[Request] Modding the bios of an old P4 mobo (845G chipset) to enable hyperthreading

[Adrian_]

After digging trough Intel's website it appears that Albatron didn't issued a HT bios update on this particular Mb for a good reason https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/...ivers.html

1 The B-1 Stepping of the Intel 845G chipset is required to support Hyper-Threading Technology.

Unless cpu-z misidentified the chipset on this board as being A1 OR Intel lied in it's spec sheet (not that it would be the first time) looks like there's pretty much no solution to this problem.

[DeathBringer]

no solution to this problem.

I think you're right.

[Adrian_]

It appears that the 845G A1 chipsets shipped well before the release of the fist HT processors (3.06 FSB 533 512k s478) . After Intel announced the launch of these processors they shipped the B1 rev of the 845G.

Probably back in the day some clever fellow may have figured out some workaround but 15 years later I don't think it's worth digging for the info. I already put much more time into reading all this stuff then I did in recapping the board. I'm kinda sad as this was a nice board (RAID, dual bios with hardware switch, voice POST error codes and so on) but for a project like this a single core single thread P4 system would be a waste of other hardware resources (RAM, HDD, video, PSU). Guess it goes on the wall of my hobby workspace

[Adrian_]

And then...

http://www.x86-secret.com/articles/cm/p4...33vt-4.htm

It appears that Asus enabled HT support on it's P4B533-V Mb's equipped with the A1 revision of the 845G chipset while the A0 chipset was hopeless.

I'll figure out later if the 845G on this board is indeed A1 as cpu-z said, as some fellow in the Netherlands apparently figured out the codes for the chipset back then https://translate.google.ro/translate?hl=en&sl=nl&u=https://gathering.tweakers.net/forum/list_messages/637759&prev=search

Anyway, it appears it's quite possible to mod the bios to enable HT and the board may or may not run correctly with it enabled. If you can be bothered to fiddle with it anymore it would be for a good cause.

[Adrian_]

I ran into EXACTLY the same issue today with another mobo (Gigabyte GA-8IGX). This one had only one busted capacitor so I figured what the [censored] (already saw it was the dreaded 845G chipset) - replaced it, booted it just fine, only to discover it has no HT option in BIOS.

HOWEVER, in the meantime I messed up with 3 even older mainboards ( Intel 850 Chipset, RAMBUS) and now I'm fairly sure that enabling HT on pretty much any P4 mobo is just a matter of editing the bios. Two of these were Intel made D850MV (first revision of the 850 chipset, only FSB 400 support) , none of them would even POST if I put the 3.06HT FSB 533 cpu in them. Intel's last released BIOS for these boards is P15. They can be flashed with the Intel BIOS for the D850EMV2 boards (second revision of the 850 chipset, that supports FSB 533 and HT) but even with Intel's last BIOS for these boards (P25) they wouldn't boot correctly with HT enabled)

Third board was a visually almost identical D850MV made for IBM and behold, IBM released a P27 bios for both it's D850MV and D850EMV2 boards. With this P27 bios the board recognised the HT CPU and offered the possibility to enable HT. It only ran it at FSB 400 (only 850E is capable of FSB 533) but it ran it without a glitch. I loaded WIn 7, checked HT was enabled, all good.
The field where you can select between FSB 400 and 533 was greyed out but I suspect that could be edited too. Obviously IBM didn't wanted to run the Intel boards out of spec...

So if anyone cares to bother with such old stuff, please step forward