BIOS Flashing-Overclocking Fun with a K7S5A

Disclaimer:
It was strongly suggested to me, that I tell you that you try these things "At Your Own Risk". I am not responsible for anything bad that happens, and you should consider "Finagle's First and Second Laws" to be fully operational.
1. The Perversity of the Universe Tends to a Maximum.
2. If Something Can Go Wrong, It Will.

Good Luck. Take it slow. Have fun.

Another Slight Detour

While playing Link Tag, looking for manuals and drivers for the Dumpster project I am tinkering with, I found some nice stuff for a couple of ECS K7S5A mobo's I had in the ..err.. parts bin. These are nice little low/mid end SocketA (AMD 462) mobo's, but are not known for their tweaking abilities. But it seems somebody took the time and effort to make a downloadable custom BIOS that Enabled the bios settings that ECS had hidden.

Not only that, but links to sites that show several ways to "hard OC" a SocketA cpu, so you can try to fry your system even if there isn't a hacked bios for your mobo floating around. I included the main links at the end of this article

Looks easy enough...

...our hero tells himself. <But we know better, don't we. --Editor>
First thing to do is figure which mobo to experiment on, then flash the latest Official BIOS to the mobo. One is a Version 1.x, with what looks like a capacitor that is starting to bulge (not a good thing). The other is a Version 3.x, with a BIOS that already has support for Athlon XP cpus, and looks like it is in good shape. Since I have already had both up and running, this is a no brainer! the V. 1.x.

Setting up

Since this is going to be a "grenade system", I went with an AMD Duron 750Mhz cpu, a stick of 256meg PC100 ram, a Matrox Mystique 220 PCI video card with 4megs of onboard ram, a Western Digital 10gig ATA-66 hard drive, an old 8x DVD ROM drive (only because it was already on the bench, I had just finished testing it), and a Floppy drive

Next, boot into the BIOS and Disable the onboard NIC, modem, sound, USB, and power management.. Set the video to PCI, and fiddle with a few other settings (like the boot order). Then sit in the System Monitor section for about 20 minutes and watch the temp and volts.

Not bad. Volts are OK, and the cpu temp is hanging around the 113F mark (44C). Save settings and Exit.

In one of my recent 'diving' adventures, I ...ummm.. acquired a Window 2000 Pro SP4 cd. It looks a little scratchy, and this is as good a time as any to see if it still works. Drop it in the DVD, push the Power Button, and what do you know... the Install screen came up! Went through the menus and left the hard drive Formatted as Fat32 (in case I needed to hook it to my W98SE system), and while it was doing its thing, I went back to the ECS site to check if I needed any other drivers than the ones I downloaded for W98 awhile back. I had already DL'd the flash program and latest official update, plus a couple of the OC hacked ones, earlier.

Clicking between the 1x and 3x DL pages (Firefox's tabbed browsing has me spoiled), the only thing I need to get is the Lan drivers for 2000/XP and the sound drivers for the 1x mobo. Seems they changed the sound chip between the 1x and 3x mobos. The others say ALL OS's, and I don't care about the AMR riser slot (onboard modem) drivers. Added everything to a Driver Archive cd, dug up another Archive cd with some programs I would need on it, and waited for W2K to finish.

W2K finished with no problems. I copied the stuff off the cd's into folders on the hard drive. I installed QuickZip and unzipped the files I was going to need, and installed and set up Motherboard Monitor 5, so I could keep track of the temps when I got around to OC'ing. I even Enabled the onboard NIC (Network Interface Card. aka: Lan), and loaded the drivers.

Some days it is almost worth getting out of bed!

They're Baaaacck.....

Spoke too soon... That sound you hear, is the Computer Gods laughing. <insert heavy sigh>

When I put a floppy disk in the drive to Format and set up the flash bootdisk, the floppy drive didn't see it. Not a problem. Turns out I grab it off the stack of drives I hadn't tested yet. I will just toss it in the garbage can and hook up another one. There must be a dozen of them floating around here. And I know most are (were) working.

Clicked the START menu, clicked Shutdown, W2K did its thing, and STOPPED at the Safe To Turn Off Your Computer Now screen!

