Hi brian105,
I’m presently working on a patched BIOS for the MS-5158 v1.(A)/v1.1 boards.
Indeed, I have been working together with FullYes to select the best BIOS to patch. FullYes tested a lot of different BIOS versions on its v1.A board, including an OEM version that came with his board. On my end, I did a detailed analysis of this OEM BIOS and the Ver 1.4 and 2.1 from TRW.
This is what I found:
The code base used for the 10/17/97 OEM BIOS is at least half a year older than that of the v1.4/v2.1 BIOSes on TRW. So the OEM BIOS looks more like a mid 1997 BIOS, while MSI’s versions 1.4/2.1 are clearly 1998 BIOSes.
I see this in the limited K6-2 support in the OEM BIOS, including the K6-2 bootloop issue as present in a lot of early 1997 Award BIOSes. The MSI BIOSes have better K6-2 support and have this bootloop issue fixed.
I also see more detailed ATA and ATAPI support in the MSI BIOSes, which could be beneficial for certain types of CD-ROM and CF or SD cards.
All of these OEM and MSI BIOSes, including the Wims BIOS, lack Write-Allocation support for the K6-2/III, so that’s why the rom.by patched BIOS versions, as tested by FullYes, show better performance. Of course my patched custom BIOS will add this WA support as well.
What the rom.by BIOS patcher doesn’t fix is the Auto Vcore control from the BIOS for K6-2+/III+ CPUs, via the hardware monitor chip. But if your board doesn’t have this chip, this is of no consequence.
Finally, a comparison between the MSI v1.4 and v2.1 BIOS revealed only one little difference. The CPU Fan and Chassis Fan items from the hardware monitor have been interchanged. Probably due to a minor trace change between MS-5158 rev 1.(A) and 1.1 boards.
Again, for boards without the hardware monitor circuit this is of no consequence, and you can use either v1.4 or v2.1 to upgrade your BIOS, as for all other functions, the v1.4 and v2.1 MSI BIOSes are byte for byte identical.
I have selected the MSI v2.1 BIOS to make a custom BIOS with all the fixes I know, so also boards with hardware monitor are supported. BTW, does your board has the hardware monitor? If so, you should see an extra SPECIAL FEATURES menu in the BIOS Setup.
I will report back when I have more,
Jan