AM2 Phenom support

[LIKMARK]

I've been running a Phenom 9500 in my Crosshair mobo for a couple of weeks now. Bought my 9500 CAAB1 AA 0744MPMW for 1390 NOK (approximatly 261 USD or 178 EUR)

There are a few threads here about Phenom and AM2+ boards that are great, and a lot of phenomenal wisdom can be learned there. (KTE and Brother Esaus threads to mention some of them)

However, not all of the functions of AM2+ boards apply for AM2 boards with the Phenom, and therefore running Phenom at AM2 boards is a bit different.

Therefore I would like to make a thread for AM2 Phenom owners to share experiences that don't apply for the AM2+ boards. It is advisable to check out your board manufacturers support sites to see if your board support Phenom.

First, a list of known facts about running Phenom at AM2 boards.

1.The boards must be able to handle the Phenoms power consumption. Most high end AM2 boards pwms can handle the amount of amperes/watts the Phenom's are drawing. If your board can't handle a 125W Athlon, it probably won't handle a 95W Phenom either.

2.The boards BIOS' needs to support Phenom. It is advisable to check out your board manufacturers support sites to see if your board support Phenom, BIOS wise and PWM wise.

3.You will not benefit from HT 3.0 and split power planes. You will not be able to feed your cores and your north bridge different voltage.

4. You will not be able to change your nb multiplier, it will run at stock *9 multi, and therefore hamper your overclock unless you have a Black Edition cpu where the nb multi is unlocked. If you do have a BE and want to change your nb multi, you will have to do this with a msr editor as no BIOS allows to do this yet.

NOTE:These boards/bioses officially support Phenom. However, official and actual support are two quite different things, therefore I've decided to mark the boards tested and confirmed by users that they actually support Phenom. The tested boards ar bolded

ABIT:

-A-N68SV
-AN52V
-AN68SD

ASROCK:

ALiveDual-eSATA2
ALiveN570SLI-eSATA2
ALiveNF5-eSATA2+ R3.0
ALiveNF5SLI-1394
ALiveNF5-VSTA
ALiveNF5-VSTA R2.0
ALiveNF6G-GLAN
ALiveNF6G-VSTA
ALiveNF6P-VSTA
ALiveNF7G-HD720p
ALiveNF7G-HD720p R1.0
ALiveNF7G-HD720p R3.0
ALiveNF7G-HD720p R5.0
ALiveXFire-eSATA2 R3.0
AM2NF3-VSTA
ALiveNF7G-FullHD R1.0
ALiveNF7G-HDready

ASUS:

-Crosshair: BIOS 0904/0905Beta(*)(PS: SLI disabled)
-M2N32 SLI Deluxe: BIOS 1701
-M2A-VM /HDMI, BIOS 1501 (Recommended upgrade to 1603 only if having problems with 1501)
-M2R32-MVP - BIOS 1009
-M2A-MVP - BIOS 0509
-M2A-VM - BIOS 1501 (Recommended upgrade to 1603 only if having problems with 1501)
-M2N-SLI Deluxe - BIOS 1302
-M2N32 WS Professional - BIOS 1703
-M2N32-SLI Deluxe/Wifi - BIOS 1503
-M2N32-SLI Premium Vista Edition - BIOS 0801beta
-M2N-E - BIOS 1202

BIOSTAR:

TF570 SLI A2+ - BIOS N57LAB06.BST
TF560 A2+ - BIOS N56BAB03.BST
TF520 A2+ - BIOS N52BAB03.BST

DFI:

-LANPARTY UT NF590 SLI-M2R/G

ECS:

-NFORCE6M-A V3.0
-GeForce6100PM-M2 V2.0

EPOX:

FOXCONN:

-520A
-560A
-A6VMX
-A6VMX-K

GIGABYTE:

