Bios Mods -The Best BIOS Update and Modification Source

Well, I'm at a loss so I figured I'd post a call for help and see if anyone can give me a hand or point me in a direction.

Soooo to start with, I went ahead and bought a brand new Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition. I put it into my system and presto, boot, no issue, I'm happy, and like anyone would with a hot new processor I decided to run some benchmarks just to see how she'd do. Well, that's when I realized that something was wrong and via cpuz I saw that the problem was the processor is only running at 800mhz. The BIOS reports the processor as unknown and all the manual overclock settings in the world are not making it run at the 3.4ghz it should be. The one interesting thing I will point out is that Windows and several programs do think it is running at 3.4ghz but cpuz say 800 and my benchmarks support that so clearly a bust exists.

Being brave I went to the Asus website and I found what I thought would be a donor BIOS and I even inserted a new microcode into the BIOS using MMtool, and sadly still nothing. Same problem as before, and still an "unknown processor" soooooo does anyone have any ideas? Help please?

The Asus site doesn't let me give a direct link to the BIOS pages but here's the drop down menu link:

http://support.asus.com/download/downloa...uage=en-us

You can get to my BIOS via picking, motherboard, socket AM2/AM2+/AM3, and then M3A78-EMH HDMI.

Also, the M3A78 Pro is the BIOS that I think/thought would be the donor as it claims support for this processor and the microcode does show a big update over the one in my BIOS.

Anyway, any help would be very very appreciated!

Thanks,
Marj

OK. here's the rundown. Whenever a system is capale of Phenom II, butdoesn't have the right stepping and instructions for the 965 BE, it clocks it at 800mhz. The readout programs give false readings, and in fact it is running at 800mhz. (I know, its horrible) In short, to add support it is neccesary to update AGESA, whichi is nearly impossible to do on AMI because of integration with the 1B module. So, your best hope is to find the closet chipset supporting AMI board with the CPU support, and use MMTOOL to port back your PCI roms etc. So, our task is to find the best candidate for the nearest matching specs.

TheWiz

Thanks Wiz, but don't bother. I knew enough to get myself in trouble so I tried to copy the AGESA code from M3A78 Pro BIOS into my BIOS and well, the system doesn't post. I killed her!

I'm now thinking that the M3A78 EM would have been a better donor board but sadly it's all for not.

I went ahead and just bought and installed a new board and I'll see if my local tech shop can hot flash the old BIOS to bring it back to life. Other then that I saw that I can order a new BIOS via ebay, but anyway, with all that said, even if I do get her back to life I'll just put my old X2 back in the mobo and I'll roll with a backup system.

Thank you soooooooo much for even looking into it for me!

You rock,
Marj

Can Phenom II support be added to Asus M3A78-EMH HDMI, please?

Yes, although I would appreciate you having a AM3 CPU to test with so i can add it to the ASUS project.

TheWiz

(04-03-2010, 02:58 PM)TheWiz Wrote: [ -> ]Yes, although I would appreciate you having a AM3 CPU to test with so i can add it to the ASUS project.

TheWiz

Bump.

Is it possible to get this bios modded? I am attempting to use an AM2+ Phenom II X2 550 cpu in this mobo. I also have an AM3 Phenom II X6 1045T in another PC that I could test with.

FYI - I also found another thread on the topic, see https://www.bios-mods.com/forum/Thread-A...elp-Please
Note the poster mentions he attempted to use the bios from the M3A78 PRO.
The only other Asus mobo that I could find with AMD 780G chipset and phenom II CPU support is the M3A78-EM, which is also mentioned in that thread.

Edit; If it helps, there seems to be a bunch of ASRock 780G+SB700 mobos that have Phenom II CPU support. See A780FullHD, A780FullDisplayPort, A780GXE/128M (this one is full-atx, so might be quite different feature wise). There are also 2 with 780G + SB710, A780GM-LE, A780GMH/128M.

Just an update, I did a lot of research into this, which I have documented a bunch of here: http://forums.overclockers.com.au/showth...?t=1180852

Modding the M3A78-EMH HDMI bios seems impractical as it uses an AGESA 3.1.?.?, and when all the similar Asus bioses got updated to 3.3.2.0, they significantly changed the way it is integrated in the bios. So replacing it doesn't seem possible. A similar thing happened with all the bioses when AGESA went to 3.7.0.0.

So as mentioned at the end of the thread above, I just flashed on a bios from the M3A78-EM, and got lucky with a working PC