M2N-E SLI vs M2N-E Deluxe

[glazedfaith]

I have an M2N-E SLI board with an Athlon X2 6000+ AM2 Processor. I've just been given a failing PC who's motherboard is going bad and it has a Phenom X4 9650 AM2+ Processor. ASUS will not release an update adding support of this processor for my board, but they have a BIOS for the M2N-E which is a very similar board and it does support it and a slew of others. Can I use the M2N-E BIOS in my board, and, if not, can somebody here ninja the two together to give me a functioning BIOS with extended support?

EDIT: I am not currently, nor do I plan to be, using SLI, if that has any bearing. Also, with the Phenom processor in my board, I don't even get a post and the CPU fan spins up initially and then spins to a halt a second or two later, subsequently twitching every few seconds.

As there does not appear to be anybody minding this board, I decided to try it, telling myself I was planning on buying a new board if I couldn't get this processor to work with this one anyway. I was using awdflash.exe after EZFlash 2 said it wouldn't let me because the ROM ID didn't match. awdflash.exe freezes up after I tell it to back up my current BIOS. Rebooting gets me back to normality, but the old BIOS is still loaded. Any suggestions?

[itul]

If a backup of the BIOS on your board is not that important, you can just download the latest version from ASUS as a backup and proceed with flashing it. If the flash utility complains about the ROM ID you could try to force it via the /f switch. Just bear in mind that crossflashing could result in problems up to and including the board not booting anymore. In the worst case you'd have to flash the chip externally or get a replacement chip with the correct BIOS flashed to recover from such a problem.

[Tigerfox]

I'd not do it, the two board are different enough to give you trouble and have different Chipsets. The M2N-E is NForce570 Ultra, while the SLI has nForce500 SLI, which is a renamed nForce4 SLI. As I have yet to see any nForce4/nForce500 AM2-board that supports Phenom, there ist not much hope for you.

EDIT: There may be hope and I may be wrong. The M2N-SLI uses the nForce560 SLI, which is yet another renamend nForce4 SLI, and supports even PhenomII. The two boards look very much alike. You could compare them, to find any differences in components. If there aren't any or only very minor ones, you could try flashing the M2N-SLI BIOS onto the M2N-E SLI.

This is actually the firs nForce4 AM2-board I know of supporting Phenom.

[itul]

There is actually no reason that the chipset can't support the Phenom CPU. It uses the same interconnect between the chipset and the CPU (HT 1.0 is slower but compatible). There are even boards based on nForce3 which were specifically designed for socket AM2 with support for AM2+ and AM3 CPUs.

see http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=AM2NF3-VSTA

[Tigerfox]

I know that but I always thought there was no nForce4/500/560 SLI AM2-Board out there that got an update because no mobo-manufacturer bothered to make one.

Seems like the two boards are exactly alike, so you should be able to simply flash the M2N-SLI BIOS. But you should prepare a floppy with the original BIOS for blindflashing in case something goes wrong. The same seems to apply to M2N-Plus Vista Edition and the M2N4-SLI, which uses a different soundchip, though.