AMD dual socket thread

[Macadamia]

Yes.
Once the server side switches to Fiorano we should be getting a WORKSTATION platform based on either RD790 or RD890.

CF is a certain.

[karbonkid]

So the weirdest thing just happened...

I'm finally back at home for summer and started playing around with the K9ND system.

First thing I did (of course) was to go all-out and stick in my mod BIOS, both FX-74s, standard DDR2 in the slots, fire her up, and.. no POST.

So I put in a single opteron intead, and... no POST

Swap the RAM for ECC Reg. DDR2, opteron in, swap in the standard BIOS, and.. it works...

Going through the RAM settings I spot a bug - completely disabling ECC seems to result in no POST, no matter the CPU. I find that disabling all ECC options except 'ECC error log' works and memtest86+ shows ECC as disabled. Non-ECC, non-reg. ram still results in failure to pass POST.

So a few minutes ago, without a JTAG card handy to debug the problems with my mod BIOS, I think, 'what the hell, might as well try it' and swap the Opteron 2216 for a single AthlonFX-74. And... she boots! This is the standard BIOS remember. Multiplier is wrong, though, it's running at a measly 2GHz... I think it may still be using the multiplier from the previous CPU (the 2216). Will do some more investigating and keep you posted.



EDIT:
Just re-enabled ECC and she's memtesting without a problem, I'm gonna mod my BIOS settings back to re-enable it. Just to clarify, the Athlon FX's don't support ECC, but getting past POST with it enabled in BIOS is no problem, at least on the K9ND...

JTAG card should arrive tomorrow, I'll hopefully be able to delve into things a little deeper .

[takealready]

Thanks for letting me know. I've had enough of my Asus L1n64-SLI WS not posting no matter what I do.

And those wonderful people as Asus returned my RMA because there was a scratch on the motherboard. So I'm

I've been thinking about get the MSI K9ND Speedster instead. Will the MSI K9ND Speedster work with dual 2352?

Side Note-->

After ASUS sent me back my board. I was pissed so I stuffed it in the oven at 200 degrees for 10 minutes. That stopped the one long beep followed by two short beeps I was getting. Now the won't POST. And nothing shows up on my monitor.

[karbonkid]

This isn't working. I am having absolutely no luck flashing anything, stock or modded 8mb or 4mb, onto the 8mb chip... phlash16 complains of the part not being in the 'supported part table' or somesuch, even though it is the very exact same chip that MSI specify on their website.

Flashrom just gives up with an 'image size doesn't match' message.

Just to try, I tried flashing the latest 4mb BIOS (onto the 4mb chip), which was a success. It seems each BIOS chip has a Device ID and Mfr ID - I'm gonna have to try and hexedit them into Phlash16.exe

@ Takealready - Sounds like a sucky situation. I'd say the K9ND is kind of a dead-end board tbh - I got it cheap, otherwise I would have gone for a Tyan. MSI support has been helpful so far, but they stopped releasing BIOS for this board long ago, it doesn't even support Barcelona B3! Maybe I can transplant AGESA from Tyan n3600, it looks simple but it might not be and I don't know if my skill is up to it, and I probably won't have quad-cores to test with for quite a while yet.

EDIT:

eek - thunder & lighting outside, my screen just flickered. I'm surge protected but the wiring in the house isn't the best. Probably a sign that it's time to give up on computers for this afternoon!

[Particle]

Have you tried using Uniflash 1.40? I had success with it in my own hot flashing adventure on an 8 Mbit SST 49LF080A. It supports a lot of other chips as well.

[karbonkid]

Thanks for chiming in, Particle

I tried uniflash 1.40 (locked up) and 1.47 (unsupprted ROM). The ROM is a Winbond W39V080APZ, just as MSI specifies. Maybe I would have more luck with a more generic ROM.

The closest I got was with flashrom (coreboot's flash utility) under Linux - it recognised the MCP and the ROM and initialized it for writing, then exited with the 'image size doesn't match' error. There is no working 'force' option

PS., as you can see, the storm is over. Kind of :ROFL:

[karbonkid]

Well, this v1.30 BIOS gives a bad CMOS checksum on every boot - nothing seems to fix it, meaning none of my BIOS settings stick. No biggie, seeing as it's only a stopgap I guess. Probably a bad transfer from web->floppy->BIOS, should have checksummed at every step really.

A little offtopic, here's some pics to remind me of what the system hopefully will be like when it's done

[Particle]

Check the LPC ROM controller on your board--it'll probably be a Winbond chip. They are often capable of using a wide variety of chips, and your motherboard itself couldn't care less so long as the controller works with the chip. They're all very similar. If so, you could try a more generic ROM of the capacity you need. You might also try padding your image with zeros to match the capacity of the ROM. I'm not sure if you need to pad the beginning or end, however. I had a chip fail some blocks near the end and the 8KB boot block was surprisingly dead. Could have just been a glitch.

[karbonkid]

Check the LPC ROM controller on your board--it'll probably be a Winbond chip. They are often capable of using a wide variety of chips, and your motherboard itself couldn't care less so long as the controller works with the chip. They're all very similar. If so, you could try a more generic ROM of the capacity you need. You might also try padding your image with zeros to match the capacity of the ROM. I'm not sure if you need to pad the beginning or end, however. I had a chip fail some blocks near the end and the 8KB boot block was surprisingly dead. Could have just been a glitch.

