Hi, I've been told at Phoronix forums few months ago that you can help solve my problem as you really do miracles with BIOS.
The problem is that I have Asus P4V800D-X mainboard from few years which has Via PT880Ultra chipset. The mainboard is for Intel Pentium4 with socket 478 and DDR1 and has two graphic slots (AGP x8 and PCI-E 1.0).
OT: The MP spec tells it could not handle both cards but I use both Radeons R3xx (AGP RV350 - 9600 and PCI-E RV370 - x300 in multiseat) just fine althrough before doing kernel mode settings on Linux I can see BIOS POST only on one of them but that's not the case...
Back to topic... Some time ago I've get PCI-E 2.0 Radeon HD4670 which I wanted to use as a replace for PCI-E 1.0 Radeon X300 and I've saw it runs without problems on different MB but with the same chipset (Asrock 775Dual-VSTA - only PCI-E without AGP, P4/DualCore socket 775, both DDR1 and DDR2) after BIOS upgrade served by Asrock. I've found that the card I've get does couply PCI-E 1.0 power requirements specs so it really should be possible to use it on PCI-E 1.0 MBs. When I put this card in PCI-E slot of my MB BIOS and even Linux after BOOT does not see that anything is put in PCI-E slot (lspci, lshw, etc... does not show anything related to this card).
I know that CoreBoot site does not list any of MBs that contain such chipset so I'm still stuck with proprietary BIOS from my MB vendor.
As I've said before Asrock did release BIOS updates for it's MB with fixes for Radeon HD2xxx and HD3xxx cards (althrough some people reported that after this BIOS update Radeon HD4670 works, too) but Asus did forget about P4V800D-X users long time ago and haven't released and wont release such fixes.
I know it will be very hard but could you look at Asrock 775Dual-VSTA BIOS changes (last BIOSes contain only fixes for Radeon HD3xxx cards) and somekind use it for fix my Asus P4V800D-X BIOS to support such cards? I don't even imagine how would you do this but anyway I've get here to ask for help as you're the only people who could do something like this.
Thanks in advance.
Asus P4V800D-X spec: http://motherboardland.blogspot.com/2006/01/asus-p4v800d-x-motherboard.html Asus P4V800D-X user guide: ftp://ftp.asus.com.tw/pub/ASUS/mb/sock478/p4v800d-x/e2221_P4V800D-X.pdf Asus P4V800D-X BIOS: http://dlcdnet.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/sock478/p4v800d-x/P4V8D704.zip
Asrock 775Dual-VSTA spec: http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=775Dual-vsta Asrock 775Dual-VSTA user guide: http://europe.asrock.com/manual/775Dual-VSTA.pdf Asrock 775Dual-VSTA BIOSes with changelogs: http://www.asrock.com/mb/download.asp?Model=775Dual-VSTA&o=BIOS
Btw. I don't have EEPROM/BIOS programmer/flasher and my MB has only one BIOS so if you would do that BIOS modifications will flashing it will be a lot more risky than flashing any other official BIOSes? I don't mind if after flashing for any reason I could get not video or sth that would just not break Linux boot from SATA HDD so I could SSH to my machine and flash original BIOS or any other not so hard to use fallback.
I don't want to change MB for the next few years because of financial reasons as I have some hardware/peripherals which use could be problematic on never MBs like these two graphic cards, PCI analog TV card, some RS232 connected hardware, a lot of DDR1 RAM, etc.
With Regards, Tom