Gigabyte DS4 owners. Advice on flashing the bios.

[acrobat]

Hi all, hoping atleast one of you may have done this successfully with this motherboard. Doing it wrong can screw it up and make it unusable so Im not going to rush into it.

It also doesnt seem that important... but there is one graphics card temperature monitoring tool that comes with my gfx card, which requires an updated bios.

There is a little tool that came with the mobo called @Bios. I updated the tool over the web, and downloaded the bios upgrade. But before flashing, it said to disable hyperthreading in the bios first. I couldn't find an option for this, and I'm not even sure hyperthreading exists on an C2D E6600.

Anyway, if anyone has done the bios flash, please let me know anything you might think I should know before I do it. I'm quite scared of messing my board up. One other thing is, do I need to know exactly what version my motherboard is or anything? All i really know is the model name. (Gigabyte GA 965P-DS4 iP965, S775, PCI-E (x16), DDR2 533/667/800, SATA II, SATA RAID, ATX).

Thanks in advance

[Steve B]

see my system
C2D is based on P3 architecture, not P4, therefore Hyper-Threading does not apply.

I've updated mine to the beta F3 i think it is, not sure tbh
ive not flashed it in a while, got the beta when it was first released.

the tool makes it easy, and the DS4 has dual-BIOS, so if it screws up, it just reverts to the backed up version

[blueball]

Running F5 here - it's fine. I have always updated the BIOS using the F8 option in the BIOS itself - I'm not a great believer in flashing BIOS from within Windows (I know, I know but I'm paranoid )

Edit: Just noticed that F7 BIOS is now available so I'm away to flash that

[blueball]

Flashed smoothly to F7 (updates CPU ID Table and enables support for a 1333 FSB!!!!!!)

[acrobat]

Thank you everyone! Very kind. I will just give it a try then, and if i screw it up, (which is unlikely), then hopefully the dual bios thingy will help me out.

I feel happy to give it a try now anyway, seeing as I know theres no hyperthreading and I know I can use the other bios if something goes wrong.

Thanks again

[acrobat]

All done Worked without a hitch and everything seems to be working great Thanks everyone!

[acrobat]

Hey all. I have one more question about the motherboard.

I have SATA-II hard disks. And in the bios it has a "Onbourd SATA IDE Control Mode".

The default setting is IDE. The other options are AHCI and RAID/IDE.

I don't want anything to do with Raid at all. But I want the disks to run at their full SATA speed. So do I leave it as IDE? Or do I need to set it as AHCI? I tried both but I can't tell any difference yet. IDE seems to be the default so I'm assuming that is the right option.... but it just seems wierd to have it set as IDE mode seeing as they are SATA disks.

Any help greatly appreciated.

[blueball]

AHCI


I'm a man of few words

[blueball]

Thank you everyone! Very kind. I will just give it a try then, and if i screw it up, (which is unlikely), then hopefully the dual bios thingy will help me out.

I feel happy to give it a try now anyway, seeing as I know theres no hyperthreading and I know I can use the other bios if something goes wrong.

Thanks again

Did you remember to flash both Main and Backup BIOS from the QFlash page?

[acrobat]

AHCI


I'm a man of few words

Thank you

Did you remember to flash both Main and Backup BIOS from the QFlash page?

No Im not sure how.

Do I have to just boot up using the second bios and then do the flash again?




------edit-------

One last question while I've got this thread going (again), do you folks know a way of me controlling the fan speeds? My CPU seems to only have a few options.... either on full blast (too loud), set to its normal voltage level (a bit too low speed for my liking), or set to change depending on temperature (not bad). I was hoping I could just set it at almost full blast but not all the way though, and then just leave it there. Is that possible?

Also, is there any way to control the speed of the case fans? I have the 120mm "Golf Ball" fans, and they are completely silent. So I was wondering if I could make them run slightly faster.

I have a program called "SpeedFan" which might let most people do this, but it doesn't seem to do anything to my fans, and when I tried to download my motherboard info for SpeedFan, I doesn't have the Gigabyte DS4 yet. None of the Gigabyte software seems to work properly either. I-Cool for example, turns the CPU fan off on any setting... and the fan only starts again when I exit the program. Easy Tune 5 doesn't seem to do anything.

Thanks

---edit---
Easy tune 5 lets me change the CPU stuff actually. But it doesnt seem to do anything to the system fans.

Also, I changed the "Onbourd SATA IDE Control Mode" setting to AHCI and that worked fine. But I saw another option too, called "SATA RAID / AHCI MODE" in the "integrated peripherals" page. That was set to disabled as standard, so I tried changing that to AHCI aswell, but I got a blue screen when XP tried to start, and then it restarted my PC. Is that normal? Is the first option the only one I need to change to AHCI?

[blueball]

No Im not sure how.

Do I have to just boot up using the second bios and then do the flash again?

Just go into qflash again and select the option to update backup bios from floppy - you can just boot to normal BIOS then press F8 to get there

I set fan control to auto in the BIOS and its fine for me however I am using an Akasa fan controller/card reader in a external bay to keep the fan speeds low:

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=257651

You just need AHCI alone unless you have built a raid array and installed the RAID drivers for windows.

[acrobat]

Just go into qflash again and select the option to update backup bios from floppy - you can just boot to normal BIOS then press F8 to get there

I set fan control to auto in the BIOS and its fine for me however I am using an Akasa fan controller/card reader in a external bay to keep the fan speeds low:

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=257651

You just need AHCI alone unless you have built a raid array and installed the RAID drivers for windows.

Thanks! No floppy, so I'll have to do it from Windows again. Am I right that I just boot up using the other bios, and then do the flash process again?

Lastly, I cant see anywhere to set fan speeds in the bios (apart from the CPU fan). Would you have that because of your fan controller? Or does it come as standard in the DS4 Bios and I'm just missing it?