Just a warning. (K8WE 1.03l BIOS)

D

Dan_D

Extremely [H]
Joined
Feb 9, 2002
Messages
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You might want to think twice before using this BIOS. I recently added an SATA controller card to my box because I ran out of SATA ports. It is a PCI-X 133 card so I put it in the bottom slot, and moved my sound card up one slot so that I could use my controller at full speed.

Anyway, with the 1.03l BIOS the system would spontaneously crash and reboot for just about anything you could do with the system. I pulled the sound card out and the problem stopped, I flashed back to 1.03 and I had no more problems after installing the sound card.

Originally I had gone to 1.03I because I wanted to get the thermal readings on my second CPU straightened out. So I am living with my secondary CPU settings reading 68C which I know of course to be false.
 
Unless there's something very compelling about a beta bios, I never use em. As far as the cpu temps on these boards go, make sure the hsf's are working properly, record baseline temps, then just watch for drastic upward temp changes.
 
Well I only tried it to solve some issues I was having. Since it didn't work, and I got additional problems I backtracked again.

Plus one of the best BIOS's this board ever had was a beta BIOS. That was version 1.01T.
 
yeah i've read about some good results with 1.01t. 1.02 was just out when i started using s2895's, so i flashed em all with that, then went to 1.03 when it came out. haven't had any problems with either, except for the weird cpu temp reporting.
 
ClintE said:
yeah i've read about some good results with 1.01t. 1.02 was just out when i started using s2895's, so i flashed em all with that, then went to 1.03 when it came out. haven't had any problems with either, except for the weird cpu temp reporting.
Click to expand...

1.03 is working really well for me right now. There is the who CPU temp reporting being screwed up, but otherwise everything is great. Amazingly enough I am not currently experiencing an option ROM error anymore either.
 
Glad to see your 1.03 is working properly now.

Just noticed on your sig that your system is similar to mine. I don't see many users with 254's, not sure why. Read quite a few places that they are very good performers.

Do you have all 4 drives on the pci-x card? I was wondering if I'd get better performance from my striped raptor 150's if I used them on my Promise SX4300 vs. the nv mb controller.

Recently was running a bunch of drive / controller combination tests and noticed that the raptors (not current production ones, but others; same model though) won't work correctly on the 4300. All drives come up fine on system power up, but after reboot random drives drop out. Changed out power and data cables 2 or 3 times, tried card in completely different system with same results. Reconnected current system drives (4x hitachi 80g sata300) to the card and everything is fine.

Glad I didn't attempt the switch from mb to 4300 before doing this testing, would have been quite disappointed.

Plan to contact Promise and WD to see if a firmware update either way will make this combo work.
 
I'm guessing that the reason why most people don't have 254s is the fact that while great performers, they can spend the same amount of money on dual dual cores and get more performance out of their system.


As I originally bought it for gaming, I grabbed a pair of 254s, but I don't even want this machine any more. Stupid Core Duo laptops are almost as powerful for what I'm doing...if it weren't for the RAM and hdd capacity this tower offers...I'd be rid of it right now...
 
2.8 dual core chips weren't on the market when I put these systems together.

doubt I'd see much difference. I don't run these boxes at their limits all that much. once in a while I could probably use the extra cores, but I doubt it would be worth replacing 6 or 8 perfectly good cpu's any time soon.
 
ClintE said:
Glad to see your 1.03 is working properly now.

Just noticed on your sig that your system is similar to mine. I don't see many users with 254's, not sure why. Read quite a few places that they are very good performers.

Do you have all 4 drives on the pci-x card? I was wondering if I'd get better performance from my striped raptor 150's if I used them on my Promise SX4300 vs. the nv mb controller.

Recently was running a bunch of drive / controller combination tests and noticed that the raptors (not current production ones, but others; same model though) won't work correctly on the 4300. All drives come up fine on system power up, but after reboot random drives drop out. Changed out power and data cables 2 or 3 times, tried card in completely different system with same results. Reconnected current system drives (4x hitachi 80g sata300) to the card and everything is fine.

Glad I didn't attempt the switch from mb to 4300 before doing this testing, would have been quite disappointed.

Plan to contact Promise and WD to see if a firmware update either way will make this combo work.
Click to expand...

I have the Raptors on the NVRAID controller built into the motherboard. The Maxtor Diamond Max 10's are attached to the PCI-X 133 controller. Though I haven't benched it at this point. The reason I installed it is because my old ass SCSI drives started dropping in and out all the time and only one of the drives is worth a crap now. So I pulled the good 74GB and all the bad ones and repalced them with my SATA 300GB drives from my old server I sold off. Set them up in RAID-1 for redundancy and thats that. I only had 4 SATA ports and my DVD Burner is SATA so I needed at least one more port.

This controller I got is about $80.00 at Fry's and my research showed this to be the best PCI/PCI-X controller for the money. Four ports (Listed as two on Fry's website but really has four) and it claims to have hardware RAID implementation, but no XOR processor. In any case the performance is pretty good near as I can tell. It installed with no issues and it came with both the low profile bracket and the standard bracket, F6 drivers disk and a CD with a monitoring utility and it also came with a pretty good manual and some SATA cables.

I was really impressed with it.

When I bought my 254's the fastest dual core CPU's were the 275 or 280's. Plus I am mainly a gamer and dual 2.8GHz CPU's which were as fast as the FX-57's were the fastest combination I could get. Plus I got a great deal on them.

Even now the fastest AMD dual core is still what 2.8? 3.0GHz? No socket 939 CPU really matches what I have and the AM2 CPU's don't offer that much more besides some overclockability. It is true though that you can get this kind of performance now in a dual core CPU like a Core 2 Duo.

I want to get back into overclocking again so my next system will be a Core 2 Duo E6300 or possibly an E6600.
 
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