Wrong core voltage settings on ASUS TX97-XV \ VOGONS

Wrong core voltage settings on ASUS TX97-XV

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First post, by lazibayer

Posted on 2017-10-10, 04:06

lazibayer Offline

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Got two TX97-XV rev. 1.13 from HP Pavilions. They have HIP6008CB onboard which can supply 2.0 to 3.5v core voltages:

But the board and manual have only 7 settings over a 3x3 jumper block:

I couldn't figure out the wiring by logical deduction so I grabbed a multi-meter and checked the connection of each pin:

Here hVID means the VID pins on the HIP chips. Comparing this to the datasheet and we can see that the 3.4v and 3.5v settings are contradictory to the datasheet, and my multi-meter told me the datasheet is more reliable:

You may ask, why did you use a multi-meter instead of monitoring the voltages in the BIOS? Because my boards came without the LM78 chip.
It's not the first time ASUS marked wrong voltage settings on their boards; I had one P5S-VM with the same issue, too.

Last edited by lazibayer on 2017-10-23, 03:29. Edited 2 times in total.

Reply 1 of 6, by lazibayer

Posted on 2017-10-10, 04:25

lazibayer Offline

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The boards came with HP BIOS and I wanted to flash one of them with ASUS BIOS. The boards have 2Mbit flash chips and all ASUS BIOSes are 1Mbit in size. So I stitched two ASUS BIOSes, 0112xv.001 and 1001xv.003 together and flashed the Firmkenstein into the 2Mbit chip. Now I can switch between the two versions by toggling 5V/GND on the chip's A17 pin.
Next I tried tillamook on it. With ASUS BIOSes I got black screen with onboard video card but I can hear the hard drive boots normally. With PCI video card the computer works fine but without L2 cache. With HP BIOS the board hangs at boot quite often no matter what kind of video option. When it works the cache is disabled as well.

Last edited by lazibayer on 2017-10-10, 15:07. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 2 of 6, by Deksor

Posted on 2017-10-10, 05:30

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Maybe you could try to patch the bios to include tilamook's microcode and put it in the Frankenstein bios, that way you'll be able to switch between the modified and the unmodified bios ^^

Trying to identify old hardware ? Visit The retro web - Project's thread The Retro Web project - a stason.org/TH99 alternative

Reply 3 of 6, by lazibayer

Posted on 2017-10-10, 16:31

lazibayer Offline

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Deksor wrote:
Maybe you could try to patch the bios to include tilamook's microcode and put it in the Frankenstein bios, that way you'll be able to switch between the modified and the unmodified bios ^^

That's a great idea. I have dissected the two ASUS BIOSes and some newer Award BIOSes with Awdedit, and I can find microcode sections in the newer BIOSes but not in the old ones. I don't know how microcode works, but I can now do "hot swap" by simply toggle the voltage on pin A17.

Reply 4 of 6, by Deksor

Posted on 2017-10-11, 05:27

Deksor Offline

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I never added microcodes to old bioses, only to newer ones (for the xeon mod on socket 775 boards) which is really easy (microcodes for those cpus are quite easy to find). I don't know how difficult that task can be for these older bioses, and if it can't be simplified nowadays by making a good tutorial

Trying to identify old hardware ? Visit The retro web - Project's thread The Retro Web project - a stason.org/TH99 alternative

Reply 5 of 6, by Windows9566

Posted on 2020-09-11, 10:35

Windows9566 Offline

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do you have a download link for the bios?

R5 5600X, 32 GB RAM, RTX 3060 TI, Win11
P3 600, 256 MB RAM, nVidia Riva TNT2 M64, SB Vibra 16S, Win98
PMMX 200, 128 MB RAM, S3 Virge DX, Yamaha YMF719, Win95
486DX2 66, 32 MB RAM, Trident TGUI9440, ESS ES688F, DOS

Reply 6 of 6, by maxtherabbit

Posted on 2020-09-11, 18:32

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I recently added some Pentium Pro microcodes to the Award 4.51PG BIOS for a slot 1 440EX board. Adding them and flashing it was successful, but it still wouldn't get past the CPU ID string in the POST process. The CPU detection logic in the BIOS was choking on it and having correct microcodes didn't help. It's worth a try in this case but I wouldn't count on it

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