Bios programming

[Badut78]

I've tried posting this on other forums with no replies. I figure it's probably too technical to be common knowledge:

On the Asus website, the latest bios version for the A7N8X-X motherboard is version 1010

The description for 1010 is "Support AMD Sempron CPU" which is self explanatory.

The description for version 1009 it says "Improve certain memory modules stability".

Has anyone with the know-how had a look at the 1009 binary to see what they changed?
Does anyone know how this extra stability for certain memory modules is acheived?

Thanks to any gurus with answers

 

[Fencer128]

Hi,

The only site I know of that has that kind of knowledge in residence are the forums at Wimsbios.

Good luck,

Andy

 

[harrkev]

I can make an educated guess.....

The hardware on your mobo has a lot of little registers. They probably default to very save (slow) values. The Bios (which is just software), then scans your hardware, and sets the registers to their best values. However, if it sets some things to aggressively (low voltage, fast timing), then things can get unstable. It is probably just relaxing the timings a little bit.

Of course, I could be wrong, but this is a reasonable guess.

 

[Peter]

That's how the stability stuff is done. Based on what has been detected (e.g. DIMMs), and what the BIOS knows the chipset and board layout can make of that, the chipset is initialized. In a desktop product, engineers usually aim for best performance first, and step back later when that's too edgy.
In industrial product, you leave a little more headroom straight from the start, since stability is absolute top priority, while "winning" benchmarks by tenths of percents is not.

 

[Badut78]

Thanks for your responses guys. Real insightful.
I like that link Fencer. It's got heaps of info. 😉