MSI Master2 Far7 AGP card mod

[Devilman]

This are the specs of my motherboard MSI K8T Master2 FAR7:

CPU

• Supports dual AMD Opteron™ 200 and sinlge Opteron™ 100 family processors
• Supports dual AMD Opteron™ 200 Series processor with 1GHz FSB
• Supports Opteron EE/HE series CPU
• Supports Dual-Core Opteron™ CPU
• AMD x86-64 Technology
• Supports ECC/Registered memory


Core Chipset

• VIA® K8T800 Pro Northbridge
- HyperTransport link to the AMD Opteron™ CPU
- 800/600/400/200 MHz "Double Data Rate" operation both direction
- AGP v3.0 compliant with 8X transfer mode
• VIA® VT8237R Southbridge
- Integrated Hardware Sound Blaster/Direct Sound AC97 audio
- Ultra DMA 66/100/133 master mode PCI EIDE controller
- Supports Serial ATA RAID
- Supports eight high-speed USB 2.0 ports at up to 480Mb/s transfer
- Extensive ACPI-compliant power management
- Integrated Faster Ethernet LPC


Main Memory

• 144-bit DDR at 200/266/333/400 MHz
• Requires 184-pin Registered ECC DDR DIMMs (maximum 4)
• Supports interleaving memory within DIMMs
• ChipKill ECC allows continuous correction of 4-bit errors in a failed x 4 memory
device




Slots

• One AGP Pro 8x/4x slot.
• Four 32-bit/33 MHz PCI slots




HDD Interface

• An IDE controller on the VT8237R chipset
- Provides IDE HDD/CD-ROM with PIO, Bus Master and Ultra DMA 133/100/66
operation modes
- Can connect up to 4 IDE devices
• Serial ATA/150 controller integrated in VT8237R
- Up to 150MB/sec transfer rate
- Can connect up to two Serial ATA drives



Onboard Peripherals

• 2 x IDE ports
• 1 x PS/2 keyboard port and 1 x PS/2 mouse port
• 2 x serial ports
• 1 x parallel port supports SPP/EPP/ECP mode
• 1 x RJ-45 port (with LEDs)
• 8 x USB ports (front*4 and rear*4)
• 2 x SATA ports


Networking

• Broadcom BCM5705 Gigabit Ethernet controller


Audio

• AC'97 link controller integrated in VIA VT8237R
• 8-channel audio codec Realtek ALC850
- Compliance with AC97 v2.3 Spec
- Meets PC2001 audio performance requirement


Power Management Features

• Wake up on LAN (WOL), wake up on PCI
• RTC alarm and wake up
• Wake up on keyboard/mouse/USB from S1
• Supports ACPI S1, S4, S5 function


System Management

• SMBus (I2C)
• Temperature, voltage, and fan monitors
• Chassis intrusion


BIOS

• The mainboard BIOS provides "Plug & Play" BIOS which detects the peripheral
devices and expansion cards of the board automatically
• The mainboard provides a Desktop Management Interface (DMI) function which
records your mainboard specifications
• Supports boot from LAN, USB Device 1.1 & 2.0, and SATA HDD



Dimension
• ATX Form Factor: 12.0 x 10.0 inch (H x W)


Mounting
• 9 mounting holes (ATX Form standard)

and here are the specs of the MSI K8T Neo2-F

CPU

• Supports 64-bit AMD® Athlon™ 64 and Athlon™ 64 FX processor (Socket 939)
• Supports up to 3500+, 3800+ Athlon 64 FX 53, or higher CPU
Please refer to CPU Support for compatible CPU; the above description is for reference only.


Chipset

• VIA® K8T800 Pro Chipset
- HyperTransport™ connection to AMD® Athlon™ 64 processor
- 8 or 16 bit control/address/data transfer both directions
- 800/600/400/200MHz "Double Data Rate" operation both direction
- AGP v3.0 compliant with 8x transfer mode

• VIA® VT8237 Chipset
- Integrated Faster Ethernet LPC
- Integrated Hardware Sound Blaster/Direct Sound AC97 audio
- Ultra DMA 66/100/133 master mode PCI EIDE controller
- ACPI
- Supports 2 Serial ATA ports
- Supports 8 USB2.0 ports


Main Memory

• Supports four unbuffered DIMM of 2.5V DDR SDRAM.
• Supports up to 4GB memory size without ECC.
• Supports Dual channel DDR266/333/400MHz.