-GA-M52S-S3P(rev 2.0) - BIOS FC
-GA-M52L-S3 - BIOS F4
-GA-M56S-S3 - BIOS F3
-GA-M57SLI-DS4(rev 2.0) - BIOS FG (may cause stability issues in Windows at this time)
-GA-M57SLI-S4(rev 1.0 + 1.1) - BIOS FE
-GA-M57SLI-S4(rev 2.0) - BIOS F12
-GA-M61SME-S2(rev 2.0) - BIOS F7
-Gigabyte GA-M68SM-S2L v1.0 - BIOS F4 (2008/01/23)
-GA-MA69G0S3H - BIOS F5
-GA-MA69GM-S2H -BIOS F4

JETWAY:

-Jetway M2A693PLUS-VP
-Jetway M2A694-GDG
-Jetway M2A694-GDP
-Jetway M2A694-GHG

MSI:

-K9NGM4-F V.2
-K9N SLI-F V.2
-K9AG Neo2 - BIOS A7368AMS.209
-K9AG Neo2-Digital - BIOS A7368AMS.209
-K9AGM3-F - BIOS A7367AMS.G01
-K9AGM3-FD - BIOS A7367AMS.G01
-K9AGM3-FIH - BIOS A7367AMS.206
-K9AGM4-L - BIOS A7373AMS.204
-K9AGM4-F - BIOS A7373AMS.204
-K9N Neo V3 - BIOS A7369NMS.30B
-K9N Neo V2 - BIOS A7369NMS.30B
-K9NGM3-FIH - BIOS A7349NMS.H07
-K9NGM3-FD - BIOS A7349NMS.U01
-K9NGM3-FD(TPM) - BIOS A7349NMS.W01
-K9NGM3-FD V2 - BIOS A7349NMS.S06


Disabling TLB Patch with MSR editor (see STICKY for disabling patch) is documented to work for board/BIOSES marked with *

Tools for msr edititing:

WPCREDIT (32bit only)
BAREDIT (32/64bit)
RWEVERYTHING (32/64bit)

(Please feel free to correct me if my information is wrong, I want this to be as correct as possible of course. Would appreciate if people would help me update this thread with important information too. )

Everyone but TROLLS are welcome to post questions/answers in this thread, it would be nice if they were somewhat on topic though.

[LIKMARK]

List of Phenom supported mobos, AM2/AM2+, courtsey of KTE:

LINK: http://techreport.com/discussions.x/14288

[LIKMARK]

My personal experiences with Phenom on Crosshair:

BIOS 0904 = Stay away, only works if defaults are loaded. Nothing can be changed, if you do, your system will freeze before BIOS logo is half loaded..

BIOS 0905Beta = A little better, Have not tested oc'ing much yet, voltage control seems nonexistent at least for the RAM (cpu too it seems) Will have to test more

Memory timings is unchangeable it seems, cpu-z reads 5 5 4 18 2t at stock 800MHz (with Ballistix)

I'm running Vista Ultimate X64, not the most stable platform if you are to believe others experiences ocing on AM2/AM2+ boards.

I'm running it under water, and it keeps pretty cool. About 30 degrees celcius at idle (Cpuid HWmonitor reports about 15 degrees too low temps i believe, seems like temps in bios is more correct), and about 43 degrees under load. (I'm not too sure these temps are right, as I have not measured it with external sensors yet).

I've run it at 2409MHz 4 hours prime stable at stock vcore, but I'm having problems with random bsods like most other Phenom owners.

The board does have vdroop up to 0,05v under load. You know, Asus... This could have something to do with random bsods.



The mem bench is with the TLB patch on, bios 0904.

Result in winrar 3.71 bench, tlb patch included: 1054 KB/s @2200MHz, mem@800Mhz 5 5 4 18 2t

EDIT: SLI support is disabled with these bioses, not a problem of mine though.

[emlyn_dewar]

The Asus M2A-VM /HDMI m-atx boards can be added to your compatible list, needs a recent bios... 1504 maybe? I'd go and check the Asus site but it's painfully slow.
Quite a nice option for a m-atx quad core system.

[LIKMARK]

Thanks, I'll check, but as you say, it's a horribly slow site. (I'm always using the global site as the national Asus sites are even worse) The M2A-VM is on the list. You tested the TLB patch fix?

