Be Excellent To Each Other

I just flashed my bios and I am still alive to talk about it

haha. Thought it deserved a thread of it's own

Nice thing is my GPU has dropped 10c at idle and is now sitting comfortably at 54c instead of the 64c I was at. Had to be done, because within about 30 secs of gaming it revs like a pilchard. Any way, let the bios flashing jokes continue.

not really. Could have used one of the tens of pc threads you have started

My guess is that you didn't try and insert and alienhead this time

"revs like a pilchard"

He is though.

Ah, Mrs Chris #5.

Buy a Mac Amstrad.

The new Alienware product line is delivered.

I think I need to flash my bios again with a beta bios to get the motherboard to cope with the memory upgrade I'm deliberating getting.

This time, it needs to be done with a floppy disk, it seems. Who the hell still has a floppy disk drive?

I have several.

Well I didn't have a choice really. I noticed my GPU idling 64c which is 10 over normal for this card.

It should idle between 48 and 55ish so I knew something was amiss. It's not that it's a worrying temp for the card, it was just that as soon as you play a game and the graphics load the fan was going straight to full. I don't know how many of you have ever heard a 280GTX (or 260) at full pelt but it's noisy.. Really noisy.

I looked at my bios and it was 1802. It was revised to 1920 or something to add CPU support (which would be like, my CPU) and then changed to 2020 to fix some suspend issues. Any way, all done now and PC is happier than ever

This time I didn't use Winflash I used Asus EZ flash which is an app built into bios.

After all the ribbings I have taken? wouldn't have been anywhere near as much fun

A brilliant thread title. It really conveys the general gist of the topic covered. 73%

/takes a bow.

Actually I'm known for a bit of that

Can't you just do a JC thread merge, sort of like his own personal BnB?

His flashing antics must be stopped!!

In all of my years owning PCs, I've never felt the need to flash my bios. What does it achieve?

Other than possibly breaking your computer of course.

From the little I understand of what JC has been on about, it appears to be some nerdly form of playing Russian roulette.

What was in the new BIOS that would change GPU temperatures? I can't get my head around that bit. It might change reported GPU temperatures, I suppose.

I suspect it exposes more overclocking options and tweaks

Hardware incompatibilities is the main one. My graphics card didn't work with the bios it came with (the gfx card hadn't been released when I got the motherboard) but a new bios sorted that issue. Similary, the current bios only supports a certain amount of RAM, when the hardware is capable of more. An updated bios would sort that. JCs original problem was that the bios didn't support his CPU properly.

I've only rarely needed to do it, but generally the closer to cutting edge you are, the more commonly it'll be required.

Well the CPU wasn't supported apparently, even though it was listed in post as being a Phenom 2 x4 940BE. Infact, scrub that.. I just went back to look again and this time I scrolled down...

I had bios 1802, but look at the bios released after that.



So god knows what was causing it, but there was clearly a problem with bios 1802 that was fixed in the next revision.. 2202 was released to fix a suspend problem but obviously had all the other fixes in too 1802 was what I was running prior, so it was actually very important. I don't think the temps were reporting wrong because you couldn't even touch the backplate of the card and could feel the hot air from about 10 inches out of the back of the card

And doc, when I say noise from the fan I mean intollerable noise. It was so bad that I had to put my headphones on and crank them up really loud just so I could hear what was going on in the game.

Yeah, sure, I'm not questioning what you saw. Just interested as to how that can be possible. I'm not enough of a hardware guy really to know what could be sent across the PCIe connector to make a graphic's card thermal profile change when it's doing the same amount of work.

No worries man.. I actually hadn't seen that until I posted tbh. I saw the CPU support updated in bioses past that (19something) and figured it was worth doing for that.

But yeah, something was definitely wrong. Had I brought all the hardware and put it together I wouldn't have known any different but I've had the 280 a while now and it was in the 680i and idled at 49. So 64 was pretty crazy even though the card can make 94 before thermal cut off and artifacts. It was the noise.. the awful, dreadful noise. That's partly why I have not been gaming much lately because as soon as you fire up a game it just spazzed and sounded like a friggin jump jet taking off. Which as I say isn't really a concern knowing what the card can take heat wise, but it was always in the back of my mind that it could damage the card and that does worry me.

haha I suppose that thread title serves me right

I'm no expert, but I doubt it is/was doing the same amount of work. I suspect the GPU was being forced to do work that the BIOS should have been handing off to other subsystems. Such as not addressing its own memory properly, so making the GPU work with less resources.

ADeeX