Phenom II support on EVGA 590 SLI

[dynacomp2002]

OK, I am now running the Phenom II X4 940 on my EVGA nForce 590 motherboard. There is an EVGA "Beta" P36 BIOS - "612W2P36". This should not be confused with the FOXCONN P36 BIOS, which is what I had been using for a long time.
If you go to the EVGA forums, and look at the thread talking about "590 End of Life" here: http://www.evga.com/forumsarchive/tm.asp?m=276917&mpage=7&key= you will see that some people successfully flashed their board with the Beta BIOS, and now run the Phenoms. I am uploading a zip file with this BIOS. I flashed my board using the Award Flash program, "Awdflash.exe", and this string in DOS: awdflash 612W2P36.BIN /CC /CD /CP /F /R /PY /SN
When I first installed the Phenom II, I received CMOS errors on the mother board LED display, C1 & C3. To fix this, I disconnected all peripheral hardware, USB devices, etc., except the boot hard disk and my keyboard. I also put in only one stick of RAM - in the slot furthest away from the CPU. This fixed the problem, and the PC posted right away. After the first successful boot into Windows 7, I shut down the PC, and reattached all my extra stuff, and it booted again just fine.

[TheWiz]

Great Work, we will add this post to our confirmed section if everything continues to look well. Sorry I was unable to be of more assistance but I just got back from my travels.

Good Find!
TheWiz

[jasoninaz]

I'm the guy that started all the screaming over at evga when they said, fu we are not going to support this motherboard at all. I can't game anymore due to tracking problems. (I get motion sickness) so I turned it into a high-end media center. I have had a 5000 black edition since they came out and I've been interested in updating to a Phenom because there are skipping problems with the hi-def movies.



Yeah baby it worked. WOOT!

I've included a the bootable file for floppy with the switches in the bat file to make it easy.

Great Work, we will add this post to our confirmed section if everything continues to look well. Sorry I was unable to be of more assistance but I just got back from my travels.

Good Find!
TheWiz

[TheWiz]

Nice work, is this ready for confirmed section?

TheWiz

[jasoninaz]

Its been running 24 hours with no issues. I have to pony up the money for a new cpu and I guess it would be.

Nice work, is this ready for confirmed section?

TheWiz

[lillejord]

Nice work, is this ready for confirmed section?

TheWiz

I flashed the beta BIOS I got from someone over at EVGA's forums. I can POST and enter Windows no problem but its defaulting to a multiplier of 4 instead of 15(?). There is no way to change the multiplier in the BIOS. Not sure if there are other settings I'm missing.

------
[edit]
There is a setting to enable AM2+. The BIOS still reads improperly but CPUz correctly identifies the speed of the processor and the multiplier. I can post screen shots if you'd like? Still need to put the rest of the comp back together and run some bench marks, but even with just one stick of ram in, if seems much faster than my old Athlon 64 X2 4000+.

[edit 2]
Beware of AMD Cool & Quite! CPUz will show 800Mhz if you're idle. Run a program and it jumps up to 3000Mhz.

[kev711]

im using the bios on a foxconn with a athlon ii 245 works and overclocks to 3.9Ghz way faster than the 3600+ brisbane that was in there. only problem in the bios is cpu feature setting are in the bios twice can this be fixed?

[jasoninaz]

I don't even care about being about to overclock just to upgrade. My gaming days are over as I get motion sickness now I just love having a media center that does everything.

1. Does the systemboard see and use all cores?
2. Does windows (or your choice of os) see all cores.

Thank you again.

Jason

---

I would love to see screen shots and a cpuid too.

Nice work, is this ready for confirmed section?

TheWiz

I flashed the beta BIOS I got from someone over at EVGA's forums. I can POST and enter Windows no problem but its defaulting to a multiplier of 4 instead of 15(?). There is no way to change the multiplier in the BIOS. Not sure if there are other settings I'm missing.

------
[edit]
There is a setting to enable AM2+. The BIOS still reads improperly but CPUz correctly identifies the speed of the processor and the multiplier. I can post screen shots if you'd like? Still need to put the rest of the comp back together and run some bench marks, but even with just one stick of ram in, if seems much faster than my old Athlon 64 X2 4000+.