[KTE]

Good idea.

I know of many boards which are supposed to be supported but there is no point in listing them as supported unless they have been confirmed as working and to what degree with Phenom.

[Ugly n Grey]

There's a quite a list of confirmed Phenom AM2 boards at the NCIX retail web site forums. They've all been verified. Some of these AM2+ but I'll leave it to you guys to decipher, most of them that are have the little "+" sign. I've reposted the list below, however you can view the original thread here

This posting was made by Linus who also posts in the WC cooling section here at XS.

Okay Everyone,

There's been a great deal of confusion surrounding board support and Phenom, so we're going to try to clear things up in the coming days to make sure that everyone knows what they need to have for their new Phenom X4 CPU.

The list below contains the board model followed by the PCB revision in parentheses (no PCB revision listed if all PCBs are okay), then with the required BIOS version.

If you have any information that is missing from this thread, or if you want to request that I look up another board and find out the BIOS revision, just post. I will try to update this every 1-2 days. We'll also try to produce a more palatable version of it.

Regards,

Linus

****IT SHOULD BE NOTED THAT EVEN THOUGH THESE BOARDS WILL WORK WITH PHENOM, YOUR CHIP WILL DEFAULT TO HYPERTRANSPORT 1.0 SPEC instead of 3.0.****

My own (limited) testing with this issue on the Asus M2N32-SLI deluxe revealed that the performance difference is negligable, but only Cinebench and some games were tested, so I'm sure there are some applications that would benefit from the extra HT3.0 bandwidth.


ASUS - all PCB revisions should work fine

M2R32-MVP - BIOS 1009
Crosshair - BIOS 0904 (0904/05 BIOS reported to be somewhat flaky)
M2A-MVP - BIOS 0509
M2A-VM - BIOS 1501 (Recommended upgrade to 1603 only if having problems with 1501)
M2A-VM HDMI - BIOS 1501 (Recommended upgrade to 1603 only if having problems with 1501)
M2N-SLI Deluxe - BIOS 1302
M2N32 WS Professional - BIOS 1703
M2N32-SLI Deluxe/Wifi - BIOS 1503
M2N32-SLI Premium Vista Edition - BIOS 702
M2N-E - BIOS 1202
M2N-SLI - BIOS 401
M3A - BIOS 301
M3A32-MVP Deluxe - BIOS 401

GIGABYTE

GA-M52S-S3P(rev 2.0) - BIOS FC
GA-M52L-S3 - BIOS F4
GA-M56S-S3 - BIOS F3
GA-M57SLI-DS4(rev 2.0) - BIOS FG (may cause stability issues in Windows at this time)
GA-M57SLI-S4(rev 1.0 + 1.1) - BIOS FE
GA-M57SLI-S4(rev 2.0) - BIOS F12
GA-M61SME-S2(rev 2.0) - BIOS F7
GA-MA69G0S3H - BIOS F5
GA-MA770-DS3 - BIOS F2
GA-MA790X-DS4 - BIOS F1
GA-790FX-DS5 - BIOS F1
GA-MA790FX-DQ6 - BIOS F1
GA-MA69GM-S2H(rev 1.0) - BIOS F4


MSI

K9A2 CF - BIOS A7388AMS.110
K9A2 Platinum - BIOS A7376AMS.100
K9AG Neo2 - BIOS A7368AMS.209
K9AG Neo2-Digital - BIOS A7368AMS.209
K9AGM3-F - BIOS A7367AMS.G01
K9AGM3-FD - BIOS A7367AMS.G01
K9AGM3-FIH - BIOS A7367AMS.206
K9AGM4-L - BIOS A7373AMS.204
K9AGM4-F - BIOS A7373AMS.204
K9N Neo V3 - BIOS A7369NMS.30B
K9N Neo V2 - BIOS A7369NMS.30B
K9NGM3-FIH - BIOS A7349NMS.H07
K9NGM3-FD - BIOS A7349NMS.U01
K9NGM3-FD(TPM) - BIOS A7349NMS.W01
K9NGM3-FD V2 - BIOS A7349NMS.S06

[LIKMARK]

Thanks, importing them now. LOL the m2n sli 0401 bios supporting Phenom? It's a quite old bios iirc.

