Re: A8V Deluxe: ECC options removed from latest BIOS!

In article <43499226$1_2@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Christian Busch
<christian.busch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I just bought an A8V Deluxe because of it's ECC capabilities (it shall
> be used to do some very light server tasks).
> The original BIOS version on it was 1010, which offered many options
> for ECC operation (like scrubbing, chip kill and so on). Because I
> bought an AMD 64 with the latest Venice core, I flashed the BIOS to
> version 1014, which is the first one to fully support this CPU as per
> Asus online support database.
> But I was really annoyed when I had to find out that Asus removed all
> the nice ECC options in each of the later BIOS versions. The ECC menu
> always leads to a blank screen with no options! What's the reason for
> this nonsense?
> Asus is supposed to be a manufacturer producing for professionals, but
> with these advanced options removed from the BIOS I can instead buy
> crap like MSI or Epox, which are cheaper anyway...
> I hope that this group is read by some Asus representative who gets
> the responsible BIOS programmer's a** kicked for this stupidity and
> this nonsense fixed asap!
>
> Regards
>
> Christian

Rest assured that no one at Asus reads this newsgroup :-)
They don't even read the posts on their own forums.

There was one poster here, who would on occasion, notice significant
trends with a particular motherboard. That guy had a couple email
contacts inside Asus, and he would report to Asus, the customers
problems. That is about the limit, for info in this newsgroup
getting to Asus.

Your best option, is to phone Asus tech support. That will be
a toll call, as they don't have 1-800 service. If you wish to
reduce the cost of the call to you, _somewhere_ on the Asus
web site, you can fill out the details of your problem on a
web form and submit it. You will get a trouble ticket number
back in response. Then, when you phone Asus at your expense,
you tell them the trouble ticket number, and the tech support
can bring your report up on their screen. That will reduce the
time wasted collecting such info as your name and phone
number etc.

In terms of the BIOS design and support, you have to realize that
the people responsible for the BIOS, change through the life of
the product. For about the first five releases, the development
people seem to have a direct hand in preparing and repairing
BIOS problems. BIOS numbers much higher than that, or BIOS
whose only release info is "support new CPU", seem to be done
by amateurs. There have been several motherboards in the past,
where high release number BIOS were bad. There was a couple
BIOS released _in a row_ for A7N8X family that were bad, and
were removed from download. The implication is that the testing
and quality control is slack, after the initial push to finish
the BIOS is over. This observation is one of the reasons I
do not upgrade my "high BIOS number" motherboard BIOS to even
higher version numbers, due to the danger of downloading a dud.

In terms of technical info about the processor and where to look
for the settings, doc 26094 from AMD, covers the register map of
the Athlon64/Opteron processors. You can use the info in this
document, to see whether the processor supports ECC or scrubbing.
I don't see a reason for AMD to be removing this, as both socket
754 and 939 have provision for ECC, and there is no real saving
for them to remove it.

Perhaps you can construct a workaround, until the amateur BIOS
support people can stumble on how they broke the BIOS :-)

Northbridge capabilities - pg.164. Also has info on scrubbing.
http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/white_papers_and_tech_docs/26094.PDF

(WPCREDIT and A64tweaker mentioned. It is possible you could use
WPCREDIT in the "Windows world" to emulate the ECC enable script
in the "Linux world" below. A number of calls to WPCREDIT could
give you the equivalent of "setpci" in the Linux world. With
appropriate time delays between executing each instance...)
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=37345

Checking settings in the "Linux world"
http://groups.google.ca/group/alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.asus/browse_frm/thread/c691015dfa1341e5/b6f042567b3c0639

Same author donated ECC enable script for "Linux world"
http://groups.google.ca/group/alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.asus/browse_frm/thread/fb6e50e2a3dbd4f3/05f5a836792ac9a7

ECC scripts from Jaakko Hyvätti :
http://hyvatti.iki.fi/~jaakko/sw/

Tell us what you cook up :-)
Paul
.

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