relying on the id in xgpro instead of pulling the sticker, dumped the rom as a w29ee011. it did not have any complaints doing this. the dump has nearly 300 differences to the 05/05/98 dated one from asus, that one has a bunch of FFs where mine has something else.

after flashing the 11/25/98 one (also different), the date on the bios screen is still showing 05/05/98 and it's still showing that weird award logo, as if i had not just flashed on a new bios at all.

by chance, i have a second one of these boards, likewise a rev 1.4 with UMC SIO. i've swapped that one in and it's doing the exact same thing with the award logo, even after changing the RAM. i could still test a different video card (using a matrox millennium), but otherwise this must be normal for these boards. have dumped the bios which is rev 0305 and older than anything out there right now. used the SST29EE010 setting for this.

i thought for a moment the bios chip on the first board might be shot, because it wouldn't verify after pulling it again, but remembered that ESCD is probably stored in flash as well, which i guess causes those 300 different blocks.

Yes the ESCD is stored in eeprom and most likely why extra odd bits in yours and the straight from Asus (or TRW) ones should have that area "clean" as FF.
I do not have a P55SP4 but 2 diff TP4's and do not recall any logo oddness but it could there and just was looking at other stuff at the time 😁

another reason it didn't occur to me at first is because i'm pretty sure the board had the write protection jumper set, but i guess it may not actually do anything for that.

by the way, some of these bios chip parts only mention a 10-year data retention in the datasheet. that's obviously on the conservative side but i have to wonder if that could become a regular issue.