MSI K8N Neo2 + Winchester... BIOS question

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I'm about to build a S939 system and have to decide between Abit AV8 and MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum... both board don't natively support Winchester CPUs so I'd obviously have to patch them up to 1.3/1.5 - should be hard enough without a matching NON-winchester CPU

I have in mind that you can patch the Neo2 without a non-winchester cpu because it does not spill an error code first of all like the AV8 does but allows you to flash the BIOS first...? I don't recall where I read this and can't find it either so basically I'm lost and don't want to spend $20+ to remove my flash memory, send it to MSI or some other bios patching company, and get it back after 2 weeks.

any help appreciated.
thanks in advance!

 

[Icepick]

The MSI K8N NEO2 WILL support the Winchester CPU as long as you have either one stick of RAM installed in slot one or two sticks in slots one and three. The issue here is that the board will not run in dual channel mode (RAM installed in slots 1&2) under the old BIOS version (v1.2 and below). But it will run in single channel mode with the Winchester. When you build your system, here's what to do:
1. Install one stick of RAM in slot 1 (or two sticks in slots 1 and 3) and boot it in single channel.
2. Install Windows.
3. Use MSI's Live Update utility to upgrade to BIOS version 1.3.
4. Install the second stick of RAM in slot 2 for dual channel.

The MSI boards might be shipping with BIOS v1.3 already and the above steps might not be necessary, depends on which BIOS version you have. In that case you won't need to upgrade the BIOS to get dual channel to work.

 

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that's really good news, thank you!

 

[rgreen83]

skip 1.3 and go straight to 1.41, spent a month trying to get this board working til this bios came out, now its rock solid with a 20% overclock! And icepik is right about the one stick of memory, actually get windows installed and everything setup before installing the second stick, it will save you trouble in the end. Also do not use the IDE connector closest to the atx power plugin, it freezes the system at detection. And dont use the bottom two sata if you plan to overclock, they dont lock. And get a usb keyboard and mouse if you can, the PS/2 ports have trouble sometimes. Dont use the bottom pci slot, it is for the wireless adaptor. And dual channel is different than most on this board, use the two closest to the cpu. Do these things and you could get yours setup 29 days faster than me!

http://www.weckstrom.com/msibios/

 

[floppydisk191]

Originally posted by: icepik
The MSI K8N NEO2 WILL support the Winchester CPU as long as you have either one stick of RAM installed in slot one or two sticks in slots one and three. The issue here is that the board will not run in dual channel mode (RAM installed in slots 1&2) under the old BIOS version (v1.2 and below). But it will run in single channel mode with the Winchester. When you build your system, here's what to do:
1. Install one stick of RAM in slot 1 (or two sticks in slots 1 and 3) and boot it in single channel.
2. Install Windows.
3. Use MSI's Live Update utility to upgrade to BIOS version 1.3.
4. Install the second stick of RAM in slot 2 for dual channel.

The MSI boards might be shipping with BIOS v1.3 already and the above steps might not be necessary, depends on which BIOS version you have. In that case you won't need to upgrade the BIOS to get dual channel to work.

Do you have to install windows first.

 

[imported_TimJ]

Originally posted by: icepik
The MSI K8N NEO2 WILL support the Winchester CPU as long as you have either one stick of RAM installed in slot one or two sticks in slots one and three. The issue here is that the board will not run in dual channel mode (RAM installed in slots 1&2) under the old BIOS version (v1.2 and below). But it will run in single channel mode with the Winchester. When you build your system, here's what to do:
1. Install one stick of RAM in slot 1 (or two sticks in slots 1 and 3) and boot it in single channel.
2. Install Windows.
3. Use MSI's Live Update utility to upgrade to BIOS version 1.3.
4. Install the second stick of RAM in slot 2 for dual channel.

The MSI boards might be shipping with BIOS v1.3 already and the above steps might not be necessary, depends on which BIOS version you have. In that case you won't need to upgrade the BIOS to get dual channel to work.

That didn't work for my K8N Neo2. I had it paired up with a 90nm 3500+. I tried a ton of configurations of memory in various slots using various types and I could not get my system to boot. I'm fairly certain that the reason the board wasn't working was because of an older version of the BIOS that didn't support the 90nm CPUs. There is also the possibility that it was defective, but that would seem to be less likely than just an old version of the BIOS.

 

[DaveRun]

Tube: Just so you know, during XP install, to update the bios you are supposed to run the software and bios file from the harddrive after booting with a bootdisk, this requires a fat32 drive. There is a way to use another type of boot disk which creates a ram drive, but for simplicity I created a small fat32 drive during install to handle this (also for file transfer to Linux but that is another story).

 

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FAT32 shouldn't be a problem, still got lots of older disks.

I just ordered the Neo2... I pray that it either comes with a BIOS that supports the winchester by default or is able to boot up with 1 ram stick so I can flash manually!