Slots

• One AGP 8x slot
- AGP 3.0 specification compliant
• Five 32-bit v2.3 Master PCI bus slots (support 3.3v/5v PCI bus interface).


On-Board IDE / SATA

• An IDE controller on the VIA® VT8237 chipset provides IDE HDD/CDROM with PIO, Bus
Master and Ultra DMA 66/100/133 operation modes
- Can connect up to 4 IDE devices

• Serial ATA/150 controller integrated by VT8237
- Up ot 150MB/s transfer rate
- Can connect up to 2 serial ATA devices
- Supports RAID 0 or RAID 1

Audio

• 8 channels software audio codec RealTek ALC850
- Compliance with AC97 v2.3 Spec.
- Meet PC2001 audio performance requirement.


LAN

• Realtek® 8110S Dual layout
- Integrated Fast Ethernet MAC and PHY in one chip.
- Supports 10, 100Mb/s and 1000Mb/s

On-Board Peripherals

On-Board Peripherals include:
- 1 floppy port supports 2 FDDs with 360K, 720K, 1.2M, 1.44M and 2.88Mbytes
- 1 serial port (COM1)
- 1 parallel port supports SPP/EPP/ECP mode
- 1 IrDA connector for SIR/ASKIR/HPSIR
- 1 audio port
- 8 USB 2.0 ports (Rear x 4 / Front x 4)
- 1 RJ45 LAN jack

BIOS

• The mainboard BIOS provides "Plug & Play" BIOS which detects the peripheral devices and
expansion cards of the board automatically.
• The mainboard provides a Desktop Management Interface(DMI) function which records your
mainboard specifications.

and here is the link to the BIOS:

http://download1.msi.com/files/downloads...702v94.zip

I hope it helps.

TIA

[Devilman]

I just noticed that also this board is very similar: K8T Neo2-F V2.0

here is the description link:
http://eu.msi.com/index.php?func=proddesc&prod_no=208&maincat_no=1

[TheWiz]

OK, I'll take to the disassembler and see what comes up.

TheWiz

[Devilman]

I was just wondering if the problem is instead a whitelist like for the wi-fi card in Phoenix bioses.

Bye

[Devilman]

I just notice that the difference between the orginal BIOS and the fisrt update was "Improve VGA card compatibility", maybe you can undestand what is the problem.

Here are the link:

Original: http://download1.msi.com/files/downloads...7MS100.zip
First update: http://download1.msi.com/files/downloads...7MS112.zip

Bye

[Devilman]

Using award bios editor I extract all the component from bios versione 1, 1.12 and 1.20 and compared them to see the difference, if this could help.

Comparing version 1 and 1.12 (the one with improved vga compatibility) I noticed that:

6420r210.ROM
ACPITBL.BIN
B57PXE.ROM
boot_blk.bin
CPUCODE.BIN

are the same and

awardext.rom
awardeyt.rom
decomp_blk.bin
_EN_CODE.BIN

are different and two file misses: 100.bin was only on version 1 and 9617.bin only on version 1.12

than i compared version 1.12 and 1.20:

6420r210.ROM
B57PXE.ROM
CPUCODE.BIN

are identical while

awardext.rom
awardeyt.rom
decomp_blk.bin
_EN_CODE.BIN
ACPITBL.BIN
boot_blk.bin

are different; even in this case there are some missing files: 9614.bin and 116.bin.

I hope this could help.

[Devilman]

Sorry to bother again, I read about hidden settings in BIOS what are those for my mainboard?

Thanks

[Devilman]

Hi using AMI-Mod Tool I extracted the DSDT.ASL from the SK8V Bios.

On this card the HD3850 works so I think should work also the HD4670.

I attache the file.

I hope it helps.

Bye

[Devilman]

Comparing the DSDT.dsl file from my BIOS and that posted here: Hacking the ACPI Table - An example I noticed that there are some part identical like LPT1 for example, but in my DSDT I didn't find a part about the AGP Device could it be the problem? If we insert this part could it solve?

Here is the link to the other DSDT table:

http://www.lejabeach.com/ABIT/AN7_DSDT_ASL.zip

Thanks

[Devilman]

Analyzing the BIOS of the two not working card with RBE from www.techpowerup.com I noticed that they have a boot mode, a powersaving mode and an UVD mode, could it be that the BIOS gave a wrong command and instead of booting up the card it put the card in a sort of sleep or suspend mode without the possibility to wake up?
Is always an ACPI information?

On the latest ACPI spec there is a part about video card.

Thanks