TH7-2 Owners: Anyone try the hacked 77 bios?

Anyone? I want more then the alloted 1.625V but wont flash until I hear from others.

Thx.

There are quite of few of us that are using it with no problem. One member complained that it doesn't overclock quite as well at the lower voltages when compared to the "38" BIOS, but I have not had any complaints. I have not heard of anyone else having a problem either, except for that one person.

That would be me. If I were you, I would just do the wire trick and release all you voltage options. If you are avid about overclocking. 1.85 volts will not be enough. As you may already know, the actual vcore and the set vcore differ by as much as 0.1 or more volts. So 1.85 set will actually only be around 1.72 - 1.75 and you will be yearning to juice it up a bit more. From what I have read and from my own experience, you will want to set the actual vcore to 1.80 to really see what your chip can do.

Thanks LarryJoe, I couldn't recall who had mentioned that before. Maybe I'll flash back to the "38" BIOS since I have my pins wired now. Maybe I'll give it another trial to see what happens and find out if I can squeeze anymore out of it. I keep expecting an updated "official" BIOS for the TH7-II sometime soon. Abit is beta testing one right now, that much I do know.

Keep us posted batboy, I would be curious to know if going back to the 38 helps you out like it did for me. Also, flashing back was no problem if you had any concerns.

I am not sure if you have seen my threads, but I am kind of stuck at 2.667. I went up to 2.750, but it required a true 1.85 volts. I am sure you are aware, the temps really are hard to control when you get into the 1.8+ range. I hit 62C under Prime 95 and my P4 Volcano couldn't keep up. Prime 95 failed after about 5 hours, I am pretty sure it is heat related.

I wish I put on a Swifttech or the new Alpha while building, but I am not about to take my mobo out now. My wife has just about had enough of seeing my head inside my case

Got an AVC Sunflower on the way, but I don't think it is going to do much.

I have not had any problems with the '77 bios.

But, if you still have your processor out, or it's easy to get to I would say wire wrap the pins. The only reason I'm not going to do that yet is because I've got Conformal Coating all around my socket and Neoprene Gaskets all around that. Plus, it's a little more of a pain to remove a waterblock than it is to remove a fan.

Good luck though.

I might try an all out assault this next weekend. I'll burn-in my Northy a little more (Serious Sam game demo loop seems to work good), flash back to the "38" BIOS, then tweak some of my Windows and BIOS settings to find the optimal performance. Maybe pull out or disconnect any unneeded devices too. I've got an idea to mount another case fan to blow across the RAM and add another exhaust blower next to the GeForce 3 vid card. Heck, I might even turn the furnace off for a few hours to lower ambient temps. I'll admit it LarryJoe, I'm jealous that you reached 133 FSB with your 2.0a, but I haven't yet. That is my goal now. I must have 2.66 gig... BWAHAHAHAHA!

LOL! I have been thinking about blowing some air at the RAM too. I can't run it at 533, so I have to run it at 3X for 400hhz. I think the highest I had it running stable was 500mhz.

I'll be curious to see how your fan on them works out.

I have a feeling you will be able to run at 20x133 with the 38 BIOS. Good luck.

Thanks guys. I always knew that hardware fixes are better then software, but this is why exactlly I asked. Joe, still got that pic handy for wiring up the proc? I seen it in another thread, but I'm borderline lazy right now.

borderline lazy

Click to expand...

LOL! can you please define Borderline lazy and how it differs from all-out laziness? I think there are a lot of us suffering from this we just haven't defined the symptoms yet. Plus, I think we all..............I'm too lazy to finish this.

LOL! I am not even borderline lazy, I am just plain lazy

Here you go:

link

Keep in mind the pic just shows 4-3 wrapped. 2 and 1 are right next to 4 and 3 in the same row. You need to wrap all 4. From the left it goes 4-3-2-1. Get a thin wire, I used one strand of car guage speaker wire. Just one strand from the copper bunch. Have a magnifying glass handy and be patient. It took me a few tries, but once you are done, you are done forvever with all the voltages into the 2's.

Good luck

Here is an excerpt from one of my previous posts.

I decided to try wire wrapping VID pins #1, #2, #3, and #4 to give me 1.85v default, which I believe is the max. It was not an easy task. I spent well over an hour with a 10X hand lens (a powerful type of magnifying glass), small tweezers, and a medium sized sewing needle. You need lots of patience.

I took a short length of fine wire strand that I stripped out of speaker wire and made a loop in the middle of it by first wrapping it around a sewing needle. Next, I lassoed VID pin #1 with the loop (harder than it sounds, because you need three hands to hold the magnifying glass, the tweezers, and the sewing needle (which I used to guide the wire loop down over the pin).

After the loop was over pin #1, I pulled both ends of the wire to tighten up the noose. The wire slipped off a couple times during this process and I had to start over. Next I criss-crossed the wire in a braid pattern around each of the other VID pins for maximum contact with the pins and also to add more friction to help keep it from sliding off the CPU VID pins.

Once all four CPU VID pins were connected, I used the tweezers to twist the wires tightly together at the end in a pig-tail. The tail of the wire was trimmed with scissors and curled around the edge of the chip out of the way. I tried to take a digital pic of the finished product, but it turned out way too blurry (guess I don't know how to use the macro feature on my camera very well).

YIPPEE! It worked like a charm. After everything was back together, I booted the system and went into the BIOS. I now had vcore settings that went all the way up to 2.2v (on my TH7-II). I wasn't expecting that much of an increase. I must caution you good folks not to get carried away with running too much voltage. That's an invitation for disaster if you don't have exceptional cooling.

Here is a diagram to help you find the pins better.

I'm wondering if anyone has a pic of a processor with the pins all done up, the proper way.

I tried taking a couple pics, but they were too blurry to show any detail. I have Arctic Silver III on the way, so when I remove the heatsink this weekend to reapply the thermal paste, I'll try using my digital camera with a tripod to take another pic. In the meantime, I'll try to make a diagram to show the way I did it.

Ok, here is a pic from one of the original articles I followed. They just made a loop around VID3 and VID4 for 1.7v.

If you connect all four VID pins, that will give you a modified default of 1.85v. With the TH7-II this will increase the amount of voltage settings to a maximum of 2.2v. I outlined in red the way I wired these four pins. I did the pigtail at the end the same exact way as the pic shows.

Post that pic on our "so-called" sticky batboy.

I'm putting a link to this topic in the TH7-II "sticky", which we now have thanks to William (check it out). I'm now working on a major article (complete with those pics I just posted or better ones that I hope to take) to be soon submitted to the overclockers.com guides to document my VID pin method. Hope that helps y'all visualize what I did. I criss-crossed the wires in between pins. VID pin #1 is looped all the way around one complete turn and the end is "pig-tailed" twisted to tighten up the wire and to take out the slack.

Hey LarryJoe and anyone else that is interested. I finally reached 2.66 gig with my system. Cooling the RAM seemed to really help for me too. I mounted an 80mm fan to blow air directly onto the RDRAM modules because the heat spreaders seemed rather warm to the touch. I now can run my memory at 1066 MHz. Read about my overclocking adventure in the Intel CPU section by following the below listed link. I am still smiling.

http://forum.oc-forums.com/vb/showthread.php?threadid=72865