Dammit, fried my bios...

[agallag]

Floppy read error during flash. Damn, that sucks. Just a reminder to always scan your floppy for errors before flashing from it.

I've ordered a new chip from http://www.badflash.com for US$25. Hopefully it'll come in quickly.

Until then, I'm stuck using the P3-800 notebook. No gaming for me

[Jon P. Inghram]

Ouchie! I felt like tempting fate the other day and modified the BIOS on my TUSL2-C to put the nifty i815 tweak from here and a custom EPA logo into the latest BIOS available. Half expected it to just sit and do nothing when I rebooted, but it worked out properly.

[The PIT]

Too be honest I'm getting tempted.

[ayoub_ibrahim]

Originally posted by The PIT
Too be honest I'm getting tempted.

hmm, do you want to fry your bios as well TP?

[Technoid]

I have no interest in changing any epa logo or any other image that can be displayed by bios, it goes past all that to quick for it to be of any interest

[The PIT]

Originally posted by ayoub_ibrahim
hmm, do you want to fry your bios as well TP?

Or hit the motherboard with a hammer

[Admiral]

Got to love Gigabyte for the dual bios
(saved me twice)

[agallag]

All the new Asus boards have bios recovery features, but mine's about 6 months too old. You'd think it would at least load the image into memory and do a checksum before it actually starts to write, or something.

Oh well... still waiting for that chip to come in. I was impressed by the service from badflash.com so far. I emailed a question to them on sunday afternoon, and got a reply within about 3 hours. I got another email from them monday morning saying the chip had shipped. It's probably sitting in customs or something right now.

Whatever happened to that free trade thing? If trade is free, why do I always have to pay duty on stuff I get shipped from the US?

[Duty]

Originally posted by Jon P. Inghram
Ouchie! I felt like tempting fate the other day and modified the BIOS on my TUSL2-C to put the nifty i815 tweak from here and a custom EPA logo into the latest BIOS available. Half expected it to just sit and do nothing when I rebooted, but it worked out properly.

What does it do?

Jeff

[Jon P. Inghram]

The i815 chipset by default disables various performace features if you run the FSB even slightly over the default. On Win98 you can use a DOS program that runs before windows that'll set stuff back to the faster settings, but it won't work on NT OS's. They have an XP version that works, but something about ATI's latest Catalyst drivers interacts rather badly with the tweak causing the system to lock hard right after the desktop shows up. They had written a version of the program that replaces the (pretty much useless) antivirus code in the BIOS, but they hadn't updated into the newest BIOS for my board. Here's an exerpt from their page that describes the settings it changes:

AGP 4X : When the CPU is overclocked of more than 5 MHz (10 on some mobo), the BIOS will force the AGP in 2x mode. The tweaker reconfigure the AGP management to 4x, AGP 4x allows a bandwidth of about 1 GB/s

CPC Mask : The CPC ( Command Per Clock ) is an option which brings a speed increase in memory transfer, the BIOS activates sometimes the CPC Mask, which inhibits the CPC in case of overclocking.

DCT : : DRAM cycle time : the DCT enables to specify the minimum amound of time that a memory page must remain open before being closed and opened again. The shorter it is, quickly the data are written into the memory, So it is faster. The default setting is [5T,7T] but always in case of an OC it is set back to [7T,9T], the tweaker forces the DCT to [5T,7T].

DPCP : DRAM Page Closing policy : This item, which can be either "One Bank", or "All Bank" is automatically set to "All Bank" (about 5% slower in memory transfer) in case of overclocking, the tweaker force this item to "One Bank ".

SM Always Bypass : This item enables a gain of some precious NS in the DRAM Latency. Like the others, this setting is disabled in case of overclocking

[Technoid]

heh, so I815 is more cripled than we knew then

[Wombat]

What's crippled about that? It's not meant to be an overclocker's board. I got an i815-based system for my mom. Cheap, stable, and the intergration saved her $$$. It would be kinda nice to go over 512MB of RAM, but other than that, I think it's a great product for the market. It's not for me or you, but WE are a niche market.

[dZeus]

Originally posted by Jon P. Inghram
The i815 chipset by default disables various performace features if you run the FSB even slightly over the default. On Win98 you can use a DOS program that runs before windows that'll set stuff back to the faster settings, but it won't work on NT OS's. They have an XP version that works, but something about ATI's latest Catalyst drivers interacts rather badly with the tweak causing the system to lock hard right after the desktop shows up. They had written a version of the program that replaces the (pretty much useless) antivirus code in the BIOS, but they hadn't updated into the newest BIOS for my board. Here's an exerpt from their page that describes the settings it changes:

AGP 4X : When the CPU is overclocked of more than 5 MHz (10 on some mobo), the BIOS will force the AGP in 2x mode. The tweaker reconfigure the AGP management to 4x, AGP 4x allows a bandwidth of about 1 GB/s

CPC Mask : The CPC ( Command Per Clock ) is an option which brings a speed increase in memory transfer, the BIOS activates sometimes the CPC Mask, which inhibits the CPC in case of overclocking.

DCT : : DRAM cycle time : the DCT enables to specify the minimum amound of time that a memory page must remain open before being closed and opened again. The shorter it is, quickly the data are written into the memory, So it is faster. The default setting is [5T,7T] but always in case of an OC it is set back to [7T,9T], the tweaker forces the DCT to [5T,7T].

DPCP : DRAM Page Closing policy : This item, which can be either "One Bank", or "All Bank" is automatically set to "All Bank" (about 5% slower in memory transfer) in case of overclocking, the tweaker force this item to "One Bank ".

SM Always Bypass : This item enables a gain of some precious NS in the DRAM Latency. Like the others, this setting is disabled in case of overclocking

Shouldn't that read "Asus by default..." instead of "the i815 chipset..." ?

[Jon P. Inghram]

Was thinking it was an i815 thing, but if it's Asus doing it with their BIOS, sorry.

[agallag]

Ok, update time... my new bios chip came in the mail today. Plugged it in, and powered it up, and the bios setup screen came up right away. So far so good.

However, when I set all the settings to the appropriate values for an Athlon XP 1700+ and rebooted, I got the vocal message "System failed due to CPU overclocking". I rebooted again, and the setup screen came up again. I put it down to 1.1GHz, instead of the proper 1.466GHz, and it booted up just fine, but at the slower speed. I put it back to the 1.466GHz again, and got the failure message again. It seems it'll now only run at 1.1GHz.

When I ordered the bios from badflash.com, I had them flash it with the latest bios version (1017) from asus. I was using 1014 before. I'm sure you can understand that I'm a little afraid to flash it back to an older version to test if it's something wrong with the new bios. Any other suggestions on what to check on this before I resort to re-flashing? Thanks guys.