Aopen AX4B-533 Tube BIOS

[shimshon]

Hi there.

I have a special project with an old, but highly unusual MOBO. It's an AOpen AX4b533 Tube. Actually, I have two of them (one for backup) and my audiophile PC is running quite nicely.

I am asking you to unlock the latest BIOS.

Sorry for the lengthy post, and I do apologize if it is not appropriate in any way. Please, also let me know if I should post the following in another thread (new user).

What I am trying to achieve with this board may not be possible at all, and I would greatly appreciate all opinions. The MOBO's original specs said FSB 400/533, Willamette and Northwood. It is a 845E board. I am using it with a 3.06 FSB 533 NW, at the CPU's own specs and as the board recognizes it (23x133, RAM@266MHz, fixed AGP/PCI ratio). There are no real problems. There is occasional freezing or even rebooting, but infrequently, and it might not be CPU-related (AOpen partly used Lelon caps for this type of board, and they were a faulty batch, so all of them had to be replaced). I understand that the 3.20 GHz EE is Gallatin-based, and as such, it should run in many boards built for Northwood ("The design was mostly identical to Pentium 4 (to the extent that it would run in the same motherboards,"). I have such a CPU, but when I boot, it fails to recognize the 200 MHz quad FSB, and sets the the speed according to the internal clock as 16x100 (?). The board was not designed for 800 MHz, but AOpen technicians later issued BIOS' for similar boards based on two a slightly (?) different chipsets, the 845GE, (and the latest one) and PE, (latest) where they claimed that 800 MHz FSB was possible with PC3200 RAM. (This was confirmed by an acquaintance of mine).
The board actually lets me set all the parameters for the EE (FSB 200, the multiplier can't be changed, but 16x remains, fixed ratio or manual settings for AGP/PCI), but the BIOS either wont boot (most of the time), or the system becomes extremely unstable (OS won't load, setup not working or getting various error messages, such as ACPI). I have also seen "This chipset cannot use FSB 533", which is funny, since it can, but that's not even what is set (and then it lets me continue, but it's not stable). It is stable at 133 FSB, but with the fixed multiplier, the resulting speed makes no sense.

What I am wondering about is:

- Do you think that this chipset could work properly with Gallatin at all?
- Could it be "made" to recognize the internal CPU settings as 200x16?
- Would it make sense to try to use it with a lower FSB, such as 133, but high multipliers, to reach at least the stock speed in a stable way?

The board lets me use ECC and Non-ECC, and I have 2x1GB PC3200 from both - same results. Tried it with one RAM, same results.

If you manage to compare the BIOS' of the GE&PE with that of my board, and can answer any of my questions or unlock this BIOS, I will be very happy

Thank you for your time.


Ah, and one more thing: the 3rd level cache does not appear in the BIOS. I guess this is normal, since EE wasn't around at the time, but now I am not sure if the CPU can use it at all in this board (some test software show it, but that's probably just from their database, not actual BIOS info).

[1234s282]

well theres no hidden settings that are of any use or worth the risk of flashing the bios

Sorry
Admin

[Antinomy]

- The chipset and CPU support are unrelated things.
- It won't be easy for sure.
- You can't raise the multiplier, the s478 EE CPUs had a fixed multi.

As for the L3 cache - you can run Everest or other memory subsystem benchmark and see yourself that the L3 cache is being used.

Nice board but as for me, the gain isn't worth the effort. And I don't exactly know how is the 845PE able to achieve 200FSB.