Acer Power M8 motherboard and CPU upgrade

elrasho · 26 Jul 2012 at 19:54

I'm gonna try flashing the bios using this guide: http://www.bios-mods.com/bios-update/

Is my BIOS a Phoenix or Award? CPU-z Says the Brand is Phoenix

Diggsy · 26 Jul 2012 at 19:54

It doesn't have a 4 pin as well? The Gateway one has both...hmm

EDIT - having looked at the ECS board, it seems it is only 3 pin. Can you try the software I linked?

EDIT2 - Your BIOS is Award... http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/266/img20120725165429.jpg/ (At the top - Phoenix Award)

Oh and PLEASE only do the update from DOS - Windows updates are risky business

EDIT3 - I think the unlocked BIOS should give you options to control the fan speed too, which would be a bonus.

elrasho · 26 Jul 2012 at 20:01

So when I'm at the DOS I type awdflash 61AO615.bin /py /sn /f /cc /r then press Enter. Is that right?

elrasho · 26 Jul 2012 at 20:03

This is what I have on my flash drive:

It doesnt show any of the Windows98 startup disk stuff? Even though I used the HP USB Tool to create a bootable USB pen drive

elrasho · 26 Jul 2012 at 20:15

BIOS flashed fine but now it won't see my hard drive, its not listed on the BIOS either

Diggsy · 26 Jul 2012 at 20:19

EDIT - I see you went for it, nice, now time to sort the HDD problem, can you post up the available screens? All of them if possible?

Oh and don't worry it'll probably be a simple setting.

EDIT - Did you do a CMOS reset after the flash? Sometimes its all thats needed to clear any abnormalities

elrasho · 26 Jul 2012 at 20:38

Cleared CMOS FTW! Ram is running at 600Mhz and the CPU has automatically overclocked to 2.7Ghz. CPU FAN doesn't have PWM so I've left the fan running at 2000RPM. Think I'm done here

Diggsy · 26 Jul 2012 at 20:59

Nice

There may well be options in the BIOS for automatically changing fan speeds, it doesn't have to be PWM for this, my Abit board has awesome fan controls and none of them are PWM.

I take it you have the new CPU in place?

elrasho · 26 Jul 2012 at 21:01

Oh yes! 2.7Ghz dual core :cool:

Is AMD Cool N Quiet when it lowers the CPU clock on idle? I have that enabled but my CPU stays at 2.7Ghz

Diggsy · 26 Jul 2012 at 21:10

Yes as far as I remember it, that's pretty much exactly what it does....

http://www.amd.com/us/products/technologies/cool-n-quiet/Pages/cool-n-quiet.aspx

Glad to see this is working well now, this is great news!!

Did you manage to get the old BIOS chip flashed, or are you not going to bother?

elrasho · 26 Jul 2012 at 21:51

Yep its great, thanks again for all your help

I might try flashing the other BIOS chip it fell on the carpet a couple of times though

Diggsy · 26 Jul 2012 at 23:02

You're welcome, glad to see this all working again, looking at your recent threads you've had some bad luck recently, but then good luck getting everything working again

elrasho · 26 Jul 2012 at 23:24

Tell me about it! This PC was gonna be thrown out by work. I asked if I could have it as I noticed the motherboard could take a better CPU and more RAM. For £25 I've got a dual core 2.7Ghz, 2GB ram and 80GB HDD. Perfect for general PC use. I'm thinking of getting a HD 5450 graphics card to free up that 256MB ram the onboard graphics card is taking up, thing is the PSU is 6 years old and only 250Watts so I don't want to push my luck.