Gigabyte GA-M59SLI-S5 CPU Support Upgrade

[2LTime]

Hi there,
I just found this forum while searching the web for topics discussed here.
I just wanted to asked if it is possible to upgrade the CPU support of the M59SLI-S5 board to something faster than the Athlon 64X2 6400+.
It seems that Gigabyte abandoned this board a while ago, so it only supports AM2 processors. No AM2+ and no AM3 CPUs possible. This is very odd because it was the top of the line product when I bought it and the smaller M57SLI-S4 supports anything up to the newest PhenomII CPUs and still gets a new BIOS from time to time.
So what I am asking is if it is possible to take the refering part of the M57SLI-S4 BIOS and use it to update the M59SLI-S5 BIOS?

The link to the M59SLI-S5 BIOS (ver. F9c):
http://www.gigabyte.de/Support/Motherboa...uctID=3629

The link to the M57SLI-S4 BIOS (possibly ver. F15d):
http://www.gigabyte.de/Support/Motherboa...uctID=2264

Please help me guys. I tried to do it myself but the tools I tried are not working, or I don't understand how to use them properly (especially cbrom). I am willing to play around with the BIOS, because the M59 board has a DUAL-BIOS which kicks in and restores the main rom if sth. does not work properly.
Cheers.

[1234s282]

Wait for TheWiz , he is our in house cpu upgrade specialist

Admin

[2LTime]

Sure.
Maybe I add some information concerning the boards.
The M59SLI-S5 is based on the nForce 590 SLI chipset.
The M57SLI-S4 is based on the nForce 570 SLI chipset.
The only difference seems to be the number of PCIe Links and therefore lanes.
The 570 chipset offers 6 PCIe links and 28 lanes, the 590 chipset offers 9 PCIe links and 46 lanes. The southbridge chip is identical.
Appart from this the M59 board only seems to have an additional SATA controller onboard as well as a second Gigabit lan controller and the cooling system looks cooler.

[TheWiz]

Normally, having the same chipset really makes it or breaks it. I have a lot going for me this week, but I'm definitely on it.

TheWiz

[2LTime]

So far, I found only one board which uses nForce 590SLI chipset and supports newer CPUs. This would be the Asus M2N32-SLI Deluxe.
But in the CPU support list they only go up to the Phenom X4 CPUs with B3 stepping.
I would like to use a Phenom II X4 in C2 or C3 stepping.
However, they offer beta versions of the BIOS which seem to support Phenom II processors (at the moment Bios ver. is 2209).
But since I heard that Asus implements the Award Bios in a different way than other manufacturers thus making it almost impossible to modify it, I am not sure if it would be of any use.

[haarp]

The m59sli is the bigger sister board of my m57sli. I can also tell you why the m57sli still gets upgrades and yours does not: The m59sli implements DualBIOS in a single chip (or something like that, not 100% sure). As a result, you only have half the space to work with, which doesn't allow for much CPU support. One could possibly add P2 support by ripping out support for the older CPUs though. I say possibly, because I doubt that this would be easy.

[2LTime]

Sorry, but your information doesn't apply. The M59 has two physically existing BIOS-ROM chips. Each chip has a capacity of 4 MBit (equals 512 Kilobyte).
If you take a look at the bios components (e.g. with cbrom), you can see that there are still a few kilobytes space left.
Anyway, I also don't care to loose support for all CPUs below the Athlon 64 X2 6400+ in order free some space within the bios.

[haarp]

You are correct, it does use 2 chips with 4Mbit each. However, the DualBIOS feature itself takes up a lot, thus reducing the available space.
At least, that's the half-official response on the Gigabyte forums.

[TheWiz]

You can always release the boot splash screens and onboard VGA stuff to free things up.

TheWiz

[2LTime]

I made a screenshoot of the DOS-prompt, showing the contents and size of the BIOS. In my understanding there seem to be ~92 Kilobytes of free space in the compressed ROM image. Please correct me if it doesn't work this way.
Do components Nr.2, Nr.15 and (SP) need to be changed to add support for other CPUs or is it more complicated?