[edit 2]
Beware of AMD Cool & Quite! CPUz will show 800Mhz if you're idle. Run a program and it jumps up to 3000Mhz.

[kev711]

I don't even care about being about to overclock just to upgrade. My gaming days are over as I get motion sickness now I just love having a media center that does everything.

1. Does the systemboard see and use all cores?
2. Does windows (or your choice of os) see all cores.

Thank you again.

Jason

---

I would love to see screen shots and a cpuid too.

Nice work, is this ready for confirmed section?

TheWiz

I flashed the beta BIOS I got from someone over at EVGA's forums. I can POST and enter Windows no problem but its defaulting to a multiplier of 4 instead of 15(?). There is no way to change the multiplier in the BIOS. Not sure if there are other settings I'm missing.

------
[edit]
There is a setting to enable AM2+. The BIOS still reads improperly but CPUz correctly identifies the speed of the processor and the multiplier. I can post screen shots if you'd like? Still need to put the rest of the comp back together and run some bench marks, but even with just one stick of ram in, if seems much faster than my old Athlon 64 X2 4000+.

[edit 2]
Beware of AMD Cool & Quite! CPUz will show 800Mhz if you're idle. Run a program and it jumps up to 3000Mhz.

it works perfect it sees all the cores win 7

---

I don't even care about being about to overclock just to upgrade. My gaming days are over as I get motion sickness now I just love having a media center that does everything.

1. Does the systemboard see and use all cores?
2. Does windows (or your choice of os) see all cores.

Thank you again.

Jason

---

I would love to see screen shots and a cpuid too.

Nice work, is this ready for confirmed section?

TheWiz

I flashed the beta BIOS I got from someone over at EVGA's forums. I can POST and enter Windows no problem but its defaulting to a multiplier of 4 instead of 15(?). There is no way to change the multiplier in the BIOS. Not sure if there are other settings I'm missing.

------
[edit]
There is a setting to enable AM2+. The BIOS still reads improperly but CPUz correctly identifies the speed of the processor and the multiplier. I can post screen shots if you'd like? Still need to put the rest of the comp back together and run some bench marks, but even with just one stick of ram in, if seems much faster than my old Athlon 64 X2 4000+.

[edit 2]
Beware of AMD Cool & Quite! CPUz will show 800Mhz if you're idle. Run a program and it jumps up to 3000Mhz.

it works perfect it sees all the cores win 7

[lillejord]

I don't even care about being about to overclock just to upgrade. My gaming days are over as I get motion sickness now I just love having a media center that does everything.

1. Does the systemboard see and use all cores?
2. Does windows (or your choice of os) see all cores.

Thank you again.

Jason

---

I would love to see screen shots and a cpuid too.

Nice work, is this ready for confirmed section?

TheWiz

I flashed the beta BIOS I got from someone over at EVGA's forums. I can POST and enter Windows no problem but its defaulting to a multiplier of 4 instead of 15(?). There is no way to change the multiplier in the BIOS. Not sure if there are other settings I'm missing.

------
[edit]
There is a setting to enable AM2+. The BIOS still reads improperly but CPUz correctly identifies the speed of the processor and the multiplier. I can post screen shots if you'd like? Still need to put the rest of the comp back together and run some bench marks, but even with just one stick of ram in, if seems much faster than my old Athlon 64 X2 4000+.

[edit 2]
Beware of AMD Cool & Quite! CPUz will show 800Mhz if you're idle. Run a program and it jumps up to 3000Mhz.

CPUs: new vs old


POST: as you can see the memory speed isn't reported correctly on POST (640Mhz should read 800Mhz there) and the Processor is "unknown".

Sometimes the processor doesn't show up at all: http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y230/ja...e/POST.jpg

BIOS: reads 1607.2Mhz instead of 3000Mhz


Memtest86+: In DOS. Here the CPU and Memory are correct (400x2=800Mhz). also no errors after 57min and one full pass!


CPUz and Core Temp: In Windows 7. You can see that the CPU is correctly identified and all 4 cores are recognized by Core Temp. Windows Task Manager also recognizes all cores.