Yet another L7S7A2 bios problem

[sillydino]

OK so got my board ealier this week. I put my Athlon XP 2800+ in and noticed that it was only registering as a 2200+. After looking around on the net for a while I determined that the only way to increase the board speed was to get a bios hack (namely the stable cheepo virus posted on this site). Made my boot disk, booted up, ran the bios update utility from the ECS website and watched the update freeze about 1/4 of the way through.

Currently I'm stuck with a board that when turned on checks the floppy...beeps once...checks the floppy...beeps once etc. This has been listed a few other times on this site but I didn't see any resolve to it.

I guess my main question would be: if the board doesn't support the amibios repair process then why does it try to access the floppy?

[SmerkO]

i dont think your going to like this . i believe the the reason for you flashing the board in the first place had nothing to do with the bios but simply the fsb being at its default 133mhz. as such 13.5x133 = 1800mhz = 2200+. when set to 166mhz it would result in 13.5x166 = 2250mhz = 2800+.....

however it sounds like you got either a corrupted bios or the floppy was bad. as far as i am aware after a bad flash the l7s7a2 has no possible recovery due to some glitch (someone may be able to explain this better than me or try searching forum) in the procedure and so it just dosent work (hense the access to the floppy but nothing else). the board sounds like its gone for good unless your good with a soldering iron to replace the bios chip. someone may well prove me wrong though!

edit: bad maths

[sillydino]

Ok well the bios specifically states that you can't change the cpu frequency from 133MHz (at least with the original bios that was on there.

Also, I believe the math is a little off, it should have been: 133 * 12.5 (which is the board max) = 1662.5MHz which was what it was running at. I needed to bump the frequency up to 166 * 12.5 = 2075MHz which I believe is the correct speed for that chip. I could be wrong though.

Anyhow, that's all irrelevant as the current speed is 0MHz, I think I'm just gunna go get a MSI board and return this one since both Tufshop and ECS's tech support leave much to be desired.

Feel free to respond with any last minute suggestions guys =)

[RayvenX]

Though L7S7A2s aren't 'officially' rated for FSB166 operation (that needs the 'fx' version of the chipset) it always works and ECS even list it in their specs (though they do claim it's 'overclocking')

It seems very strange that the BIOS got corrupted on the first flash. I guess you're very unlucky :(

Another ECS failure. My opinion with regard to motherboards is now that you nearly always get what you pay for. Cheap boards aren't worth the hastle when your CPU typically costs much more anyway. Better to protect the investment [img]smile.gif[/img]

The MSI nF2 mobos are quite good, but I'm not sure which one you're going for... Anyway, best of luck with the replacement.

[SmerkO]

Originally posted by sillydino:
Also, I believe the math is a little off, it should have been: 133 * 12.5 (which is the board max) = 1662.5MHz which was what it was running at. I needed to bump the frequency up to 166 * 12.5 = 2075MHz which I believe is the correct speed for that chip. I could be wrong though.

your right :D . there are two versions of your chip however - the barton and thoroughbred. the barton core runs at 2086mhz (12.5x333) and the thoroughbred at 2250mhz (13.5x333). the bartons extra cache allows for the slight decrese in clockspeed with the same performance. i was presuming your chip was the thoroughbred core as i did not think the board would show 2200+ as a barton hense the multi (13.5) i used. no excuse for the fsb though! sorry if i confused anyone - its edited now.

if you look here http://www.ocworkbench.com/ocwbcgi/u...;f=35;t=002847 you will see the l7s7a2 will happily go far above 133fsb. ive heard rumours of people hitting double that with some tweaks.