The ROM was modded with PBE, and it seems to pad automatically - the output was exactly 1024kB. I assue the LPC ROM and the Super I/O chip are one and the same? Winbond W83627EHG. I'll have a look for an 8mb chip that works with uniflash...

EDIT:
Oh, and thanks for the help

[karbonkid]

Right, looks like it's going to have to be the SST 49LF080A

Thanks for the tip

EDIT:
Thought you might want to know, Russian version of Uniflash 2.00 is in testing:
http://translate.google.com/translat...istory_state0=

Just tried it, very nice interface and features. Alas, no support for my chip..

[Particle]

Yes, that Winbond is probably it. It's described as an "LPC IO" which is for your BIOS chip--not your SuperIO controller. That'll probably be another Winbond chip of a different model elsewhere on your board. We have similar controllers, actually, so I imagine there's a good chance of it working with the SST.

Yours is a W83627EHG and mine is a W83627HG. Not sure what the difference is atm.

[takealready]

This isn't working. I am having absolutely no luck flashing anything, stock or modded 8mb or 4mb, onto the 8mb chip... phlash16 complains of the part not being in the 'supported part table' or somesuch, even though it is the very exact same chip that MSI specify on their website.

Flashrom just gives up with an 'image size doesn't match' message.

Just to try, I tried flashing the latest 4mb BIOS (onto the 4mb chip), which was a success. It seems each BIOS chip has a Device ID and Mfr ID - I'm gonna have to try and hexedit them into Phlash16.exe

@ Takealready - Sounds like a sucky situation. I'd say the K9ND is kind of a dead-end board tbh - I got it cheap, otherwise I would have gone for a Tyan. MSI support has been helpful so far, but they stopped releasing BIOS for this board long ago, it doesn't even support Barcelona B3! Maybe I can transplant AGESA from Tyan n3600, it looks simple but it might not be and I don't know if my skill is up to it, and I probably won't have quad-cores to test with for quite a while yet.

EDIT:

eek - thunder & lighting outside, my screen just flickered. I'm surge protected but the wiring in the house isn't the best. Probably a sign that it's time to give up on computers for this afternoon!

Thanks for the honesty Karbon Kid. I was hoping the MSI would have more support (as well as be more flexable with what processors it can handle) than the L1N64-SLI. So I guess my dreams of having a dual socket/8 core monster/ SLI beast will have to put on off for now.

Their are some K9ND on ebay for cheap (under $170). But I didn't want to waste any more money. My L1n64-SLI was $175 from "the bay". And now I've got a $175 paperweight

[karbonkid]

Flashing onto the SST with Uniflash fails... I decided to take a dump of the original BIOS and compare it to the .WPH, and, you guessed it... They're different. It seems the Phoenix utility patches something into the BIOS before flashing it. Working on making a similarly patched ROM for the 8Mb chip now...

[karbonkid]

Having given up on the 8Mb ROM for now, I tried modding the 4Mb one. It stores microcode in a different form, but I put it in the same place as the 8Mb BIOS anyway, just to see what would happen. It picks up that it's an Athlon FX, but not yet the model no., nor does it set the correct multiplier, and feeds it a measly 1~1.1V; took about 15 reboots just for it to get to the boot prompt of a Live CD....

[Hawkeye4077]

Taken from my post on 2CPU:

Some early overclocking:




http://valid.canardpc.com/cache/screenshot/635386.png

[Smartidiot89]

Taken from my post on 2CPU:

Some early overclocking:




http://valid.canardpc.com/cache/screenshot/635386.png

My oh my that's :banana::banana::banana::banana: to my eyes. We want some 3D, Cinebench or whatever!

[Hawkeye4077]

My oh my that's :banana::banana::banana::banana: to my eyes. We want some 3D, Cinebench or whatever!

I'm not done.



Only setting I can change is Ram speed. HTT multi doesn't function, and I think I am hitting a fsb wall. I can keep it at 3.5ghz, but its not stable.

[Daveburt714]

VERY IMPRESSIVE Hawkeye4077:!!!

Is CPU-Z reporting the correct voltages?
If not, what are you using to tweak those setting?

Reguardless..... Your my hero!

[gOtVoltage]

Wow ,, another good 4xDouble Oc...You are doing some nice tweaking.

we need Real FX style enthusiast Dual 2x Socket mobos for 1207 and PHII AM3..

[Hawkeye4077]

VERY IMPRESSIVE Hawkeye4077:!!!

Is CPU-Z reporting the correct voltages?
If not, what are you using to tweak those setting?

Reguardless..... Your my hero!

Vcore for this cpu is 1.25, i cannot change them in anyway. What CPU-Z shows is good.
Only thing I use is Clockgen. I leave my ram at default speed of DDR2-800, overclocked it runs at 938mhz

Although if i could find a way to change vcore and actually have the HTT multi function, I'd have alot farther to go.

[karbonkid]

Great work, Hawkeye (Rok?). Amazing to see what those Shanghais are capable of in the right hands. Have you tried ntune? It might give you the OC options you are looking for...

[Hawkeye4077]

Ok nvidia's replacement for ntune, does me a little less work, but no further. 3400 looks like the cap without further increasing vcore.

Clockgen i had to go no more than 2-3 steps at a time. Whereas the nvidia software does it all in one and automatically at windows boot.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/nvidia_...ools_6.05.html