost double that of spec 145W.

So where is this capping to 145W you're referring to?

Yes, as Parja just said. Reference GTX 970 is = 145 Watts, GTX 980 = 165 Watts.
 
Maybe I'm missing something but even the stock Gigabyte G1 970 BIOS sets 100% TDP to 250W, and with AB you can increase it to 112% for a whooping 280W, or almost double that of spec 145W.

So where is this capping to 145W you're referring to?

what do you mean 'even'? the gigabyte gaming 970 has the highest tdp of all the 970s. if you're talking about the cheaper one, its tdp is not 250W.
 
That sucks. I mean hell we get +86 now and when we set +86 we only really get +50. Hopefully we can actually get +100 which should = 1.315. (my cards stock voltage is 1.215v) The thing is if I can't figure out how to boost the power limit with something correctly then I doubt my card will boost to that higher voltage as it is since I'll hit the TDP wall.

I was thinking this way. My Card is probably a 250Watt TDP board but it is capped to 145 Watt. Basically I should be able to squeeze an extra 100 Watts of power out of my card. So that's 66% more or 2/3 of my current TDP. So I was thinking about going into the Power Table Tab and setting all of those settings to = 165% if 100% = 145Watts then that should be right. (By the way I'm rounding values for safety) That should put my boards to each use 240 Watts more or less.

Hey we all wanted a 250 Watt TDP maxwell board hopefully when more info comes out we'll get them :D

I was referring to this.

I got confused because somehow I thought you were talking about the Gigabyte 970 G1, which has a TDP of 250W.
 
I was referring to this.

I got confused because somehow I thought you were talking about the Gigabyte 970 G1, which has a TDP of 250W.

Ah I see where we all went astray. I meant to say that my card is 165 watts, I mistyped that. I'm not sure if my card is 250Watts or not but my math was off before. I worked on other things tonight so no bios flashing yet for me. Probably tomorrow night since I'm about to call it a night.
 
Update,

I got my cards to flash to a new bios I modded for myself using my stock bios.

I must have done something wrong in the voltage tab because the cards would lock up my OS. I tried a bunch of things to get them stable but eventually I had to flash back.

I changed 4 values in the voltage table all the way to 1.312. 3 of those values had 2 sliders showing ranges of voltages and I moved both sliders to 1.312 in each of those 3 values. I think I went astray there.

I gotta read more and try to figure out the voltage thing because it doesn't seem to be worth it to me to flash without a voltage bump.

The other changes in the Power Table Tab mirrored what everyone else has confirmed stable. I guess I'm just not clear form that thread what to do in the voltage tab.

so attempt 1 = Fail
 
Yeah, that'll be the problem. People getting successful overclocks seem to be doing so well under 1.3v.

I'm at 1506 core on both of my GBT G1 Gaming 970s at stock voltages (around 1.2v).
 

Awesome I'm gonna try using this now. Hopefully it's more intuitive some of the stuff on KBT was a guessing game.

Anyhow UPDATE:

I kept locking up so I flashed a bios on my card with no voltage tweaks and the result was that I was still locking up. It was the Power Profiles I had set which were an exact mirror image of what someone did on the forum. I currently have a bios that is unlocking 1312v on my cards. I'm still tinkering with things because of the voltage discrepancy bug I'm not getting full voltage. That or I'm thermal throttling my voltage. My temps seem okay (below 75c at full load in Heaven) but the most voltage I've seen is 1.258V which is higher than before but still not quite there.

I'm going to try Maxwell bios tweaker beta and mess around with my voltage settings and see if I can up my TDP a little to make the extra voltage worthwhile.

I'm getting there.
 
Awesome I'm gonna try using this now. Hopefully it's more intuitive some of the stuff on KBT was a guessing game.