What The #$%^!! Why won't it Power Off?!?! Never mind. I will figure it out later. Press the Power Button for 5 seconds, and it turns off.
<note to self: do NOT kick hard objects while barefoot>

Tossed the old drive, grabbed another one off a different stack, hooked it up making sure the gray data cable is on correctly (the #1 data pin and power plug on floppies can be any which way, while the #1 data pin on IDE drives is always on the side closest to the power plug), and booted the system.

Double click My Computer, right click on the floppy, left click Format, and <deleted expletive --Editor>! No Option to copy System files to the floppy! Oh, well. As long as I am here, let's check the drive. Click Format, and everything seems to go well.

Took the disk over to the W98 machine, and just to be ornery, reformatted it, and copied the system files to it. As long as I was there, I copied the flash program and the bios update to it. The files were still on that hard drive from DL'ing them. All things considered, I think it's time to take a Chill Pill, and take up the fight tomorrow. Besides, my big toe still hurts...

Another day, another headache

Alright! Let's get back to it.

Popped the floppy disk into the drive and fired it up. After a few minutes the A:\ prompt showed up on the screen. So far, so good. I know that they suggest making an AUTOEXEC.BAT file with the flash program and update file in it, but I like to do it manually. So I typed in the program name and... Error Codes alllllll over the place. Now what's wrong!?!?!

Maybe it's the wrong program version. Went back to the other computer and put an older version I had, on the disk. Tried it again. Same thing. OK, maybe this drive is funky also, it does sound like it's dragging a little, so how about a different trick.

Rebooted to a clean A:\ prompt, changed to the C:\ drive, went to the Folder with the bios stuff in it, and typed the new flash file name. Bingo! Some good info and a different error code. On the downside, the last flash program I ran, had a menu that gave you options to Save the Current Bios, or pick the new file. This one didn't have a menu. Let's try it with the update file added to the command line.

That's the ticket! Smooth as silk. A couple of minutes later, I get the Update Successful, and I need to reboot.

When the BIOS screen comes back up, I enter the BIOS to see what kind of changes it made. While in there, I notice that under Power Management, this bios has a setting for ACPI AWARE OS, and it was set to NO. I must have done it when I disabled the power management stuff, without realizing it. Could be my problem with the power not turning off. So I set it to YES, and set the Default Settings (something else they suggest, to limit problems if you have been playing with the setting), Save and Exit, and when it rebooted, I let it go until it started looking at the floppy for the OS, and turned it off. Booted up again and went back into the Bios, to reset my preferred tweaks, and rebooted into W2k. Tried the Shutdown, to see if it fixed the power off problem... Nope.

When losing... Cheat

Not knowing much about W2K, except it is just different enough, that my knowledge from W98 would only be of limited help. I spent a bunch of hours, over several days, looking through the OS settings and digging in the Registry, trying to fix this. With no luck. Though I did decide that during the install process, the disabled bios setting, made the OS not able to send the command to kill the power supply. It's got to be in the Registry somewhere, I just can't find it. Consider this fair warning.

I finally got tired of messing with it, and did a Dirty Install, which fixed it. Works like a charm, now.

If it ain't broke... try harder

Now that this little beasty is running good, time to put the OC BIOS on it, and see what kind of problems pop up. First thing to do, is put another floppy drive on it, and get the correct files copied to the bootdisk.

I need to put PC133 ram in there, to handle the faster FSB speeds. No reason to risk the DDR sticks. Let see.... what's in the bag? A matched pair of 64meg 133's! That's only 128megs, but should work fine for testing. Cool! Just putting in the 133's made the bootup feel a little perkier.

For some reason, I am having trouble getting this thing to run from a floppy drive (I tried 4), but it runs like a scalded dog from the hard drive. So it's all good. The OC bios is about 6 months older than the official flash I put on there, but it went on without a hitch. It even had an option to press F2 - Load Defaults, when it was done. Sweet!

Hmmmm.... A handful of new setting options all through the bios, but not worth going into here. Things like: I now have a setting for how the power switch acts. Very Nice. I will just set it back to my standard tweaks for now, and see if W2K will boot.

