Hi everyone,

i'd like to share my little journey in getting a SIL3512 PCI card to work on my dual S.462 machine. Let's start with the initial setup:

Tyan Tiger MP S2460 (12V rail modded + full poly recap)
2x Athlon XP-m 2600+ FKT4C
Geforce 6800gt
3x1gb Samsung ZCCC @ 133Mhz 2-2-2-6
WD 500gb 2,5" Sata HDD @ IDE/SATA converter

Soundblaster 128 PCI
D-Link Wifi card
Via VT6421 USB2.0
SIL 3512 SATA controller

I've had this setup up and running with the IDE converter for quite some time. However i noticed that the HDD tops out at ~70mb/s in HD Tune v2.55, but the AMD 762 chipset of the board supports UDMA5 (100mb/s). So i doublechecked with a small ssd on another setup and indeed the converter turned out to be the culprit. So i decided to add a PCI SATA controller to the machine, to work around this issue. The controller of choice is a SIL3512 as i had it laying around. The factory installed bios is v4.3.79 (RAID).

I couldn't get the controller to work on the tyan in win xp at all. I always ended up with a code 10 or code 12 error in the device manager. So i again used another system (Asus a7n8x-e) as i knew the SIL3512 works there. Luckily the Wayback machine and some guys here on vogons had the newer bios for the SIL saved, so i could obtain and flash the non-raid v4.5.02 bios onto the PCI card. I flashed using the options of the controller in the device manager which got a tab for flashing the firmware (neat feature by SIL!). After re-inserting it into the Tyan it was instantly recognized by the bios and even showed up during boot. Using one of the newer drivers (v1.3.71.1) it now works perfectly fine... Interestingly the old bios was released in 2006 and the new one in 2008, so several years after the Tyan (2001?), but it still had its issues...

Just wanted to leave this here, so if someone else comes across this, there's a solution. My guess is that some bugs in the older firmware makes these controllers so hard to deal with and i can only suggest to update firmware first.

I'll attach the latest non-raid firmware i could find, i used b4502.bin on my controller.