AMD Radeon HD 5850 and HD 6950 revived – cleaning, assembly and the hunt for old records | Time travel

1 - Motivation and joy for something old 2 - Refurbish: the nasty part (General) 3 - Time travel back: DirectX11, drivers and tools 4 - Logging, benchmarks and test system 5 - ATI Radeon HD 5850 - the dirt catcher 6 - Powercolor HD 6950 - it doesn't want to become a 6970! Conclusion

And before we start testing the two cards, a few words about the drivers at that time. Development and driver support of the old stuff has officially long since ceased, of course. Nevertheless, I ran my tests under Windows 10 64 bit First, I have to say that the Radeon HD completely passed me by back then. In the late noughties I had some old Nvidia card from a friend and then from 2012 for eight years only Intel HD.

At that time, I only wondered how a few ATI cards suddenly became a hodgepodge of a seemingly infinite number of different HD models – I still don’t quite get it and have learned that a larger number doesn’t always mean “better”. So this is all new territory for me right now and I spent some time researching until I could get my old cards up to full steam. Here are the most important tips from my point of view:

Driver

On amd.com, you can find new drivers in addition to new drivers in the selection for the Radeon HD series, depending on the model, usually two, sometimes three drivers: Catalyst 15.7.1, Crimson 16.2.1 and with luck the Catalyst 14.4 (mostly under Windows 8 32 bit).

I initially thought newer is better – but I should have known better from current days! The HD cards with the 14.4 spit out the most performance, partly even with a clear gap! The relevant performance settings can then be found under Performance / AMD OverDrive and …

… this view was later called Wattman by AMD, so this is still the more common name today.  

Tuning with the Afterburner

As a user of a current high-end Radeon, the MSI Afterburner is a horror to me and I don’t like to touch it, but as a tuner for old cards, it has grown on me. There is even a Big Navi skin! Thus, GPU and VRAM clock can be controlled with the Afterburner partly after persuasion and, depending on the model, also the fans, a voltage (seems to be sometimes that of the GPU depending on the model, but mostly – at least according to HWinfo – that of the voltage converter) and the power to be used even beyond the driver-side limits.

I had initially tried this with the 16.2.1 driver and there the Afterburner only allowed settings within the limits set in the driver – if at all. After a long search on the net, I picked up a tip somewhere to use old drivers, i.e. the Catalysts, if possible. The afterburner can probably reign in these much better. There is a multi-stage procedure for enabling the voltage regulator:

1. Either unlock in the options of the Afterburner.
2. Then there is a trick on the net to change a setting in a config file (MSIAfterburner.cfg): [ATIADLHAL] Enable = 1, UnofficialOverclockingEULA = I confirm that I am aware of unofficial overclocking limitations and fully understand that MSI will not provide me any support on it
3. If that doesn’t work either, then there is the possibility to delete everything in the Profiles folder in the newest profile and overwrite it with something new (search a bit, then you will also find that on the net).

I have really long tried around and 1, 2. and 3. tried again and again. I think it was the switch from the Crimson to the Catalyts driver that helped. Since then it’s been smooth sailing. 

VBIOS Flash

Especially before I got the hang of the Afterburner, I edited and flashed all the cards’ bios several times via RBE (Radeon Bios Editor from Techpowerup, not the Red Bios Editor based here!). This is how it would go:

First extract the bios from the card via GPU-Z, then edit it sensibly via RBE and then write it back to the card with the ATIWinflash (run as administrator!). This is quite fast, but unfortunately it only works successfully with very few cards. I haven’t shot down a card yet, but when the values (upper limits for GPU clock, VRAM clock and voltage) don’t fit because I set them too high, the card jumps or stays in minimum load in typical load scenarios, sometimes at 150 to 300 MHz. Also, for a dual bios card, I learned that mostly bios 1 is overwriteable and bios 2 is mostly read-only. You can find this in any forum in articles from 2010 on page 178. Or something like that.  

Sapphire Trixx

Sapphire has countered Afterburner with Trixx as its own software. Partially this also works, but I have experienced it as less stable and often not compatible with the old cards. In addition, it needs old, partly modded versions (greeting from forum XY, ages ago on page 365 or so) to be able to operate the voltage regulator. So we’d better not do that.