[KTE]

Ugly n Grey that is exactly what my last post said I wouldn't post. This is old news that's been thrown around many places online for a long time without any confirmation, they are only going off manufacturer confirmation and lists as to what is supported and we already know not to trust that. Those are the boards that are supposed to work with Phenom with those listed BIOSes, nearly all of those AM2 boards do not have users or user examples where people have testing them and can verify if they actually work, run fine, and to what extent with Phenom (i.e. do they get the Clock Interrupt BSoD which many on AM2 boards get? That fails the term "working"). Only a few of those like the ASUS M2N-SLI Deluxe boards are known to work with a recent BIOS. Back then no one AM2 board worked with AM2+ CPU at all, that's a non-verified list.

I can even list more, but there is no point in gathering up motherboard lists that are supposed to work as most don't and no way did they work back in December when those lists were aggregated.

[Ugly n Grey]

Those boards were all posted by a trusted member of the forums who did his research.
In other words he checked the listing for each BIOS individually.

[KTE]

Ugly n Grey I think you're mistaken because he didn't test them nor verify them as you can see by the posts straight after. He added all links where the motherboard MFG claimed to support Phenom. As per his own words on Dec 26, 2007 03:12 PM:

I'm focusing here on boards that are officially supported. Tom's basically pulled a bunch of boards out of their closet that do not officially support Phenom, and told us what we already know about them.

It's a list of boards that are supposed to work with the claimed BIOS version. Sure this is helpful too, but please make it clear what it is as it'll be misleading to readers.
The grim reality is half of those didn't even run with those BIOSes listed, at least until mid-January. There are many examples around of that here and on every forum. Personally I know of the ASUS 590i SLI boards, they did not function with that BIOS in December at all, not until as of very late. I've been troubleshooting Phenoms since November and know well enough what did work and since when. AM2 support and compatibility has been poor.

And BIOS 1.00 for MSI RD790 had hordes of issues too including reboot loops. Official v1.1 or Beta vP0H is the one that should be listed there.

[Ugly n Grey]

So let's get this clear, you want to go through and test every board and that's fine. It's not like I edited the OP's post to include those boards or BIOS, I thought it might be a decent place to start as a reference ... so what do you want?

[KTE]

Well, if you want to list boards which officially are supposed to support Phenom, then that's cool too. The only thing I was noting is that many AM2 boards actually still don't work properly with a Phenom (as in stable at stock configurations) even though they claim to, and we have no user feedback on many of them either apart from the manufacturers word so it would cause users undue trouble if we stated they were working fine.

Please append to the beginning of the list that "these motherboards/BIOSes officially support Phenom CPU's" or something to that effect just to make things clear for all.

If you want to add boards, then Abit, ECS and Foxconn has some too. Off the top of my head and some notes (100% sure, but untested by any user AFAIK)

Abit:
AX78
A-N68SV
AN52V
AN68SD

ECS:
NFORCE6M-A V3.0
GeForce6100PM-M2 V2.0
A770M-A (AM2+ MB)

Foxconn:
520A
560A
A6VMX
A6VMX-K

MSI:
K9NGM4-F V.2
K9N SLI-F V.2

I haven't seen any mention of K9AGM3-FIH being officially supported yet by MSI.

You basically use the latest BIOS there is as none of the AM2 boards don't need another BIOS for AM2+ CPU's yet - they still have many issues for which you'll need new BIOSes. That goes for many of the aforementioned boards on the list, at least 3 BIOSes there I can see do not work stable or even at all with Phenom (newer BIOSes do though).

