Straight to the Anoraks VBIOS Collection Downloads!
#Welcome to the Λnorak VBIOS collection
This topic will help you to understand the technical ressources your hardware has, and give you the possibility to optimize mining speed, electricity usage and cooling performance.
#Disclaimer
Mining cryptocurrencies with your GPU puts the graphics card under heavy stress. Modifying the VBIOS to gain more performance, optimize electricity usage and cooling, will put your graphics cards to their limits, and beyond. Modifying the BIOS will void your warranty. This information is provided as-is. Do not blame me, or any other member of this community for the damage caused by a bad flash, incorrect flashing, or any other damage caused to the card or computer.
#Why to flash a VBIOS?
Simple said, to gain more mining power! Your graphics card comes with stock settings provided by the manufacturer which include clock speeds, fan speeds, memory timings and power usage. Those settings are usually within the specs to insure that your card will work properly. Some manufactuers tune those settings to offer graphic cards with more power, for higher prices of course. There are tools available to tune and overclock your own card, to gain maximum performance or best electricity usage. Those settings are altered live within Windows/Linux and have to be reset after each reboot. By changing those values right inside the firmware (VBIOS) you can avoid resetting the values over and over again with a 3rd party tool.
#How to flash a new BIOS
https://anorak.tech/t/how-to-flash-amd-vbios/15
#Altered values and impact
The roms which I provide here, come in different versions. Beside the original rom, there are usually 3 different custom types. Memshift, Overclock and Powersave.
Memshift
The memory shift modification is the most basic one to gain more performance/mining speed with most miners. The memshift versions do have modified memory timings to increase memory transferrates at lower latencies.
What are memory timings and what do they do?
The memory modules on a graphic card work at a given clock speed measured in MegaHerz (MHz). Where each Herz is a cycle in which the memory has time to do calculations and work. The timing measures the chips delay doing calculations and work internally before passing the data forward. So eventhough a memory chip is working at high clock speeds, the work it does internally is limited due to the delays that are given by the memory timings. A chip working at 2000MHz with slow timings (large delays) can perform worse that a chip with 1500MHz and fast timings (short delays).
When the timing does not match a cirtain range for a given clock speed, the memory can run into trouble and generate memory errors and miscalculations. While memory errors do not harm the hardware, it can lead to faulty calculations of your mining software, thus in rejected shares.
The memshift roms are pretty straight forward as they use the tighter and faster timings of the lower clockspeeds. For example the timing from the 1500MHz clock speed is used at 1625, 1750 and 2000MHz. That results in higher transferspeeds of data from and to the GPU. And therefore to higher hashspeeds of the mining software.
Different miners for different coins do get different effects by this, as they utilize the memory for calculation solutions more or less. Ethereum for example gets the most profit out of changing the memory timings, compared to ZCash.
Overclock
The overclock versions are pretty much the same as you can do with overclocking tools like Afterburner or Sapphire TRIXX. Those versions come with higher clock speeds for the GPU as well as memory and include the memshift. The graphic card gets higher power limits to ensure stable operation at higher clock speeds. To avoid high temperatures, the original fan settings are tweaked to perform better at higher temps. Keep in mind that those settings result in louder noise due to the higher fan sppeds.
Due to higher clock speeds, and higher power limits, you have to concider higher power draw from the wall as well as higher temperatures.
The roms provided here are overclocked slightly, you could get better results by determining the maximum clocks your card can get. But as all cards perform different according to the quality of the chips themselves, I can only provide roms that work within a more or less save range of clock speeds.
Keep in mind that higher clock speeds will wear your graphic cards more and can result in damages!
Powersave
The powersave versions are quite the opposite of the overclocked versions. In some cases, you do not want to get the best performance, but the best electricity usage and lowest temperatures.
The roms provided here come with lowered clock speeds on the GPU and lowered power draw, but still have the memoryshift modification.