Turn your 480's into 580's?

So some guy learned that you can flash your 480’s using 580 bios and get better performance. Enjoy:

Just thought that i would post my results. I have successfully flashed my xfx rx480 8gb with saphire rx580 bios. This one to be exact.

Update: check 7 under “updates, fixes and progress” below for more info on other bios files that i have flashed. also check under “list of what has been tested” for a list of tested cards using the above bios.

here is a gpuz screenshot after the flash:

just switched the bios switch and took a screenshot of gpuz showing the oem rx480 bios that the card came with.

seems legit.

At the time of writing this i could not find windows 8.1 drivers from amds website so i had to manually install them from device manager. will update later and report back.

Update: Please check 6 under “update fixes and progress”

it seems stable at stock clocks in the witcher 3 wild hunt and running UserBenchmark. if i touch the core clock at all in MSI Afterburner and try to run any kind of test it will immediately crash the driver.
(UPDATE) i am now using stock rx580 clocks of core@1411 and mem@2000 with a +24mv to the core. card has been completely stable since. no crashes in benchmarks or artifact. event viewer is clean also. all benchmarks are using the stock clocks of each bios with new settings.

Here are some benchmarks:

More Benchmarks by biffzinker here:

========================POWER AND THERMAL NOTICE========================

Many of the rx500 series cards have an 8pin+6pin or just 8pin configuration. most rx400 series cards just have an 8pin or 6pin design. this could cause power issues. i have not heard of any yet but just be aware that anything could go wrong. you are modding your card so be prepared for the worst. you will lose your warranty. please watch your temperatures. if your card runs hot now and you already have a custom fan profile this bios will only make it run hotter because of the higher voltage values permitted by the rx580 bios. you may be flashing for various reasons, that’s your business. i flashed my card to see what would happen. I now have an rx580 thats stable. before i could not get my core clock over 1350. now im at 1411.

Another issue that needs to be addressed is the fact that the rx500 series of cards has been updated to address many of the heat and or power issues of the rx400 series. this is why the new cards can run with higher voltage values and stay within temp. i try to address temperature issues with fan profile settings i listed under the “stability” section of this post. PLEASE WATCH YOUR TEMPS. i feel that anything under 85 under Extreme loads is ok. keep an eye on vram temps as well.

==============================Bios Flashing===============================

Now for those who are going to try and flash their cards. PLEASE READ!

It is recommended that if you are going to flash to the rx500 series that you find a bios from a card that is similar to yours. such as who made the card ex. gigabyte, asus, msi. simply download the bios from the Techpowerup VGA database and rename it to rx580.rom and replace the one inside the rx580 flash files folder.

I need to include this WARNING that i am not responsible for any damage that may occur to your card as a result of trying to flash your cards bios! MAKE A BACKUP OF YOUR OLD BIOS. PLEASE READ UP ON HOW TO BIOS FLASH THESE CARDS AND GET AS MUCH KNOWLEDGE BEFORE HAND AS POSSIBLE. I have provided the files i used to simply make it as easy as possible. My card has a dual bios switch so if something went wrong i could easily recover. Also I DO NOT TAKE CREDIT FOR THE CREATION OF ATIFLASH. i only edited a small potion of the file so that i could flash my card.

Now for flashing the card i attached the version of atiflash that i used and included it as a rar. you will need to extract the folder. afterwards all you need to do is right click “BIOS FLASH” and run it as administrator. if this does not work than run it by just double clicking. it should update your card with the new bios. if this still does not work, open “ATIFLASH” as admin and leav it open, dont press anything! Now open “Bios Flash” regularly by double clicking or enter. this should do it.

================================Recovery================================

if you need to recover your bios just find it on the TPU vga database and download it. rename it to rx480 or whatever you want. then copy it to the rx580 flash files folder. after that right click on the “bios flash” file and click edit, you will see were it says rx580 inside the bios. rename it to whatever you called the backup bios and save then close. now you are ready to recover the bad bios. read on to learn how to recover the bios.

  1. is for duel bios

  2. is for no bios switch

  3. To recover for those of you who have a duel bios switch make sure that the switch is set on the bad bios before recovering. you can do this by shutting down the computer, switching the bios switch to the backup bios and booting back up. after you are in windows switch the bios switch to the one that needs to be recovered and run the Bios flash file that you just edited. run as admin and if that does not work just run it normal. now you can just leave the bios switch in this position.

  4. For those of you who have only one bios than you will need a secondary card or on board graphics. once you get your pc to boot into windows with the backup gpu installed open up a command prompt and navigate to were you put the rx580 flash files. for this i will assume its on the root of C: drive.

Type “cd/” Press enter. you are now at the root of c: drive. Type “cd rx580 flash files” Press enter. you are now in rx580 flash folder. Type “atiflash -i” Press enter. you will see a list pop up with a column on the far left called adapter. this part is important so pay attention, look on the list to see witch card you want to recover. than look at the adapter number given for that cad. got it? good. now navigate in windows to the rx580 flash file folder and once inside right click on “bios Flash” and click edit. You should see the number “0” change this to the adapter number that correlates to the card you want to recover. once you have done that save and close the file. you can now run the bios flash file assuming you FOLLOWED ALL STEPS AND READ THREW COMPLETELY. run as admin or normal.

This file will only work with the 8gb models ONLY! ALSO DO NOT TRY FLASHING YOUR CARD IF YOU DO NOT KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING. RESULTS WILL VARY FROM CARD TO CARD SO MINOR OR MAJOR TWEAKS MAY BE NEEDED TO GAIN STABILITY.