Anyhow UPDATE:

I kept locking up so I flashed a bios on my card with no voltage tweaks and the result was that I was still locking up. It was the Power Profiles I had set which were an exact mirror image of what someone did on the forum. I currently have a bios that is unlocking 1312v on my cards. I'm still tinkering with things because of the voltage discrepancy bug I'm not getting full voltage. That or I'm thermal throttling my voltage. My temps seem okay (below 75c at full load in Heaven) but the most voltage I've seen is 1.258V which is higher than before but still not quite there.

I'm going to try Maxwell bios tweaker beta and mess around with my voltage settings and see if I can up my TDP a little to make the extra voltage worthwhile.

I'm getting there.

Not sure if you did this, but disable boost. It might be fuckin with ya.

Also some people are reporting seeing different voltages in MSI AB and GPU-Z then what the card is producting (they used a multimeter).

Right now who knows. But at least with the maxwell bios tweaker nothing is greyed out.
 
Checked out the bios editor program but I couldn't find anything to modify temperature throttling. Could any entry in the Power Table be related to temperature limit?

ps: I've tried using software like Gigabyte's own OC Guru and MSI Afterburner to increase the temperature limit all the way to 91c, but my card still throttles at 70c.
 
Not sure if you did this, but disable boost. It might be fuckin with ya.

Also some people are reporting seeing different voltages in MSI AB and GPU-Z then what the card is producting (they used a multimeter).

Right now who knows. But at least with the maxwell bios tweaker nothing is greyed out.

I like Maxwell bios tweaker thanks for that. I dont think boost was messing with me because the locking up was happening if I opened afterburner after the flash and applied. This would lock my Power to 100% (the max available) I'm running a new bios I made in maxwell bios tweaker with my voltage at 1.3 and it's working good so it's definitley something I did in the power table tab. I need to figure out the power table tab settings to boost my TDP. I think I'm hitting the TDP wall even faster now because of the extra voltage (makes sense) Now I'm working on this.

Checked out the bios editor program but I couldn't find anything to modify temperature throttling. Could any entry in the Power Table be related to temperature limit?

ps: I've tried using software like Gigabyte's own OC Guru and MSI Afterburner to increase the temperature limit all the way to 91c, but my card still throttles at 70c.

Hmm, I'm not sure there is a thermal throttle point. I've watched my card quite a bit and I do not throttle at exactly 70c or 75c but around there I may hit the TDP wall and throttle from that. It would be a thermal throttle point if the moment I hit that temp it throttled but it doesn't for me. It seems more based on TDP for me.
 
I like Maxwell bios tweaker thanks for that. I dont think boost was messing with me because the locking up was happening if I opened afterburner after the flash and applied. This would lock my Power to 100% (the max available) I'm running a new bios I made in maxwell bios tweaker with my voltage at 1.3 and it's working good so it's definitley something I did in the power table tab. I need to figure out the power table tab settings to boost my TDP. I think I'm hitting the TDP wall even faster now because of the extra voltage (makes sense) Now I'm working on this.



Hmm, I'm not sure there is a thermal throttle point. I've watched my card quite a bit and I do not throttle at exactly 70c or 75c but around there I may hit the TDP wall and throttle from that. It would be a thermal throttle point if the moment I hit that temp it throttled but it doesn't for me. It seems more based on TDP for me.


Are you able to go past 1.3 with the maxwell tweaker? Not next to my computer and the anticipation is killing me.

Oh and I think throttling begins around 50-60C. My voltage used to dip to 1.225 from 1.250 when I hit about that... On my reference cooler it would fluxuate, when I got my kraken it'd stay at 1.250 all the time since temps didn't go over 50C.
 
Okay so Final Update for now.

I'm very comfortable with flashing and have been working on this all morning. I have successfully flashed my cards to max out on voltage and even set my Power tables to + 150. The problem is the voltage discrepancy bug. The drivers simply aren't matching your cards like they are supposed to. I could never get past 1.256v on the cards because of the driver issue. Using single cards you can fully tweak your card out and be accurate on what your getting with bios modifications

Although I have a working bios customized and saved, this software glitch is not allowing me to do what I need to with SLi.

