Unsure about the Mobo

[loveguns]

Hi. im new to these forums but spent a big chunk of yesterday reading up.

im about to build myself a new system but have hit a small problem.

this is the vitals of what im buying.

AMD Phenom II X2 Dual Core 550 3.10GHz Black Edition (Socket AM3) - Retail

Corsair XMS2 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2 PC2-6400C5 TwinX Dual Channel (TWIN2X4096-6400C5C)

Asus M4A78 AMD 770 (Socket AM3/AM2+) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard

HIS ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card - OEM

problem im looking at is Mobo.

couple of questions to those much much wiser than myself if possible please.


1.what happens if the mobo's bios is an old ver. AFAIK the board requires a bios update to support this chip ?? will this mean i could receive this and not be able to update the bios without having a AM2 chip to do so ??

2. can this board open up the redundant cores on the chip ? i know theres no guarantee any mobo will but owning the chip and never knowing if i have extra horsepower there will kill me. if this boards not capable of this can anyone spec me a board at the same price that will ?


hope thats not asking too much.

thanks LG.

 

[loveguns]

Anyone ?

 

[Speed]

If you are ordering from OcUK, phone up and ask them to check what revision the boards they have instock are.

Although Looking at the CPU support list, the only board revision listed is 1.02G and that appears on almost all of the CPUs so it's very likely that the boards stocked will be that version or higher. Same with the BIOS version really, it lists:

Phenom IIX2 550 (HDZ550WFK2DGI),3.1GHz,80W,rev.C2,SocketAM3,Dual-Core:

Board Revision: 1.02G
BIOS Version: 0701

I expect as 0701 was released on 2009/04/13, it will again be a higher version but if you want to certain get OcUK to check. I'm sure they will if you ask nicely or they may even have that sort of info on file.

As for question 2, I'm not sure, never used an AMD processor so never tried, try googling for some guides.

Source: http://www.asus.com/product.aspx?P_ID=8DgaI5WgY50udcbZ