Question For The B I O S And Firmware Gurus!

[bdenner]

Being on a limited budget I'm about to do a limited upgrade to my PC -- Actually it's the AUD$900.00 our benevolent if not nieve government is giving me to stimulate the economy And No -- A friend is bringing the hardware up from Melbourne if you are thinking I'm spending Kev's handout here in Thailand.

Anyway, I'm about to install a new E8600 CPU onto my Gigabyte motherboard and have to replace the BIOS firmware.

I've downloaded the package -- motherboard_bios_ga-965p-ds3_f14d.exe -- which is the correct version for the processor, the E6600 I have currently installed uses Version F10

As there is quite a bit of difference between the E6600 and E8600 so do I run this package prior to or after swapping the processors. I guess somewhere along the line a 1024 Byte file has to be burnt into the BIOS when does that occur. I guess that is embedded in the exec somewhere.

I haven't pressed the go button on the executable as I'm not sure what is going to happen. Any advise is welcome, not many computer engineers here in the rice paddies.

Thank you

Edited April 23, 2009 by bdenner

[dave_boo]

First leave your old processor in until after the flash. It won't affect the suitability of the board to run the old processor, in fact there may be fixes in the new code to have it run more correctly. However, looking over the changelogs on the various bios, there's no mention that the Wolfsdale needs an update (i.e. you may want to try dropping the new processor in and seeing if it'll boot up before attempting to flash your 'puter). Add in that the 8600 is a 1333mhz FSB and Gigabyte only supports 1333mhz FSB on rev 3,3 models of that motherboard and you may end up being disappointed.

However, assuming that you have rev 3,3+ and it will not boot from your new processor, you're going to have to flash your machine. Easiest way is to use Gigabytes's @BIOS, which is a Windows based programme.

Otherwise you're going to have to create a DOS boot disk, run the programme and hope there's no errors.....

[thunder30101]

Good advice above also you might want to put copies of your old and new bios software on a flash drive as backups in case something goes wrong. Ive sometimes found newer bios versions have better features but can also be more troublesome due to quirks here and there. better safe than sorry.

[bdenner]

Thank you for the input guys. The board is Rev 3.3 1333MHz FSB in fact I'm so lucky the P35 chip set was released only days after I bought it. As a part of the upgrade I'm also replacing my 7300GT with a Gigabyte GTX260 overclocked version and 4 GB of DDR2 8500 up market ram. (I know only 3.2 is usable).

Kev's money spent!