New K8WE Thunder (S2895) BIOS 105 Available

I was cruising the new Tyan site tonight, and I noticed a new 105 BIOS
for the K8WE Thunder (S2895) motherboard. It installed like a charm.
I don't know whether everybody already knew about it.

Enjoy!

Jim

 

In his posting of Sat, 12 May 2007, Jim writes

Jim, thanks for that but what are the advantages of installing these new
BIOS please. I purchased one of these boards 18 months ago.

Thanks

 

After trying it out I found the following problems:
1. PCI-X slots don't work. Only the PCI and PCI Express were operational.
2. SCSI doesn't work
3. No boot option for net
4. Max speed on SATA was 1.5 Gb/s instead of 3.0 (Did I measure this
with a bit speedometer? No, I looked at the messages that Linux emits
while it's booting.)
After going back to 1.0.4, these problems went away. BTW, I am running
Linux 2.6.22.9 at the moment (Fedora Core 6) and updated numerous times
while 1.0.5 firmware was installed. All were the same. I don't know how
it works with Win, don't have it installed on this machine.
This makes me wonder about Tyan's QA.
Oh, I didn't lose any functionality going back to 1.0.4. So if you want
to cripple your computer, go ahead and install 1.0.5. Of course, your
results may be totally different. I can say that I tried it and it
didn't like it.

Bob

 

Bob,

I'm *sorry* about your problems, but I did not have them. I am using
*both* the PCI-X and PCI-E slots, and both continued to work.

I am also using the onboard SCSI, and it has continued to work.
However, I am *not* using the driver from Tyan; I am using a driver
from LSI Logic. I took a chance, and it worked. I have a SCSI tape
drive.

I have *not* checked this.

I am using a 3ware/AMCC SATA-3 controller (9550 SX), so I am not
running this off the motherboard.

Sorry I recommended the new BIOS. Obviously it is *not* for
*everybody!*

Jim

 

I wonder about the half speed SATA drive. I bought a seagate 320 sata
and found it was shipped from the factory with a jumper limiting it to
half speed. Removed the jumper, full speed operation, and quite
reliable. It looks like that's what we have here.

Dave

 

Midol,

I telephoned Seagate earlier about the settings of their SATA drives.
(I am running two of them in RAID 0 in a different machine.) They
said that they jumpered--at that time--*all* of their drives as SATA 1
because *most* people did *not* have SATA-2 controllers. Hitachi, on
the other hand, has no jumpers on their drives, and they will work
full-speed at either SATA 1 or SATA 2 depending on the controller.

Just some interesting trivia.

Jim

 

I don't think that is what caused the problem as I had full speed with
the original v1.01 BIOS that came with the motherboard and also with V
1.04. I made no changes to the disk drive in getting the different results.