D875PBZLK BIOS rev & PAT

[cmetz]

So today, my Intel D875PBZLK motherboard arrived, and I'm getting ready to set it up. Check over at The Inquirer and today's comic blasts Intel for... the 875PBZLK disabling PAT in BIOSes >p05. What?! A Google search later and it appears to be all true, including the part where Intel lies to their customers about the situation.

This all seems to have happened a while ago, and the current BIOS is p21. I was wondering if anyone who knows more about this problem can comment as to whether it ever got fixed (Intel re-enabled PAT) or what the story really is/was. I am building special purpose test boxes around these boards, and it's all about I/O and memory performance... so PAT is very important to me, while BIOS features mostly aren't.

Thanks!

 

[us3rnotfound]

yeah, i was on P21, 'till today when I read all that, so I just flashed to P05, although there isn't much of a diff

 

[RalfHutter]

Howdy! Nothing new to report about PAT being disabled on all the post-P05 875PBZ BIOSes, as it still is. Intel has improved the memory performance a bit since BIOS P09 so even without PAT being enabled on the newest BIOS the memory performance is almost identical to the PAT-enabled performance of the P05 BIOS. (but if PAT was actually enabled you'd get another 3-5% performance increase!)

Have you read the giant 875PBZ thread over at ABXforums? That's where we first discovered this issue, sometime back in early August.



Edit:

Oh, and shminu: Since you're running that 533MHz CPU your PAT remains enabled even in the post-P05 BIOSes. It's "only" the 800MHz processors that are effected by this problem.

 

[us3rnotfound]

Oh, and shminu: Since you're running that 533MHz CPU your PAT remains enabled even in the post-P05 BIOSes. It's "only" the 800MHz processors that are effected by this problem.

ah, so would it be smart of me to should re-flash it to P21? Or is PO5 still more stable?

Thanks

 

[RalfHutter]

Originally posted by: shminu

Oh, and shminu: Since you're running that 533MHz CPU your PAT remains enabled even in the post-P05 BIOSes. It's "only" the 800MHz processors that are effected by this problem.

ah, so would it be smart of me to should re-flash it to P21? Or is PO5 still more stable?

Thanks

I'd run some benchmarks with P05, reflash back to P21 and run the benches again. Unless P05 gives you noticeably better performance I'd stick with P21. It seems like a good, stable BIOS except for the "no-PAT" problem, which isn't an issue for you.

 

[cmetz]

RalfHutter, I found the ABXforums thread.. it's a bit unwieldly, though. They desperately need a better search function over there!

Last time I bought an Intel motherboard, it was a NX chipset with an RZ1000... a RMA and a bunch of software fixes were what it took to get as close to what was promised as was gonna happen. The PBZ is already giving me feelings of deja vu from ten years ago...

Most critically, I have a rev 205 board (brand new from ZipZoomFly...), and when I cold boot it, sometimes for no good reason the CMOS checksum comes up invalid, the configuration's all gone. This is pretty much a show-stopper for me. BIOS P05. I'm probably going to try P21 and see if my stability problems get fixed, but the memory performance drop (PAT, no PAT, whatever, it's clearly a drop from 05 to 21 from what I'm reading) may be a show-stopper for me too.

 

[RalfHutter]

cmetz - The meat of the PAT discussion started around early August in that giant thread. Read through the August/early Sept part of it and you'll learn all the gory details.

There's also been two different threads on two different forums (Ars and SilentPCReview) where ZipZoomFly has sent refurbished 875PBZs to people. One guy RMA'd the first refurb and recieved another refurb in it's place. ZZF claimed that had no control over what Intel sends them so they refunded his money after the second refurb. The boards people were getting from ZZF had either the outside "anti-tamper" sticker replaced with a new one, or the inside yellow sticker on the ESD bag was already torn open and/or replaced with a second one.

The board's a very good board except for the PAT thing. There aren't really any other common issues with it. Since there's over 4000 replies in that ABX thread we've gathered a lot of feedback on the 875PBZ and I feel confident in saying that it's a board worth sticking with, as long as you can live with the PAT issue.