Hi guys! I made something pretty unusual, and I wanted to share the story with you!

Last week, something terrible happened to my PC. A 12V wire touched a 5V wire, and unfortunately, my PSUs didn't have the protection needed to prevent a disaster. I lost my Gigabyte X99P-SLI motherboard, a 500GB SSD, and two of my XFX RX 580s...

I was devastated. I'd bought these components just a week or two earlier, and electronics prices in my country had gone through the roof. Building a local AI machine with four used XFX RX 580s and that motherboard was pretty much my only affordable option.

But honestly, it was an amazing machine for the price! I was getting around 30–35 tokens/s during generation and 250–350 tokens/s during prompt processing, even with at least 160K context, running Ornith 1.5 35B, a Qwen3.6-35B-A3B variant.

Everything was going perfectly until those two wires fell in love... and their love was so hot that they blew up half my PC. 💀

During my desperate attempts to recover the hardware, I discovered that both GPUs were actually healthy, except for one thing: the BIOS chips on both cards were dead! (Error 43 in device manager, no flash utility can flash bios to GPU! even ch341a USB spi programmer cant read / write from / to chip!)

I tried replacing the chips, but I made a mistake during the process and damaged some PCB traces. So, fixing them the traditional way wasn't going to be easy.

Then, after countless attempts and a lot of frustration, something unexpected happened.

Somehow, Claude, ChatGPT, and I (although I actually wrote zero lines of code myself!) managed to build something that I think is genuinely useful.

It's a UEFI application that essentially emulates the SPI flash chip, initializes the GPU's memory controller, and loads the VBIOS into the card.

And the crazy part?

My RX 580s now work even with their physical BIOS chips completely removed from the boards! I actually desoldered them!

How does it work?

You only need the VBIOS files for your graphics cards. That's it!

• Know which VBIOS belongs to your card? Just provide that one BIOS file for each card.
• Not sure which VBIOS is the correct one? You can provide multiple BIOS files, and the loader can try to find the appropriate one.

No physical BIOS chip is required on the GPU. The application loads the BIOS directly into the card during startup.

I've also made a GUI version to make things easier:

GitHub repository: https://github.com/aryan-nikzad/rx580_vbios_loader_GUI

I never expected to turn a hardware disaster into a software project, but here we are!

Maybe this project will help someone else recover a GPU with a dead BIOS chip instead of throwing it away.

What do you guys think? Has anyone tried anything similar with Polaris GPUs?

(I’ve used “VBIOS” and “chip dump” interchangeably here, even though they aren’t necessarily the same thing. Also, ChatGPT helped rewrite this post because English isn’t my native language. Anyway, thank you for taking the time to read it!)