Currently my 7970 is on its way back for RMA , so i have had to buy a 2nd user card to keep me going , i happened to pick up a 4890 for £22.50 delivered on ebay via a auction this morning..... But i have read there is updated bios's around , so in the hopes of getting the most out of the 4890 xfa radeon while i wait ,i imagine around 3 weeks for my 7970 to be returned. Can anyone offer me a link to the best bios to update the card with. And can i still use the latest beta AMD drivers for the 4890 , or is there a custom set of drivers best used with the 4890.... Also , what is the advantages of a pencil mod !!! Great forums
I'm not too sure on the VBIOS, but I don't think they can really boost performance much unless there was a serious bug or you get one that modifies the clock and/or unlocks something that was soft-locked. Sorry can't help there. However, on the driver issue, the latest drivers for you are 13.1 or 13.4 beta officially. After that, you'll need to use modded drivers which there are a few in the AMD driver section forum. Mainstream support has ended for those cards so you have to do a little trial and error to maximize performance. However, there shouldn't be too much difference other than some newer profiles or bug fixes for select games.
The 4K series never needed or warranted ever requiring to update the bios ever for any reason, except to fix an obscure fan spin up bug which affected 4850/4870 only. You risk trashing the card if the VRAM isn't the same brand, or same selection of timings from different brands of Hynix, Qimonda, Samsung etc which were doing the rounds on that series depending on early prices of GDDR5, and booting with a red or garbled screen, or one of the DVI ports will stop working etc. If you don't have this particular fan spin up bug, you likely don't need any BIOS update at all and certainly not for a 4890. There is nothing to be gained at all other than a screwed up card. The 4890 clocks much better on the core than 4870 ever did due to a circuit redesign, apart from that, it's practically the same chip. So any drivers that people favour for the 4870 should work practically the same, and I do believe that the first driver AMD released that supported the 4890 was Catalyst 9.5, so start from there and work your way up till you find something that works acceptable for your taste... Have fun...
