Bios Mods -The Best BIOS Update and Modification Source

Hi therem I only just found this forum.

I own an Abit KN9 Ulta board with nForce 570 Ulta chipset. Since Abit was nearing it's end when Phenom was released, few of their boards got phenom support, none of them being one of the first generation AM2 boards.

Early on, they said boards with a bios chip of only 512KB can't get phenom support but later they released an agena-supporting bios for one of those, the AN-M2 HD.

So I thought, maybe my board could have gotten it, too, if only Abit would'nt have died.

I have searched the net for help and openend the bios of my board and serveral similar boards with phenom support an compared them but I am to much a newbie to do anything.

Here I was told it'd never work. But now that I looked through this forum, this seems to be your daily work.

So is there a possibility to add AM3-support to a board now even having agena-support?

I have attached the latest BIOS for my board (m520a23.zip), the mentioned AN-M2HD (which is Nvidia MCP68, bios named m628a19.zip), the Gigabyte ga-m57sli-s4, which is the only award-BIOS nForce 570 board with AM3 support I know, and the Asus M2N-E (1701.zip), which is the only nForce 570 ULTRA board with at least Agena-support I know of.

Is there no hope for me?

Sorry for the delay , the person who does CPU Mods (TheWiz is currently really busy with school exams etc and I cannot do CPU Mods!

Sorry , Have to wait till he gets back

Regards
Admin

Oh, that's understandable, I wish him good luck. I'm busy with university atm, too, so it's not that urgent.

On a sidenote, I've seen in the CPU support-list of the Gigabyte board, that it doesn't support Phenoms with 125w TDP, although it supports K8 Athlons with the same TDP. Can I assume, that, even if my BIOs can successfully be modded, it'll be unwise to install a 125W Phenom?

Hey Tigerfox,

This looks like you have all the info I need, as long as the Gigabyte board has the support for the specific proccessor you need. (Yes, exams just ended, its great to be done, and ace em ) Do you have a method of recovery in case something goes bad, as sometimes the ACPI tables with the power states can be rather painful, and it sometimes can corrupt it.

Thanks,
TheWiz

What exactly do you mean with method of recovery? I have no rescue bios or something like that.

Well, Im saying that sometimes these mods fry boards, so you may want to plan on a new board or bios chip for 20 bucks to ensure you still have a system. (EX. Hotflashing)

TheWiz

Well, then it's not that urgent. I don't have a AM3-CPU to test and if the board is fried, I would hate it to be forced to buy one of the AM3-boards available at the moment, since there are much better ones knocking at the door.

But I hoped all damage done by a bad flahs or a wrong mod could be repaired by blindflashing the original bios. I could try to optain a spare bios, but that's not easy here in Germany.

Well, they sell bios chips at http://biosman.com for 20 bucks. here's the safer BIOS MOD> Tthis updates your Microcode to the AM3 Platform, as well as AGESA and MEMINIT.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1525839/Bios/M520A_23.BIN

TheWiz

OMG, already done O_O
That was really fast, given that at two other forums they said it'd be impossible. Thank you!

Just out of interest, from which BIOS did you take the files you needed?

BTW, I found a german website that sells empty BIOS Chips as well as ones already flashed with a bios. The one for my board would cost 10€+shipping, may be +4€ for the pincers to echange the chips. Would that make it safer?

EDIT: If I open the .bin you gave me with the Award BIOS Editor, it gives me an "error extracting component! The BIOS Image may be corrupted or damaged. The editor will still continue to load the image, but certain components may not be editable."
Should I give this any meaning? I can look into all parts of the BIOS-file perfectly fine.