Surprisingly solid support on old AMD FM1 board for Windows 10

[nerp]

Thought I'd share my experience upgrading an older AMD box to Windows 10.

Turns out MSI updated the BIOS for my A75MA-P35 board in 2013 for Windows 8, providing for fast boot. Sweet. Flashed BIOS and went without issue.

Windows 10 detected all my devices and had the board fully operational with drivers for _everything_ upon first boot.

Realtek has updated Windows 10 drivers for the audio.

A former MCE box running WIndows 7, the machine had an external USB TV tuner that I'll be selling. But it also had an internal PCIe card, an AverMedia combo tuner that came out years ago. Windows 10 even found and installed a proper driver for that. Found a program - Sichbo PVR and it lets me use the tuner to watch live tv over ClearQAM and OTA with an HD antenna. Sweet!

The box has been re-purposed from the living room to my home office. Currently being used to manage some backup and sync tasks across my network, podcasts, steaming radio and video and serving as a spare, dedicated machine/display to give me more room to work.

Performance on this machine is surprisingly awesome. It's an older FM1 motherboard. The A4 LLano chip is pretty pokey at just 2.7 ghz. The Samsung 840 SSD I have in there is not as fast as the newer EVOs I have. But I'm very, very impressed by how it's running. It's running cooler than under 7 and much faster. Even when I'm slamming the CPU with 100 percent usage the UI and apps are totally responsive. No hitching, jerk or lag.

AMD has new, updated drivers for the platform. That was nice.

In conclusion, I walked into this upgrade thinking that support/drivers might not be awesome and I'd perhaps have to yank the tv tuner card. I also expected this machine to be painfully slow. The exact opposite happened.

Now that I've got it running I'm looking at the board and realizing that it was pretty sweet at the time it came out. FM1 had a short lifespan, but this has USB 3.0, 6 SATA III ports, supremely good audio, solid caps. Your average user who doesn't game wouldn't think this is a slow machine. Plus, the benefit of AMD's APUs for low-end gear is evident. Hardware decoding and other niceties means the budget cpu here isn't lagging with 1080p video. I'm reminded why I got it to run a Media Center experience.

New life for old gear. Wooho!

FYI, the machine ran fine WITHOUT the bios update to enable "windows 8" features, which essentially was a UEFI switch and fast boot capability, among other things. But I flipped the switch and did a fresh 10 install after, anyway. Fast boot is nice on this.

 

[Eug]

ALL three of my Windows 10 machines are older than your FM1.

None of the three have updated drivers from the computer manufacturer. Latest are for Windows 7, but for stuff like graphics, I'm using the GPU manufacturer's graphics drivers which have been updated on an ongoing basis.

One problem I ran into is that the Windows 10 installer felt the graphics drivers were not up to date, and then would deactivate my graphics drivers and install the MS generic graphics drivers. I'd then have to reinstall the manufacturer driver, and then a few weeks later Windows Update would repeat that process. However I attribute this to Windows Update being far too aggressive. It's been fixed now.

The other problem is Win 10 didn't really like updating from a well-used Windows 7. Updating from a clean Win 7 install worked well, and a clean install of Win 10 also worked well, but upgrading a several year old install of Win 7 was iffy.

But now all three machines are running Win 10 just fine. And yes, it's faster than before. It was particularly noticeable on my Atom machine and my Pentium SU4100 machine. Can't say for my Athlon II X3 though, since in the process I also put in an SSD so of course it's faster. Machines are listed below in my sig.

 

[nerp]

Cool.

I reserved a Win10 copy by upgrading the machine about two weeks ago and then reverting back. Both steps were flawless and I was impressed. Then, when I went to upgrade again, I ran the Windows 10 upgrade assistant and it acted like it was going to upgrade, it would reboot and come back to 7 like nothing happened. Then I saw it as an option in Windows Update, so I chose that but then the upgrader popped up and was saying it was failing, rebooted again, nothing. So I created a usb installer with the media creation tool, ran THAT and it finally upgraded. Then I did the BIOS flash. Then I broke the install because the new UEFI boot stuff and it switched SATA from AHCI to IDE, so Windows started booting into "automatically booting into recovery mode" or something, so I just said screw it, booted the USB key, did a clean install and it was fast and perfect.

The real nice thing is having network drivers from the beginning.

Windows 10 alerted me that ATI control panels needed my attention. Turns out there's a setting to turn on hardware decoding and it's normally disabled? So it was telling me I should enable it and did. Curious why they just don't make it the default?

And, of course, this whole process involved me opening it up, blowing out years of dust, giving it a real proper cleaning, tidying up the cables a bit. The old PSU fan was making grinding noises, so I swapped in a new PSU I actually had on hand as a spare. A rare "Flex" PSU that came with the case. Funny story: my first FM1 motherboard died an ungracious death years ago after I first built the machine. I bought a new PSU thinking it was the PSU based on the symptoms. Turns out it was the motherboard so I had this odd PSU sitting in a box never used.

Sure came in handy. I looked in the old used PSU and it was caked up and the fan looked problematic to replace. Suddenly I remembered the spare, managed to find the box in the garage after some rooting around and lo and behold it was there. Looked at it closely and man, it's brand stinkin new inside. All shiny and everything. Popped the sucker in and now the machine is so much quieter.

In an effort to consolidate and declutter, I stripped some older laptop HDs out of machines I no longer use. Turns out I have a couple hitachi 7200rpm 320gb drives. Going to pop them in this weekend, use Windows Storage Spaces to make 1 640gb volume and I have a dumping ground for downloads and crap so I don't have to use the SSD for that kind of stuff. Speed ain't much of a concern with this box.

 

[Eug]

I just checked. My main machine is an AM3 socket machine. BIOS date 2010.

It works great with SSD + 8 GB RAM for the stuff I use it for (no gaming). The only caveat is it's only got USB 2. I installed a circa 2011 D-Link USB 3 card and it caused the computer to crash. Removed it, and Win 10 is fine. That's using the native Win 10 driver for the card. But I'm not surprised since Win 7 would crash with the card too, using the D-Link drivers.

Either I'll go searching for another USB 3 card with a more recent chipset, or else I'll just do without.

Otherwise, assuming the hardware lasts, I could see myself using this for the next 5 years, since I just need mainly business type apps and web browsers.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Yeah, waltchan over at the CPU & OC sub-forum clued me in on some ECS FM1 A55 boards that had a new enough UEFI / BIOS for Windows 8.1, that they supported secure / fast boot. They support Windows 10 wonderfully. A clean install finds drivers for everything automatically. And I can OC the bus if I leave it set to IDE mode. Using A4-3420 OCed to 3.15Ghz, nice and snappy with an SSD.

 

[nerp]

Yeah, waltchan over at the CPU & OC sub-forum clued me in on some ECS FM1 A55 boards that had a new enough UEFI / BIOS for Windows 8.1, that they supported secure / fast boot. They support Windows 10 wonderfully. A clean install finds drivers for everything automatically. And I can OC the bus if I leave it set to IDE mode. Using A4-3420 OCed to 3.15Ghz, nice and snappy with an SSD.

If I weren't so content, or if this board was FM2 or FM2+, I'd be looking at maxing out this socket. But alas, the CPU support for this is just not there. I could probably pick up the fastest Llano chip out there but that would require hunting around or maybe even ebay (shudder).