Originally posted by: Kraeoss
but the e2180 is a 65 nm chip so it'll work right out of the box. or am i mistaken ?
Yes, that's the exact processor that I used myself. Any processor that was released before the P45 chipset was released will work just fine.
Originally posted by: VirtualLarry
That's the first I've ever heard of that. And most of the new Gigabyte boards have hardware dual-bios. Haven't heard of backup BIOS on HD either.
I do believe that Gigabyte is the first board maker to try it. Unless they've already had so many problems with it, that they've stopped using it, it applies to all of their boards that the names start with EP. BTW, you wouldn't hear about it, unless someone made the mistake I mentioned in my first post, or wiped their hard drive (it writes the data to the boot sector), then had a failed overclock or other change to the BIOS that wouldn't allow the board to post.
(How would that even work? If the BIOS is bad/unworkable, how is it going to access the HD to get to the backup BIOS, if the BIOS doesn't work to read the HD? It can't!)
Exactly the same way that a failed overclock with any other board works. Motherboards have other "code" they use, besides the actual CMOS. If there's a no-POST situation, the motherboard instead goes to whatever it uses as it's backup (which it does with no help from the CMOS). With most boards, it's just a duplicate copy of the stock CMOS, that's stored in the EEPROM. The Gigabyte boards are just storing it in on the hard drive's boot sector. As long as you don't change hard drives (without ghosting the old partition to the new one), or delete the partion or overwrite the boot sector for any reason, it would
presumably work exactly like other boards work with a failed POST.
edit: The other code they use is called a BIOS. You can't make changes to your BIOS, when you press Delete or F2, on boot, you're only making changes to your CMOS, which isn't the same thing as a BIOS. The two are related (very, very related), but they aren't the same thing.
