AMD AIB’s issue new VBIOS update for older HD7990 bridge chip

We received some queries from Kitguru readers after our initial Radeon Quad HD7990 testing back in January this year. We had a crash happy disaster of monumental proportions and based on emails, we weren't the only users experiencing problems. We had assumed at the time that AMD had not focused on Quad Crossfire profiles for these cards.  Considering they weren't official AMD designs, it seemed the most logical conclusion.

Fast forward to last week and we tested the official AMD HD7990 Malta card in QuadFire … the result? Extremely positive. All of the synthetic benchmarks scaled well and we noticed some commendable frame rate improvements with many of the leading Direct X 11 titles.

We had a chat with AMD today and they told us that the issues back in January were not caused by the driver. There was apparently a VBIOS issue that incorrectly set several settings for the bridge chip. This triggered the system hangs and PCI-e lockups.

The AIB has since released new BIOS/firmware revisions which avoids these issues with the bridge chip. These same new settings are included by default with AMD's new reference HD7990 ‘Malta board', which explains why it worked well for us recently.

The AIB is distributing the VBIOS update via their tech support, and pre-flashed on new boards.

Kitguru says: Some good news if you happen to have bought two of the earlier HD7990's and can't get them to play ball together.

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