Update: this is a more in depth guide on how to flash and recover your cards if you need more help.

===============================STABILITY================================

Okay so their are users reporting stability issues, my suggestion is to download MSI Afterburner and try out these tweaks in this order.

  1. make a custom fan profile using these settings in msi afterburner. you can fine tune it later but for now use it

fan speed % 35% 50% 60% 75% 85% 100%
Temperature C. 30c, 50c, 60c, 70c, 75c, 80c

  1. take the core voltage and slowly increase it up to 50mv until its safe, like 8mv, 12mv, so on. just find what makes it stable. don’t go above 50mv. if you take it above that i don’t know what will happen because i have not tested it, it might fix your issue or not

  2. if number 2 fails try downclocking and overvolting. take the core down to 1390 with a 24mv core voltage increase.

  3. if number 2 and 3 fail than revert back to stock bios. OR go to step 5 at your own risk.

  4. so user biffzinker in his post on page six brought up an application called wattTool that can apparently give you more access to the voltage values set in the bios. i did not create wattTool and dont take credit for its creation. you can find it on overclock.net. please support development of this application when you get a chance. it can be found here.

not going to get much into this but found in interesting for those with stability issues. this is not for the faint of heart so please read up on it.

========================UPDATES, FIXES and PROGRESS:=======================

  1. GPUZ 1.20.0 Fixes the subvendor issue so please update gpuz if this is an issue.

  2. my new settings in msi afterburner are:
    Core@1411mhz, Mem@2000, Core Volatge +24mv, Power slider set to 50. was having minor hicups while stress testing. im going to mess around some more but i have not had a single issue after adjusting it.

  3. The Rx580 draws more power and thus generates more heat. i highly recommend a custom fan profile. i have noticed that my card will start to decrease clocks around 82-83c when stress testing. the profile i am using can be found in the “stability” section above.

  4. So after doing a little bit of reading i have come across people claiming that there are different voltage controllers for the different model of cards. apparently my card has the same controller as the rx580 nitro that i just flashed to and that might explain why i was able to flash to the new bios. if yours wont flash because of this please let me know. as i yet it has not been brought up.

  5. if the card will not post try switching to hdmi. this had come up and apparently switching to hdmi fixed the issue. i myself am using hdmi. (Thanks go to biffzinker for finding this)

if you have the XFX RS RX480. (UPDATED!! Please Read!)

Turns out one of the DisplayPort Connectors is nonfunctional on some cards, but if you move up to the second connector you should get a image on the monitor.


So: DVI - HDMI - DisplayPort - DisplayPort - Mini DisplayPort
Plug into this instead

Update: it seems that the best way to avoid having any issues upgrading to the rx580 bios is to find one from the same manufacturer as your current card that also has the same display port configuration.1

  1. for windows 8.1 i found that if you download the windows 7 drivers for the rx580 and install them from device manager on 8.1 it will install the drivers this way too. you have have to extract the package and then direct windows 8.1 to the driver location (its in Packages\Drivers\Display\WB6A_INF) in the extracted folder. you can also do this with win7 and 10. just download there respected drivers from the AMD website.

  2. so i have tried out some other bios files in the unofficial bios section on TPU.

MSI RX580: VGA Bios Collection: MSI RX 580 8 GB | TechPowerUp
Powercolor RX580: VGA Bios Collection: Powercolor RX 580 8 GB | TechPowerUp

Both worked fine at stock setting. Tho i should note that the Powercolor bios maintained full boost clock speeds threw furmark while the msi bios dropped down to 1308. the msi bios ran slightly cooler than the Powercolor bios which is to be expected but was only down 1fps in furmark.

===========================list of what has been tested=======================

Please reply back to my inbox with your cards info so that i can make this list. this list does not guarantee full functionality it just confirms that the bios will flash to the card. you may still need to tinker. this thread is still young and i am working on the stability section.

Please use this format

Model of card, ASIC Quality, works or deos not.

RX-480P836BM, 66.7%, works. -user manitox

RX-480P836BM, 72.4%, works now! -user biffzinker (flashing bios caused display port to stop working but switching to hdmi fixed.)

xfx GTR Black edition, 76.3%, Works -user irekski

RX-480M8BFA6 RX480, 81.7%, Works -user aGeoM

XFX RX480 GTR RX-480P8DFA6, 78.7%, Works. -user Gumby

XFX RX 480 Triple X Edition, not available at this time, Works. -user TheJedi

Power Color Red Devil, 77.1%, Works. -user Arys64

Gigabyte G1 Gaming Rx480 76.99 Works. -user ImRobi

RX-480P8DBA6, 68.0%, Works. -user s10hotrod

RX-480P8DBA6, 66.8%, Works. -user odombones94 (downclocked due to stability issues)

MSI RX 480 Gaming X 8GB, not available at this time, Works. -user glasforex

XFX GTR XXX RX480 8GB, 87.7%, Works. -user ptesmoke

Reference XFX RX 480 8GB, 80.6%, Works. -user Xcat2008

XFX RX 480 GTR Black Edition 8GB, 75%, Works. -user atahual

-------------------Works with OC----------------------

MSI Radeon RX 480 GAMING X 8gb @1450/2200mhz ASIC Quality 75.2% -User Snowman88

1 Like

Is the performance gain in terms of hash or power efficiency?

Great topic and info thanks @Digitmint

check out this video below… when he posted his 4xx to 5xx flash video I asked him to start doing Hex Editing Videos… AND HE DID!!! LOL he actually listened to my comment !!!

Great video some handy tips there