I guess there won't be many who are familiar with this issue (I mean, not many who have been in the situation), but I'm trying to prepare for what I'm going to do when the Athlon 4800+ comes in. I've read everywhere how current 939 motherboards will be compatible with the X2 processors after a BIOS update. Well, I've found the update for my motherboard. My question is: will the X2 be compatible enough to let me boot my machine and update the BIOS? Do I actually need another single-core 939 CPU installed just to flash this thing? That would really suck.

What do I do?

What should you do? Just chill out.

Don't mess with the motherboard BIOS unless you need to. Wait until after the X2 chips are in use, and give it a few weeks to see if other folks run into problems -- maybe the update you've found is buggy because it's only been tested in lab situations. If your sytem is working now, then use it.

When the chips are out there, and other people have charged into the upgrade then they'll know de facto whether it's best to do the BIOS update before or after you swap CPUs.

--Nathan

I thought the issue was that the X2 CPUs require a BIOS update to be at all compatable with current motherboards. This is a brand new PC with no current CPU. Sorry, I'd been posting about it recently, but I shouldn't have assumed everyone knew the situation.

With the way the cpu works hopefully it will just see it as single core until you install a bios that can see both cores. If not you might need to find a single core cpu or some type of hardware bios flasher. I guess there is only one quick way to find out. Have you tried trolling forums like hardocp and anandtech , they would likely know for sure .

Thanks. That would make sense, and I'll look around those places. I went by Arstechnica, but couldn't find anything.

*edit*
Thanks for the suggestion. This thread seems to have people who are reasonably certain that it'll operate as a single core CPU. Oh well, I guess I'll find out either way! I just wanted to see if there was some major disappointment coming my way

I would hope/expect it to work as a single-core until the BIOS update, but if it doesn't, then yeah, you'll need to get a single-core CPU installed to do the BIOS update. There's a reasonable amount of history for that kind of behavior, but as you said earlier, there haven't been too many people actually putting a dual-core AMD chip on an older motherboard.

--Nathan

It's definitly hard to say for sure as others have said, but I can share a similar experience.

Any Proliant server I have worked with always manages to power on with a CPU, supported or not. If it is an unsupported CPU due to unsupported firmware, it sits at a very basic "CPU UNSUPPORTED" message and starts looking at the floppy drive for a firmware file. It has enough logic to get it updated to then support the CPU. This comes in handy in situations where not all the spare mainboards have been upgraded, and a customer has one replaced.

I can't say for sure though if this tech has moved into common desktop motherboards though. It's beein in Proliants since at least 1998, so I would hope so. Then again, it's still rare to even see a PC motherboard with the ability to have the BIOS upgraded in Windows, or Linux.

How old are they? I'm pretty sure my A7N8X doesn't support it (that was a scary process, too). I've looked over the procedure for the one I'll be doing when the X2 arrives, and it doesn't look like the MSI Neo4 has this ability (of course, I'm going to flash before I install Windows anyway).

The Abit ones are about 1-2 years old and the Gigabyte ones are within the last 3-6 months or so. Northwood and Prescott basically. It might be because they're both brands usually aimed at the overclocker/tweaker crowd though.

Yeah. It's a good idea to flash before installing Windows. Years ago on some random board I had, doing one of the BIOS upgrades made Windows go nuts because some of the ACPI tables changed and Windows decided that half the detected devices weren't there anymore and needed to redetect them.

Thanks for all the help, folks! I'm a bit more confident that come setup time, we won't have to rush order a $150 processor.

Heh, as nervous as I am at the prospect of flashing the BIOS of a motherboard from an entirely new generation of PC technology, not to mention the new type of CPU and the lack of any IDE drives (yay for SATA drivers!), I'm quite excited and can't wait for the CPU to get here.

Oh, UPS, why won't you update your tracking information!?!

I can't believe you still haven't gotten the CPU they should send you a loaner I couldn't take having the pile of new stuff just sitting there waiting for the CPU.

Yeah, my genuine Intel MB (P4-2.4/533) POSTs very fast.

But then, so does the new Dell Inspiron 9300 "notebook" here. Very fast. Makes it really easy to switch (gasp!) between Linux and windows using Suspend-to-Disk and Resume-From-Disk (aka "hibernate").

Cheers

I've got a Dell PowerEdge that is incredibly slow doing POST. It's nearly 2 minutes before it actually gets around to starting the OS. Really annoying if you want to do some quick tests because you end up waiting ages each time you reboot.

One of the Dells I have has a fastboot option in the bios. Not sure but I think it turns on/off detailed memory checking. Sure makes a difference in how long the bios takes booting.

Okay....a little confused.

I got the processor today, put it in, everything looks good. I then power on the system. That's it. At the moment, when I press the power button, the power LED lights up, all the case fans go (including the CPU fan), the hard disk seems to be spinning, and I'm pretty sure that initially I hear the floppy disk being check. The problem is I wouldn't know if it is or not. I cannot get a single thing to display on the monitor. Oh, there are also no beep indicators going off.

So far I've tried a few things. I've tried connecting both the VGA and DVI cables to the video card (ATI Radeon X800), and switching the monitor inputs between the two. Nothing. I've then tried taking that card out and putting an old PCI video card in one of the PCI slots. Nothing over VGA there. I then try an old CRT monitor on both cards with the VGA connection. Still nothing.

The fact that there are no beeps when the PC powers on, combined with the fact that I think I hear the floppy being checked, leads me to think this is a video problem of some sort. Any ideas? This is tough after 12 days of waiting for the CPU.

But would it do this without displaying a thing? I'm just getting the amber light on my monitors that I've plugged in. That's all.

*edit*
Okay, I knew I'd feel dumb...and I do. This is my first experience with these new boards, and I didn't notice the additional power plug for the CPU. Oops. Thanks for the help, folks.