Wednesday 25 February 2009

BIOS Flash Upgrades - Lessons learned

I've been looking to upgrade my main desktop for a little while - it is (was) an AMD-X2 4200+ (Socket AM2 - but that's a different story) on a ASUS motherboard with 4GB Ram running Vista-64bit - very happy it was too. I was looking at possibly moving up to a Phenom at the high end of the scale and for this I needed to flash my BIOS to give it support for the newer CPUs - not been keeping it up to date. So saturday afternoon I decided to do the necessary and flash the BIOS - no big deal, that is until the system wouldn't POST after the reboot - argh worst nightmare, so after trying everything in the manual and that I could find online I admitted defeat.

I am now the proud owner of a Gigabyte motherboard (with dual BIOS chips to allow you to mess up one of them), and an Intel i7 920 - yes change of architecture and I've wondered what I could do with 4 cores hyperthreaded and a potential 24GB of memory (I only got 6).

I am now in the process of re-installing Vista (something I didn't want to have to do, but hey) so here are some of my lessons from this tale:

1. Don't flash your BIOS unless you have to
2. Flash your BIOS before you go and buy that nice new processor
3. Intel processors need more power than AMD processors (did I mention the new 1000W power supply - overkill I know, but my 4 year old 500W couldn't get the thing going)
4. You want to hear only one beep when your motherboard boots - continuous short beeps means you need more power (see above)
5. Vista will not boot if you change the processor architecturedummy
, motherboard, raid controller etc and you will have to re-install.

So that's it - Vista is reinstalling and so will I be for the next few nights. Still I should now be able to really crank up my UC lab with VMWare sessions, and lightroom should fly :-)

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