[LIKMARK]

I'm agreeing with you on this issue, KTE. Supposed support is not good enough. I'll leave all the boards on the list for now, but I've bolded those boards actually supporting Phenom. The boards have to support Phenom at default settings. As I said in mye earlier post, the m2n sli bios 0401 is very old and I'd be suprised if that board works with Phenom at all. Ain't nVidia 500 just a rebranded nforce 4 chipset iirc?

[KTE]

I'm agreeing with you on this issue, KTE. Supposed support is not good enough. I'll leave all the boards on the list for now, but I've bolded those boards actually supporting Phenom. The boards have to support Phenom at default settings.

Great idea.

I don't want to hear users trying an old BIOS which has poor to no AM2+ support and then saying "my Phenom is bust, AMD is selling dodgy Phenoms, the 3rd core doesn't work even at stock!" which is exactly what users on AM2 boards with poor BIOSes and Phenom are saying after using a BIOS which the MB MFG said supports Phenom (but it didn't). ASUS nForce 500 chipset boards are the hotties here.

As I said in mye earlier post, the m2n sli bios 0401 is very old and I'd be suprised if that board works with Phenom at all. Ain't nVidia 500 just a rebranded nforce 4 chipset iirc?

No way it works. Even 1203 which came out at least about a year after doesn't. 1302 is the one supposed to support AM2+ but it's old, as of November, so I highly doubt it runs them properly with many updates yet, which I doubt ASUS will bother with (it's focusing on 700i/P48/X48/X38 mostly).

I know the M2N32-SLI Deluxe BIOS which is supposed to support Phenom does not support it (mainly the root cause for the fudged 3rd core belief). I'm not sure of any BIOS which yet fully does (i.e. the system reads system details properly and the BIOS changes do change after bootup). The BIOS which does support all 3 Phenoms in retail is 1603 but 1701 is better and very recently released.

The nForce 500 C51XE 90nm and MCP55PXE 140nm both by TSMC are different to the nF4 AFAIK, as IIRC nF4 didn't support RAID 5 whereas the nForce 500 chipset did. I'm not sure, I was away from computers/online involvement from around late Feb. 2006 onwards to now, so skipped much.

[LIKMARK]

Tested bios 0905 beta some more on my crosshair today, and I can confirm there is no voltage control whatsoever. It is appliable in the BIOS, but no change is made.

Max bootup is htt 227, but bsod comes at once there is some load on the cores. Irql less or equal or second core did not interrupt bladi bla... probably not enough juice to cores/nb I believe.
Max semi stable htt speed is 223 with 2450MHz on the cores.

KTE: Do you think I will be able to change nb multi via wpcredit (as you can do with AM2+ boards) for AM2 boards or is it locked to cpu multi? I'm not sure I understand it correctly about this. I know split power planes is disabled with AM2 boards, but does this apply for nb multi too?.

Also I remember reading something about nb running slower on AM2 boards (1,6GHz), or did this just apply for the barcelonas running on dual socket bords?

[KTE]

Max HT I get on AM2+ board without NB multi/voltage control is also 225HT (stable). Above this will be unstable (due to NB volts per speed - we've tested other BIOSes and it does 250 HT max stable boot and 2.6GHz max NB speed).

You might be able to change the NB multi although I am doubting it due to support for separate PLL's. Try it, it doesn't take long. Just check the register first to see if values are consistent with AM2+ boards (should be).

NB should be 1.8GHz on AM2 boards AFAIK. Ones I've seen were 1.8GHz. New Phenoms will all be 2GHz (as these werr supposed to be originally).

[LIKMARK]

Hmm, I'll test it out, It would be lovley if it worked, otherwise no 2,5Ghz for me..

Multiple pll's as in one pll for cores and one for nb (or one pll for each core plus one pll for nb (I'm assuming the first option..)? The values for tlb patch were the same as on the AM2+ boards, so the values for nb multi probably are too.

Probably me remembering wrong about nb speeds (or it was one of many rumors before Phenom launch)

Edit: BTW, I can change multi for each core with AOD hack posted here, that should count in favor of being able to change nb multi I'm thinking (.. or desperatley hoping/wanting )

[Ugly n Grey]

Well, using the list I posted I started searching other forums for threads where users have had/had not had success with the product listed. My interest is old stock boards we can slap quads into at stock speeds for folding as I anticipate the price of low end quads will fall drastically by summer so this is of great interest.

