Asus F8Sn video upgrade works, but no DVI

[ascaris]

Hi,

Is anyone still working on these old beasts?  I see here they were popular mod targets several years ago.  Now that Moore's law has seemingly come to an end, old machines like these are more usable than ever, and I am inexplicably obsessed with upgrading them rather than buying a new, faster laptop.  I guess it's my dislike of the planned-obsolescence, throw-it-away mentality.

I have a F8Sn (well, it's an F8Sn motherboard... it was originally an F8Sp), which originally came with the Nvidia 9300 G (not GS) or the 9500 GS (both G86 series despite being labeled 9xxx).  I used MMTOOL 3.26 successfully to add the option ROM for my new video card, a 220M GS (which I've read is a rebadged 9600, though its specs show it as being a 9650). 

It works quite well in Windows (after modifying the INF) and Linux... but as others have noted when upgrading like this, the DVI output no longer works.  Windows and Linux cannot detect the monitor on the DVI port, and the usual Fn-8 switching doesn't work either.  (The VGA port works, though.)

I've tried four or five different option ROMs for the 220, all extracted from various Asus models that used the 220, but none fixed the DVI.  

I am thinking there is another module in the firmware image that could be swapped or modified.  There's a little more to it than just the option ROM, as my experience with my former F8Sp board showed.

Initially, I tried using the 220 with my F8Sp setup, which came with an ATI HD3650M.  I added the same option ROM that is now working in my F8Sn setup to the F8Sp's firmware, but it was never usable that way.  I could see the screen image, but shortly after booting, the system would become unresponsive to mouse or keyboard input.  It did this even in the BIOS setup, so it wasn't a Windows or Linux driver issue.  The VGA BIOS version in the BIOS setup was blank.

In the attempt to fix that, I bricked the motherboard.  I tried using the usual recovery methods, but they all failed... but that is another topic (but if anyone has any fix-it ideas, I am all ears!).  The relevant point here is that there seems to be some kind of back-end in the BIOS that is necessary for the option ROM to work.  I see people here report that inserting oroms for Nvidia cards into F8 family laptops (which includes the A8) that came with ATI cards worked, but it didn't work for me. 

Any ideas welcome!

[ascaris]

I noticed something interesting about this video card: None of the laptops that use it actually have a DVI port.  They all have VGA and HDMI, but no DVI.  What that means, exactly, in terms of getting the DVI port to work, I do not know, but it does explain it.