Single cards can max voltage and as many have seen you don't show 1.3v but 1.262V. in the on screen display. If I had a multimeter I could check and I'm sure it'll say 1.3v but I lent it out last week.

Finally with my card's power tables set the way I did I noticed that I would be floating around 101-102 TDP instead of 115-120 on the primary card. So even that looks successful.

I flashed my cards back to stock bios and am going to wait until this voltage discrepancy issue is fixed before really playing with bios flashing since I can't really see exactly what is truly going on with SLi enabled at this time.

The final thing I haven't had a time to play around with is Disabling boost entirely. I saw the 3 boost options in the bios and I'm sure if I set all 3 of them to disabled then that should do it. The card should always run at top speed. Below I'm going to post a Bios flash guide that I used on my GTX 980s Do this at your own risk.
 
Flashing bios is done at your own Risk This is a beginning to end process on Flashing your Bios using Maxwell Bios Tweaker, GPU-Z & NVFlash

The info in this guide may change as more is learned collectively or my comprehension of the process gets better. The only claim I make is that this guide should work for you because it worked for me exactly as the information is presented.

Download Links
Maxwell Bios Tweaker

NV Flash w Certificates Disabled

GPU-Z

Step 1: BACKUP your Stock BIOS! to a folder on the root of your C:\
1. Disable your graphics card driver in the device manager
2. Open GPU-Z and at the right of your reported bios version click on the save bios option. Name it something like Stock980.rom and Save it somewhere specific e.g. folder in root of C:\

Step 2 Open/Modify & Save a modified version of the bios into the same Folder
Disclaimer. When you do this step be sure to choose Save-as instead of save. Save will overwrite your stock bios backup. You need that stock bios backup AS-IS so Choose Save As and name the modified bios something different e.g. GTX980Ti.rom

Open Maxwell Bios Tweaker and choose open Bios. Browse to that Stock980.rom bios in the folder at the root of C:\ and open it.

Modifying Voltage

Voltage1.jpg


I modified the right voltage sliders on the 3 above and the 1 right slider on the 1 below

Voltage2.jpg


Modifying Power Table Tab

Go to the Power Table Tab

PowerTables1.jpg

As you can see above I modified the TDP power table to increase my boards overall TDP from 250Watts to 285Watts

PowerTables2.jpg

As you can see above I modified only the Power Target to be 125% of 285Watts instead of 125% of 250 Watts

Explanation Of what the 6 Power Tables Are (Below)
dda3f739_kbt-power-table.jpeg


There are a total of 9 different power tables. Only 6 are relevant. In the image above I only modified the top Power table and the last of the 6 power Tables. The first is the TDP your setting for your card. I set 285Watts by using the settings in the pic above. In the last of the 6 power tables I set the values as shown so that I can set my Power Taget to 125%.

Once you have your voltages and Power tables Set click SAVE AS name this bios anything you want I chose GTX980Ti.rom ;)
Put it in the same folder as your other bios. ALSO Put your NvFlash.exe(the actual file not the folder) file in the root of the same folder.

Step 3 Flashing the modified Bios
Disclaimer: Never EVER reboot or shut down your system while Flashing your bios unless you enjoy having $330 or $550 Paperweights. You have been Warned

Once again you want to disable your Card/S in the device manager. If running SLI disable the bottom card first.

once cards are disabled in the device manager and you have a big ugly screen open up a command prompt as Administrator

Change directory to your folder that has NVFlash, stock980bios.rom, & GTX980Ti.rom

To do that I typed: cd C:\nvflash (since the folder I created at the root of C:\ was called nvflash) and press enter.

