Manually writing to BIOS

[marty]

Has anyone tried to manually change there BIOS settings? The article that explains it is here:

Changing BIOS Setup Settings that do not Appear to Exist

In many cases, BIOS setups' will not allow very many system settings to be altered. Some only allow floppy/hard drives to be configured, along with other minor settings. This is a major drawback due to

sysopt.earthweb.com

The reason that I am interested in this is that there has to be a way to manually write just about anything to the BIOS. For example you could change the voltage past what the soft menu allows. Likely you could change the voltage even if it isn't in the softmenu.

This is essentially what the programs that manipulate the BIOS settings do. SoftFSB and CPUCool are writing to the BIOS. If we knew the commands and settings we could do this from a DOS command line.

I think it would be interesting to do voltage changes this way rather than with the wire trick.

 

[wild_andy_c]

You'll put me out of business doing things this way!!!!

I think that wiring chips is far less risky and much easier to do than messing with the BIOS.

 

[Tim-]

Some changes- like voltage limits are going to be dictated by the hardware. What ever the programmable regulator, or clock chip or whatever is capable of will be the deciding factor. On boards that offer a lot of adjustments, you may not be able to gain anything- on others you could have great results. YMMV!

 

[marty]

Well the updated BIOS for my Abit board allowed a max voltage of 1.9 instead of 1.85 for PIII Coppermine chips. If they can change the max then we can too!!

But the only program that I have found to do this does not support any of the newer chipsets. Whoever was writing it hasn't updated it since 1999.

 

[Tim-]

I agree that you can make some changes, but my point is that when the bios issues a command to the regulator or whatever that it can't comprehend you are liable to get unpredictable results- Opening the regulator up too far can be a bad thing.

 

[marty]

I agree that this could be risky. But it could be fun, too. It's too bad that Abit and Asus don't let us play a bit more.

 

[marty]

Oda still has the WPCRE12 program available on his site. (Meaning he hasn't shut it off the way he shut the downloads and support for SoftFSB.) There is a pcr file for my Abit SE6. Therefore I can now write to the BIOS from Windows.

The thing that stinks is that I can't figure out if there is a voltage setting in the table that results from using the program.