Recieved this today! NEW! Beta Bios M621E_11.B07 compiled on 13/03/07

DISCLAIMER:
Universal abit will not be held responsible or liable for any damage made with using a BETA BIOS.
Please proceed with discretion and do not attempt to use unless you know what you are doing!

IMPORTANT! - READ BELOW!

Quote Originally Posted by Richh
Okay, before y'all fill Nelly's pm box asking for a copy of this BIOS, I've had a look at it, and it is not the universal answer to everybody's prayers, so read the following and count to ten before you do anything:

1) It *is* a new *beta* BIOS, build 11 beta 7, compiled on 13/03/07.

2) It appears as though the power management is broken in the same way that B06's was. As such, you do not get any dynamic voltage management, and I strongly suspect that those of you who experienced stuck multipliers will continue to do so with this one

3) The BIOS now seems to function properly when the ICH8R is selected to run in RAID mode. The AHCI option ROM also runs during POST. This should allow those of you who want to connect optical drives to the SATA1-6 ports while also running the controller in RAID mode to do so.

It also appears as though the boot device prioritisation has been properly fixed (the "fix" in B06 was a temporary kludge).

4) As a result of the fix above, the POST process now takes longer due to the AHCI ROM enumerating the attached hard disks.

5) I am unaware as yet if there are any changes at a performance/overclocking/memory level - Nelly will hopefully be looking at this aspect later.

In short, the only issue that this BIOS seems intended to address is the full functionality of the ICH8 RAID controller + optical drive problem. I have not tested yet whether it is actually fixed, but see no reason why it won't work - I'll find out for sure later.

As such, the only people who, at time of writing, will appear to gain an advantage from this new BIOS are those wanting to mix a RAID array and optical drives on the SATA1-6 ports. For anyone else, this build is arguably a backward step over B6R.

Of course there should be room for a "B7R", but I need to more fully understand what is in this new release before I know what I can change on it.