Now you'll see C:\nvflash

Type in the following command

Single Card
nvflash -6 yourbiosname.rom
Press enter
When prompted press y for yes, and then you'll be prompted a second time (repeat press y)

It should say successfull

SLI

type in nvflash --list
type in nvflash -i0 -6 yourbiosname.rom
Press enter
When prompted press y for yes, and then you'll be prompted a second time (repeat press y)
It should say successfull

Now you want to flash the second card

type in nvflash -i1 yourbiosname.rom
Press enter
When prompted press y for yes, and then you'll be prompted a second time (repeat press y)
It should say successfull

Exit the command prompt, Re-enable your graphics card/s (bottom first if using SLi)

Reboot for good measure
 
Last edited:
Don't know if you saw my other post, but it seems with SLI on both cards drag their feet for some reason.

Btw this is completely fucked:

http://www.3dmark.com/compare/fs/2938077/fs/3056893

Care to guess which result belongs to which set of cards? Man I just can't get a fucking break! :mad:

EDIT: So after a very quick test it seems the lower voltage card is bogging down the entire SLI setup, including itself rofl.

With SLI disabled and +120 core/+300 mem, boost increased to 1524MHz, while voltage also jumped to 1.225V while running Firestrike. Now keep in mind the top card is 20MHz behind the bottom card (higher volt card). At +140 core/+300 mem, boost further increased to 1545MHz and voltage stayed put at 1.225V.

So what this means is that if everything were to have worked properly, I should see a boost of 1524MHz in Firestrike. But I don't, instead I see 1506MHz, and the reason for that is because the top card is downvolting to 1.200V instead of 1.225V, so it simply does not have enough juice to eek out another boost bin or two. Even with the exact same OC, the cards that had comparable ASICs and voltages worked much better than the other set. Clearly the "mismatched set" is losing about 40MHz of core clock even though on paper everything appeared to be the same, which would explain the 3% loss in Firestrike score.

On the bright side, +120/+140 core and +300 mem (=1506 boost 7600 mem) is completely game stable without even touching volts, and cards stay at 1.200V/1.206V. So basically stock 980 level performance without needing to add any juice for this new set of Gigabyte 970s. I guess I really shouldn't complain.

But still, GODDAMN NVIDIA GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER AND UNBORK THE DRIVERS KTHX.
 
Thanks for that write up Lord :) Going to be flashing soon as I see a 970 G1 bios I like.
 
Thanks for that write up Lord :) Going to be flashing soon as I see a 970 G1 bios I like.

I've always liked to make my own bios. Since all cards have their own unique personality e.g. some card's vram like less voltage to overclock than others or, some cards overclock will not benefit from more vcore, they'll just get hotter..

Driver issues made me sidebar this until later sadly

The driver issues in the way AND too many unknowns will make this all much better soon

Some unknowns I'd like answers to;

Which voltage is for Vram, should I move both sliders to 1.3 or only the second one on the right of each value.

What is a Safe TDP for a Reference card or a 970G1 etc... Why should I or shouldn't I touch the rails in the Power table tab?

I kind of like information about specifically what I'm adjusting instead of just doing because someone said.

I'm sure as the days turn into weeks there will be much more knowledge about what we can do and what's the best way to do it.

Still there are always the usual people who are famous for putting out great bioses and I'm sure they're busy right now ;)
 
I've always liked to make my own bios. Since all cards have their own unique personality e.g. some card's vram like less voltage to overclock than others or, some cards overclock will not benefit from more vcore, they'll just get hotter..

Driver issues made me sidebar this until later sadly

The driver issues in the way AND too many unknowns will make this all much better soon

Some unknowns I'd like answers to;

Which voltage is for Vram, should I move both sliders to 1.3 or only the second one on the right of each value.

What is a Safe TDP for a Reference card or a 970G1 etc... Why should I or shouldn't I touch the rails in the Power table tab?

I kind of like information about specifically what I'm adjusting instead of just doing because someone said.

I'm sure as the days turn into weeks there will be much more knowledge about what we can do and what's the best way to do it.

Still there are always the usual people who are famous for putting out great bioses and I'm sure they're busy right now ;)

Exactly :) I do not trust myself to make a decent bios. I know Skyn3t is working on them now. And I know me makes a great bios :) Because of him i was able to get my 780 lightning to 1450 overclock!
 
Back
Top