Thread: SDRAM choice
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Old September 19th 14, 09:06 PM posted to alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.gigabyte
Paul
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Default SDRAM choice

Haines Brown wrote:


I purchased the MB from Newegg several weeks ago. You seem to imply that
if a vendor has high turnover, it is more likely to provide the Gigabyte
board with the updated BIOS. Other than asking the vendor directly, how
would one know what BIOS version a Gigabyte board has? My MB has dual
BIOS; does that have anything do do with version 4?

Haines


Dual BIOS is a form of protection against flashing accidents.
If you flash one chip, and the flash operation fails, the theory
goes that you can switch to the other chip and recover. Once
you trusted the new flashed BIOS, you could flash a second time,
overwrite the second chip, and have both running the same version.

It's possible the setup looks like this.

Chip #1 Chip #2
Boot block ---
Main code Main code

The Gigabyte scheme may still be relying on just one boot block.
And the redundancy is coverage for the main code block. It still
leaves an exposure of brickage of the boot block. Gigabyte is free
to change their scheme at any time and make it fully symmetric.

We had a scheme like that at work, only ours was fully duplicated,
not exactly a BIOS, and you could switch sides based on failure to
boot. It was used for software upgrade. Both of our chips had
the same content layout. And hardware decided which chip to run.
If booting from #1 failed and the hardware rebooted, it could
use #2 automatically, with no front panel intervention. I'm sure
the scheme had just as many exposures as the Gigabyte scheme.
Part of our testing, was "hammer" testing, where the equipment
would lose power in the middle of a software upgrade, to prove
the equipment would boot from the remaining good side.

*******

At one time, the BIOS version was indicated by adhesive label on
the flash chip. The flash chip is too small for that now. The chip
is an eight pin DIP, rather than being the larger square chip
in the removable socket they used to use. The chip is also soldered
into place, more than it should be. Some boards, a few years ago,
they had a seven pin serial flash header, but the programmer for
that costs around $150, so nobody is going to have one of
those for repair work (the manufacturer probably wouldn't
provide support long enough to make owning one pay off).

*******

If I check the Newegg reviews...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813128712

"JK I.
6/22/2014 9:41:07 AM

One note: I don't know what BIOS version is shipping on the boards
now, but the newest BIOS is F4, 6/4/2014. Mine shipped with F3
and I updated immediately."

And that was for a 4790 processor, which runs on F3 anyway.

The only other thing I can suggest, is find a Gigabyte motherboard
similar to the one you got, with the same BIOS release scheme (F3 and F4)
and see if there is any evidence the board will run with F3 with
that processor. There aren't enough reviews on Newegg to do a good
job of figuring it out.

Paul