On 13-07-12 13:27, David Griffith wrote:
On Fri, 13 Jul 2012, Oliver Schinagl wrote:
On 13-07-12 12:14, David Griffith wrote:
I have an old motherboard which I'd like to experiment on and have
my eyes on a bleeding-edge board. The old one is a Shuttle AN35N
Ultra (socket 1). The new one is an MSI 990FXA-GD80V2 (socket AM3+).
Neither of these appear on the list of supported motherboards.
Tinkering with the old board should be relatively safe because the
BIOS lives in a socketed PLCC. I can't seem to figure out what sort
of package the firmware in the newer one lives in. None of the
photos I've found of it seem to have good enough resolution to
tell. Can I get some help here?
I found
http://www.msi.com/pic/product/five_pictures1_2400_20110531112742.jpg
and I have to agree, the resolution is a bit to low to recognize the
bios on.
My personal 'best bet' is the 'green' chip in the left bottom corner.
If you look at the south-bridge heat-sink, under the middle leg of
the 'm' there's a small SOIC8 chip with a green sticker. It is
surrounded by 3 caps. That's the most logical bet, as the sticker
probably has bios version number on it.
I think I see it. In the bottom-left there is a white fan header
labeled "SYSFAN4". Just northeast of that is the chip. Am I right?
Yep, that's what I spotted.
I thought I was going to have to jerry-rig something messy to replace
the SOIC8 with a socket of some sort, but I see that someone[1] found
a source of compact and relatively affordable sockets. The clearance
with that 10-pin header just south of the firmware chip looks rather
tight. I also see some adapters that puts a socket on an SOIC
footprint and then a DIP adapter is plugged in.
That looks really interesting. I wonder how much those are going for on
ebay. I also have a HP N36L/N40L microserver that I would love to see
coreboot running on. But since the bios is a SOIC8 i've been putting it
off. May try the PCI Raid adapter boot trick once I find it in my box of
junk.
[1] http://randomprojects.org/wiki/SOIC8_socket
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