[KTE]

Multiple pll's as in one pll for cores and one for nb (or one pll for each core plus one pll for nb (I'm assuming the first option..)?

A separate PLL for all individually components.

Edit: BTW, I can change multi for each core with AOD hack posted here, that should count in favor of being able to change nb multi I'm thinking (.. or desperatley hoping/wanting )

Give it a try, couldn't be easier.

Well, using the list I posted I started searching other forums for threads where users have had/had not had success with the product listed. My interest is old stock boards we can slap quads into at stock speeds for folding as I anticipate the price of low end quads will fall drastically by summer so this is of great interest.

I agree, they should be. They already are pretty cheap here.

[LIKMARK]

Give it a try, couldn't be easier.

Gave it a try, and are a bit at loss for what to do. Cant use wpcredit as it won't work under vista x64. I'm trying to use rweverything instead, and can find the right HEX, but i can't find the BIN(ary?).

Anyone know what to do from here? Pics:

[KTE]

LIKMARK, add these to the 1st post please. They officially support Phenom FX and Phenom (no user test of these that I know of though).

Asrock ALiveNF7G-HD720p
Asrock ALiveNF6P-VSTA
Gigabyte GA-M68SM-S2L v1.0 - BIOS F4 (2008/01/23)
Jetway M2A693PLUS-VP
Jetway M2A694-GDG
Jetway M2A694-GDP
Jetway M2A694-GHG

Gave it a try, and are a bit at loss for what to do. Cant use wpcredit as it won't work under vista x64. I'm trying to use rweverything instead, and can find the right HEX, but i can't find the BIN(ary?).

Felix built a nifty tool. Use this, it's smaller and handier for the job: http://www.tweakers.fr/baredit.html

I haven't used RWE for this task so I can't advise on its functioning. Install Bar_Edit, restart and then you can use it.

You have the right register there (D4) and you're after modifying the binary data of that register in this box =>



For reference:
00001b = NB Multiplier 5x
00110b = NB Multiplier 6x
00011b = NB Multiplier 7x
00100b = NB Multiplier 8x
00101b = NB Multiplier 9x
00111b = NB Multiplier 10x

Edit binary>press Write>Reboot>Check to see it's changed.

[LIKMARK]

Hm..

I don't like this. Seems like TLB patch fix and NB multi change via msr editors don't work. Tested a few configurations, with horrible results. There is clearly something wrong with my system now. Earlier tests with WinRAR bench gave 1095KB/s, tlb patch enabled. Now I don't even make 300kb/s. Changing NB speeds does nothing to latency test, ie nothing is changed even if Cpu-z reads nb speed changes "on the fly":


NB @1600MHz, TLB Patch enabled------------->NB @1600MHz, TLB Patch fix
______________________

NB @1800MHz, TLB Patch enabled------------->NB @1800MHz, TLB Patch fix
______________________

NB @2200MHz, TLB Patch enabled------------->NB @2200MHz, TLB Patch fix
______________________

NB @2200MHz, TLB Patch fix, Rebooted


As you see there is no change in the values of either latency test or WinRAR bench.

[KTE]

That's still running the NB patch in all instances, thats why.

RWEverything patch method doesn't work on my system.

Can you try this please after booting up and see if it works: http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...postcount=1215

Make sure you have the RDMSR values I had before changing them. Then re-run the above tests only for NB 1400 compared with NB 1800.

9500/9600 doesn't clock higher than 9x NB multi.

[LIKMARK]

Alright, I know CrystalCPUID method works as I tested it first, didn't do any benches though. Were hoping rweverything method worked as CrystalCPUID method is somewhat.. impractical.. At work now, but I'll certainly test it tonight. So the TLBpatch overrides NB speed changes too? I can find all the right RDMSR values, so theoretically all changes should be applicable IMO.