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Gigabyte 7N400 Pro 2 Rev. 1 updated SATA BIOS

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repo man11

Member
Joined
Dec 28, 2001
Just in case anyone out there runs into this problem. I was recently given a desktop computer. Older, but decent hardware: a Gigabyte 7N400 Pro2 motherboard, in a nice case, with an XP3200, the fastest officially rated Socket A CPU. It was combined with only 512 megabytes of memory, and a very slow old Maxtor IDE hard drive, making it very slow. Adding an SATA hard drive (this board has an integrated Sil3112 SATA controller), a more powerful (but still obsolete) ATI X1650 video card and upping the RAM to two gigabytes really made it perform like a much more modern machine (as it was done with stuff I had laying about, it was very cheap).

I decided to swap in an even newer hard drive, a Western Digital 750 gigabyte to see how much faster it could be. I jumpered it to limit it to 150 MB/s, but it would hang at the SATA BIOS screen when the drive was attached. It turned out that the Silicon Image SATA controller BIOS bundled into the mainboard's BIOS was too old for such a large drive. Doing some searching, I found forums where people talked about updating the BIOS for the SATA controller by using a DOS based program called CBROM to insert the newest Silicon Image 3112 SATA BIOS (4.4.02) into the mainboard's BIOS. People had done this, but the links to the resulting BIOS images themselves were all dead. So I decided to use the tools and modify the BIOS myself. And I was successful! With the new SATA BIOS, not only can it handle the WD 750 gig hard drive, it doesn't even have to be limited to 150 MB/s! On the slim chance that anyone out there happens to have this motherboard, finds this post by Googling, wants to update it with a new, large SATA hard drive, and doesn't feel like bothering to modify the mainboard's BIOS themselves, send me a PM, and I can email a copy of it to you.
 
Your still limited to a SATA 150 due to the limitations of the chipset/motherboard. Drivers can also slipstreamed into a Windows installation using NLite or VLite for 7/Vista. I actually keep a copy of XP with the S.I. 3112/3114 slipped into it.
 
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Your still limited to a SATA 150 due to the limitations of the chipset/motherboard. Drivers can also slipstreamed into a Windows installation using NLite or VLite for 7/Vista. I actually keep a copy of XP with the S.I. 3112/3114 slipped into it.

Is it going to pull 300 MB/s? No. Does it hang at POST if the drive isn't jumpered to limit it to 150 MB/s? No. Using a defrag utility called Vopt XP to test the drive speed, it hits up to 180 MB/s with this drive (a WD7500AAKS). That's quite good for such old hardware.
 
Just for fun I loaded Windows 7 Pro. CPUs have really moved on since Socket A; the CPU rating was only a 3.6. The hard drive rating was 5.9 though! Still a usable system, but anything beyond 720p will not play properly. This was true with the X1650 and the Nvidia 6800 card, so I think it's more CPU limited than video card.
 
Nice effort! I have used nforce2 boards in the past and they were quite capable at that time. Re the fullHD playback, think it will require a more modern card that that has HD decoding built in(Purevideo HD) like the Radeon HD3xxx series. Challenge here is that the board has AGP slot. Nvidia cards with GPU decoding starts from 8500 series and up, those cards are PCI-e only. The 76xx series as h.264 assist but still require somewhat from the CPU.

http://www.nvidia.com/docs/CP/11036/PureVideo_Product_Comparison.pdf

EDIT: I see the 6200 series have some h.264 support so that may also be an option since I think there used to be an AGP version of that card also.
 
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My plan was to build a computer to sell to my job. We have some real antiques at work; we still have two P3 based machines running Windows 2000! My plan was to pull the two gigabytes of DDR400 out, and replace it with two 512s of unknown brand. Carelessly, I forgot to click the rocker switch on the PSU, and something hit ground when I was removing the memory. Whatever hit ground was strangely selective in what it killed - it booted up just fine, but no USB, one bad memory slot, and no on board network interface anymore.

I put it in an old case, and added a NIC, and a USB card, both pulled out of my accumulation box. So it still works, and I should be able to get $60.00 for it to replace one of the P3 boxes. Relative to those, it's a speed demon!
 
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