Background
I purchased two Asus R9280X-DC2T-GDR5 model AMD video cards back in 2014 for a gaming computer I was building. A few months after building the system one of the video cards failed and needed to be RMA’d (at POST/boot it would show a psychedelic light show instead of displaying those screens correctly, then showed similar effects along with artifacting once it booted in to Windows) which fixed that issue. However over the course of another year or so the computer started experiencing some display artifacting and stability issues, especially when playing video games. I tried some suggestions I found online that seemed to make things work better for awhile but eventually the stability and artifacting issues had become common enough that I couldn’t reliably play some of my games for longer than an hour without experiencing issues or a crash. Unfortunately this was also just outside of the warranty period.
Diagnosis
After doing more research and investigating I began to suspect the issues were being caused by heat. The system, CPU and GPU temps were all below their max values but the fact that the issue began to occur after the computer had been running under load for some time along with my discovery that leaving the side panel off the computer case tended to lessen the frequency of the issue seemed to point me toward a heat related cause. Additional research finally revealed a series of forum posts from other users having similar issues and their ultimate conclusion that the issue was more or less heat related. The best diagnosis I found explained that the GPU cooler for that model video card left some of the memory chips at one end of the card exposed without shielding or a heat spreader on them. These chips were made by Hynix and were originally rated for 1.5v and 1500Mhz. However since the Asus R9280X-DC2T-GDR5 is the TOP factory overclocked model the card was running those chips at 1.6v and 1600Mhz instead. This began to fit with what I was seeing from my card.
Solution
The suggested fix was to RMA the card since this kind of issue should not be happening and plenty of this model card exist and are in use without this issue occurring. However since my card was already out of warranty when I finally experienced and diagnosed this issue that wasn’t an option for me. The best suggestion for those with a card out of warranty (short of replacement) was to try removing the cooler, clean off the original thermal grease, then apply new thermal compound and re-install the cooler (or upgrade to an after market cooler). Another option I found mentioned in forums was to try upgrading to the latest vbios from Asus (since an update had been released back in 2015 to address this type of issue, however I was already running that vbios) or, as a worst case, try flashing the vbios from the Asus R9280X-DC2 model card. The R9280X-DC2 is the non-TOP model of the card that is not factory overclocked. This means the vbios clocks the GPU down to 1000Mhz and the VRAM down to 1500Mhz @ 1.5v. While you do lose your factory overclock many users who did this reported that the cards ran stable after flashing that vbios. I ran in to some issues right off the bat though. Most of the links to the video bios .rom files in the forum posts no longer worked. Fortunately some Google searching led me to the R9280X vbios archive at TechPowerUp. There I was able to grab the latest vbios .rom file for the R9280X-DC2 model card. I was also able to download the ATIFLASH utility (now called AMDVBFLASH) and the GPU-Z software from the TechPowerUp site as well.
Flash Procedure
- First, download and open the GPU-Z application. Once it’s up and running click on the camera icon in the top right to take a screen shot of the current video card specs. This will be used to compare your specs after the flash process to help confirm the vbios and settings indeed changed.
- Next you will want to make a backup of your current vbios. This is necessary in case you ever decide to flash it back to stock. In GPU-Z click on the arrow icon next to the UEFI check box and select the save to file option. Make sure to give it a name you will recognize as your stock vbios backup later on if/when it is needed.
- Now that you have backed up your stock vbios it’s time to flash the new one. IT IS IMPORTANT YOU UNDERSTAND THAT YOU ALWAYS RUN A RISK OF BRICKING A DEVICE WHEN A FIRMWARE UPDATE IS BEING FLASHED! YOU ARE PERFORMING THIS AT YOUR OWN RISK! I am not responsible for any damage you do to your computer if you are following this procedure. That said, download and unzip the ATIFLASH utility. You will find two executable files in the folder, one that is for Windows and another that is for running from the Command Prompt. I would also suggest you copy the backup .rom file you created with GPU-Z in to this folder along with the new vbios .rom file you downloaded from TechPowerUp or where ever you got it from.
- Open a Command Prompt window as administrator (you will need administrator priviledges for the flash utility to work correctly) and change to the directory that has the ATIFLASH utility in it.
- Now type “amdvbflash -f -p 0 XXXX.rom” making sure you replace XXXX.rom with the name of the new vbios file you are trying to flash to the video card. The -f forces the flash and the -p 0 tells the utility which video card to apply the flash to (zero being the default video card).
- If you get an error during the flash process first make sure you are indeed running Command Prompt as administrator. If you get the message ERROR: 0FL01 or a similar message you may need to unlock the rom on your video card first. Type “Amdvbflash.exe -unlockrom 0” to unlock the rom on the default video card. Then run the previous flash command that you got the error with previously and it should complete the flash process.
- Once you have successfully flashed the vbios file to your video card you will need to reboot the computer for the changes to take effect. You may also find that you need to uninstall/reinstall your video driver since the vbios flash makes your video card think it’s now a different model card. I didn’t have to reinstall my driver but others have.
- Launch GPU-Z again and compare the specs now shown with the screen shot image you took before the flash was performed. You should see that the cards model and other specs like clock speeds are different. In my case it now shows the card model as R9280X-DC2 instead of the original R9280X-DC2T. It also shows the GPU clock speed at 1000Mhz instead of the stock 1070Mhz and the memory clock at 1500Mhz.
- You should be able to follow this same procedure to flash back to your stock vbios backup if/when you need to.
Conclusion
The above process worked for me and so far my video stability issues have not returned. I will update this post if I do experience any further issues or changes in performance but so far everything appears to be working correctly and running stable. I do intend to eventually try removing the GPU cooler and either replacing it or at least removing the old thermal compound and reapplying it to see if I can get better performance and ultimately flash back to the stock vbios file. Until I get a chance to do that though this fix has at least given me the ability to play games on this system without the random stability issues that had really become a problem for me. I hope this has been useful, helpful information for you. – Tom S.
