New Asus P5WD2 P BIOS 0606

Just saw this over at extreme forums.

wanna give it a shot for us? :d

me me!

Gotta do a backup first though. I was overdue for one anyway. I'll check back later this evening. The last bios screwed up my ide/sata controllers. I'm still praying for a fix to the reboot issue when overclocked.

Welp, here goes nothin'

Installing now.......

PEACE

Why was I stupid and got the Non-premium, from the looks of it, there will be no BIOS updates for this board lol.

Nothing great. Just a new BIOS. None of those fixes applied to me, so I didn't expect much.

Except my system hangs, for a bit, at the beggining of the boot whenever its checking the HDD's and DVD drives. Is there any fix for this? With the original BIOS it zoomed right through this process. akward.

PEACE

No serious changes that I can tell.

Man, that was a lot of responses pretty quickly. I was waiting on you guys to use it and tell me how it was...lol. I guess I will update just to stay current. Doesn't seem like there was any big change from what you guys are saying.

Well, got the same glitch as I had with the 0506 drivers (detects ide channels that won't install properly in windows). Back to 0422 for me.

I noticed no change. I was using 0519. I think my computer MAY boot through BIOS slightly quicker.

Alchemy1 said:

I noticed no change. I was using 0519. I think my computer MAY boot through BIOS slightly quicker.

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I can confirm that as well, 0606 was noticeably faster loading the devices at POST.

I guess it wasn't my imagination.

Has anyone read the bios history today because yesterday ASUS didn't mention anything about support for ATI CrossFire technology but today it says that bios version 0606 now supports ATI CrossFire technology, NVIDIA aren't going to be to pleased.
Also on the ASUS forums someone has been in contact with ASUS support by phone and this is what was said,

"just got off the phone with asus support, and after being placed on hold for 10 minutes i was told that the 606 bios in fact makes the second pci-express slot run faster! to quote: "The secondary x4 pci-express slot will work much like an AGP slot." when i specifically asked:"Will it run at x8 speed?" they said YES!"

Could this mean that we may get SLI support on this mobo seeing as the second PCI-E slot will work in x8 mode.

BIOS HISTORY

P5WD2 Premium

[ 0606 ]
----------------------
Fix CrashFree fail issue with ECC DRAM
Fix WinXP can't be installed from a PX-716SA SATA DVD-RW drive in AHCI mode.
Fix ECC initial incorrect
Adjust low threshold of CPU fan.
Support ATI CrossFire technology.

I don't recall seeing the ATI crossfire notation either.

Concerning nvidia and intel, it's a nvidia driver's issue at this point, isn't it?

As far as i know it's a driver issue on the part of NVIDIA so i hope they can and will add support for SLI on the 955X chipset seeing as ASUS say the second PCI-E slot now supports x8 mode but i'm not sure if that implies SLI will be supported in the future using two x8 PCI-E slots.

d.chatten said:

As far as i know it's a driver issue on the part of NVIDIA so i hope they can and will add support for SLI on the 955X chipset seeing as ASUS say the second PCI-E slot now supports x8 mode but i'm not sure if that implies SLI will be supported in the future using two x8 PCI-E slots.

Click to expand...

I would take all this with a pinch of salt as there's some smart talk going on in regards to the Asus phone conversation. Of course in theory a 16x wide PCI-E socket on the P5WD2P can run at 8x but only in theory. The reasoning behind this is that OK yes physically it's connected (i.e. the pin connections between it and the motherboard are in place) however electronically it's not possible. The 955X from my memory can only support 22 PCI-E lanes. With 16x going to the primary GFX card connector this leaves 6x spare. As Asus has made it a maximum of 4x can be assigned to the secondary PCI-E x16 slot leaving 1x for the motherboard's PCI-E 1x connector (second from bottom) and 1x for the Gigabit LAN. Because of this they were forced to make the 2nd Gigabit LAN run from the PCI bus (a mistake in my book but oh well).

The only way they could ever make the second PCI-E x16 length slot work at 8x is if they divided the primary 16x PCI-E slot into 2x8. Because StackCool2 in on the back of the board it's impossible to make out whether enough lanes are connected to the 2nd PCI-E 16x slot in order to do this. My guess is a very good "no". Why do I think my guess is spot on? If Asus indeed could transform the board into 2x8x PCI-E slots then it would have already made a big loud marketing boom from day 1.

In short the design people got carried away thinking Nvidia will certify their board for SLI and were also hoping CrossFire would arrive much sooner. As has happened however both have been delayed/dismissed so Asus has kept quiet about it so as to not hamper new sales of this board.

My guess is Asus will continue to stay low profiled about this issue, they would rather it just gradually fades away into one's memory. They will attempt to divert all attention to their 975X product in the forseeable future.

As a result of this mistake in design based on the assumptions of ATI/Nvidia mentioned above the P5WD2 is worse specified than the P5AD2-E Premium before it. The other reason why it's worse specified is cost, Asus realized they could make more money by taking the Wireless LAN part and sticking it onto an add-on card and charging around $50 more. The only thing that the P5WD2 can really do better than its predessor is overclock plus of course offer some features coming directly from the 955X chipset itself.

The bottom line from my analysis is this. If you expect to run SLI or CrossFire on the P5WD2P then dismiss your hopes now. It won't happen or will but with a performance penalty making it non-feasible. The 2nd PCI-E 16x length slot is limited to 4x speed. Why? Even in BIOS version 606 the highest option is 4x, a BIOS that supposedly supports CrossFire? Asus's official line apparently reads it supports CrossFire, but what it should read is your 2nd GFX card will be limited to 4x, please forgive us. The only thing you can do is run two GFX's for multi-monitor support. They got it wrong, what they hoped for was an edge on the competition, the reality made it into a unmaterialized mistake.

My only hope is Asus people don't try to be as smart next time and do a much better job with the 975X board. Fingers crossed everyone.

but it should read is your 2nd GFX card will be limited to 4x, please forgive us. The only thing you can do is run two GFX's for multi-monitor support.

Click to expand...

If I understand your post correctly, you are saying that Crossfire will not work on the P5WD2?

BigStan said:

If I understand your post correctly, you are saying that Crossfire will not work on the P5WD2?

Click to expand...

It will work if Asus is saying it (the BIOS) supports it however unless Asus pulls some magic from under the table the 2nd graphics card will be limited to only 4x PCI-E bandwidth. In essence one will run at 16x while the other at 4x. This will reduce performance at high resolutions and rich eye candy settings, might even be fair to say we can call it a bottleneck.

The part I don't get is why didn't Asus just divide the 16x into 2x 8x slots and leave the 2nd Gigabit LAN on a PCI-E 1x slot at in the P5AD2-E. This would still provide 2x the bandwidth of AGP8x per each graphics card, very much enough for today's technology requirements.

It's my understanding that the current cards are not even using half of the bandwith that PCI-E bus offer.