New Epox 8K7A Performance Bios is Here!

[Bingo13]

Link

Nice of these guys to make it available. Also on Epox's Taiwan Site now.

What are your new results or did your board come with this bios???

 

[Bingo13]

Testing results so far-

The best I could do and still run Sandra on both boards with tweaked settings-

1.33 at 1550
155 FSB
GF3- 12.40
512mb Crucial PC2100
W2K SP2

A7M266 - 768/980 now- 764/976 with latest beta
Epox 8K7A+ - 764/972 now- 772/994 with 521 bios

Best I could do with the Epox-
Epox 8K7A+
1.33 at 1580
158 FSB
GF3- 12.00 WHQL
512mb Crucial PC2100 (new batch received today, seem more tweak friendly)
W2K SP2

776/1000 (realize it took 12 times to get it to this bus speed and not have the GF3 die on me) I am sure the core can do 160 but with the GF3 and raid it will not. I have to back down some of the memory settings and take AGP to 2x while tweaking the card with NVMAX to do 158. It would lock on any game I tried and I only made it to the lobby level in 3dmark2001 once. I will try later with a G400 or something to see what the fully tweaked settings end up showing. My poor Visiontek GF3 has been hammered now, just waiting to play taps here shortly.

 

[Mungla]

Bingo, can you post a link to a website that explains what I need to install once I get Win2k installed? This is my first AMD motherboard and I'm having a bit of trouble. I have the Epox CD, does it contain the appropriate files?

 

[buck]

Great find!

 

[Bingo13]

CKY-

Have you tried this bios yet? Just wondering as your previous scores were very impressive!

later....


Mungla,

Replied in another thread to you concerning your question.

 

[TheTeacher]

CKY That BIOS is dated the same as the one I sent you the other day. I talked to Chris and it is the same one I sent you already. With the drop in mem performance. No biggie.
Mike

 

[TheTeacher]

I think they use default mem settings.
Old BIOS @166MHz: 775/1017

New BIOS @166MHz: 730/970

That's why I have a PCI 66MHz RAID card. = )

 

[buck]

I noticed that this morning. The BAK.bin is the shipping bios right?

 

[TheTeacher]

Yes it is CKY,
Mike

 

[Mungla]

What is the best BIOS to be running as of now? I flashed my BIOS from the shipped version to version 1521. I haven't had time to run Sisoft on the memory yet, but I scored the same in 3dmark 2001.

 

[fishingeek]

I know this is probably a stupid question but how do you flash the bios? (new to this)

 

[Mungla]

Check out Epox's website at www.epox.com .. They didn't have any of the bundled BIOS files for the 8K7A yet, so I downloaded the zip for a different motherboard and modified its .bat file so that it would look at the different .bin file for the 8K7A. I'm sure someone has a zipped version for this motherboard, if not I will zip up my floppy for you and post it on the net. Epox's website has instructions telling you what needs to be done in order to update the bios too.

 

[fishingeek]

Could you e-mail me the zip? Thanks alot!!

 

[Mungla]

Sure thing. This is a zip with the latest BIOS + flash util. You need to make a plain bootdisk, with no drivers. The easiest way to do this that I've found is to goto the dos prompt and type SYS A: .. I've noticed the sys command only works in Win9x. After you've booted from the disk, just type update at the command prompt.