ECS GeForce 8800 GT Video Card Review – N8800GT-256MX

Bundle and BIOS Flashing

This is a value card after all so you get a pretty bare bundle. Adding games and adaptors only bumps up the overall price of the card. Included are a DVI to D-Sub adaptor and a HDTV RGB hookup.

Flashing the BIOS:

First off, flashing a video card BIOS is not for the faint of heart, you can easily kill your video card if you aren’t careful. What you do with your own hardware is your choice, if you break it, it’s not my fault!

In order to flash your 8800 GT you will need NVFLASH 5.57. You will also need to have either a floppy drive, or a USB flash drive and a computer capable of booting to the USB drive. You can also do it by using a CD but we are going to cover flashing by USB drive.

To make the USB drive bootable I used an HP format utility (don’t forget to take off any data that you want to keep). I then copied the new BIOS (88HY512.ROM) and NVFLASH to the USB drive and rebooted. Another note, your system should not be overclocked while flashing a BIOS as any instability could cause the system to crash at the wrong time, killing the card as I mentioned above.

After the system boots to the drive you’re greeted with the command prompt in DOS. Simply type “NVFLASH 88HY512.ROM -4 -5 -6” and it will perform the update. The flags at the end are necessary as the card will see that you’re trying to flash a BIOS with a different product ID. Once it is completed it will notify you that it has completed, and you will need to reboot.

Once back in Windows, we see that our BIOS flash worked!

One final and very important note, this BIOS is specific for this video card and the memory on it. Flashing to a BIOS other than what we are providing could have disasterous consequences! The original 256MB BIOS and the new 512MB BIOS file can be downloaded from Legit Reviews here.