So far, so good. But it wanted to reinstall the NIC drivers. Strange, but not serious. Shutdown and reboot into the BIOS, again.

Set the CPU/FSB from 100/100 to 107/107, Save and Exit. WooHoo!!! Running at 804MHz. It should be 802.5MHz, but the README file said the OC Bios pushed FSB a little faster than what the numbers would indicate, and the Official Bios was a little slower. In fact, in MM5, it showed the CPU running at 749MHz with the official bios, instead of 750MHz. Works for me!

W2K is stable. I think I will let Motherboard Monitor run for about 30 minutes, and see what kind of IDLE temps I get.

OK. Holding steady at 107F (40C). Most excellent. Let's see what happens at 110/100.

I decided to use the Ultimate Boot CD, instead of risking my W2K install. I ran one of the benchmarks on it to stress the system a little. I won't post the numbers here, as they wouldn't mean much to you, other than to show that they did get better.

The one strange thing I noticed, was that the more I raised the FSB, the more the hard drive score dropped (not the good way), and when I got to 112MHz, it came up a little. So I changed the FSB settings in random order, and the number bounced over a small range with no rhyme or reason. I got the highest and second lowest score at 112MHz. You will get some score variation because of the Random Read/Write/Seek tests; and I would need to have a record of different rig-configs, run with this benchmark, to know if it normal or has a problem. But that probably won't happen, since I have other things to do besides run benchmarks all the time.

Still, I guess you want to hear some of my conclusions. So....

Unlike the mobo's that are made for these kind of games, the OC Bios didn't have a lot of flexibility built into it. But it was wayyyy better than the OEM Bios.
No way to increase the voltages for the cpu or memory. But some of the options bumped it up a little.
No way to change the Multiplier.
You can't change the cpu bus and memory bus speeds separately, and most of the supplied Options were synchronized (100/100). That being said, here is what I came up with.
- At 100/100 (750MHz), the boot screen said I had a 766MHz cpu, and the bench program said 757MHz. Nice and perky.
- At 107/107 (802.5MHz), Bios screen said 800Mhz. The benchmark said 804MHz. Everything worked fine. (see earlier comments above)
- At 110/110 (825MHz), the Bios claimed I had 850MHz, and the benchmark said 826MHz. The Bios number isn't as bad as it seems. My reading had warned me that bios's can be stupid about what CPU is on the mobo when messing with the bus speeds.
- At 112/112 (840MHz), the bios still said 850MHz and the benchmark said 841MHz. W2K still booted and ran OK, but I started getting a little bit of flicker on the screen, and one time it started to Boot, and then did a Memory Dump, instead of Logging On. I turned it Off and back On, and it booted fine. It did do some extra hard drive grinding after the Desktop came up. Probably just checking itself out after the bad boot.
- At 124/124 (930MHz), the bios said 933MHz, and would POST. But the UBCD cd would start to load, and then crash out into a Prompt, instead of the Menu it was suppose to go to. I didn't even try W2K.
I never saw the CPU Temp go over 114F (46C), and I was only using stock heatsink/fan that was laying around. The temps will probably go up when I put it in a case, but with about 25 degrees of headroom, there should not be any problems.

All in All, I got enough of a hardware buzz from this project, that I don't even mind having to do all this typing. I might fiddle with the bios settings a little more and see if I can get it to run at 124/124, but mostly I think I will drop it back to 110/110 if I keep it as a W2K test system to have around as a reference. That is still a 10% boost and seems to be stable. And for a Duron on a run-of-the-mill mobo, that ain't too shabby. The screen flicker at 112/112, tells me I would need to tweak some other setting in the Bios to really trust it as a test board. Maybe bumping up the Refresh Rate will do it. Or I could see what happens with an AGP card, instead of this PCI one. As you can see, there are still things I could do, but I found out what I wanted to know. And I need to get back to the Dumpster project.

Besides, I have the Version 3.x mobo, with an Athlon 1GHz cpu, AGP videocard, and DDR ram, I can put together and juice up. Should make my primary W98SE system just scream. I can't wait....