Rick Torres wrote:
>I have an ABIT 440BX R.2. According to the manual it can only support
>up to a 500 mhz chip. Can the bios be upgraded to accept faster chips???
>If so where can I get them??(I tried ABIT site but it seems a
>underwater cable has been cut and parts of their site is not available)


Hi Rick

What motherboard do you have? There are several Abit boards based
on the BX chipset. Regardless of which board you have, since it is
a revision 2, the following advice should apply.

You can go to the newsgroup <alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.abit>
where you will find scores or even hundreds of messages about your
motherboard and what processors will work with it. (There are
currently 24,000 messages in this group on my ISP's server. I read
a few dozen from users using PIII-800 and PIII-850 processors on
their rev.2 boards. I'm sorry I didn't have time to search through
more messages. You might also be able to find messages listing
alternate "mirror" locations from which to download the latest BIOS.

I was in a similar position about what processors would work with my
Asus motherboards and I found hundreds of messages about this in the
Asus newsgroup <alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.asus>. It worked for me.

I suspect you will need a new BIOS...if only to have a new processor
properly recognized so that Intel's microcode corrections can be loaded.
(The BIOS reads the "cpuid" from the processor to identify the stepping
version. Intel microcode for different PIII steppings comes with the
motherboard BIOS and when loaded corrects errors in the processor.)
A CPU whose stepping is not recognized by the BIOS may or may not work
properly in your machine since the microcode corrections are not loaded.

Regards,
Bill

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