AW9D Max revival
 

After several months of almost no pc contact I pleased myself with an Intel Conroe E6600 + Aw9D Max. Running almost two months at stock speed, I wanted to flash a new BIOS.

After several years of BIOS flashing I got hit by a freezing computer. Damn, but due to the friendly people @ Abit I got a new BIOS chip in less than a week :ws: .

But, as I'm not the very patient guy and don't have the right material to replace a bios chip I kinda damaged the BIOS housing. And with some evil forces inside me I felt the urge to wreck the housing.

See for yourself:

http://www.madshrimps.be/vbulletin/a...2&d=1168456931

But after a night of good sleep I realized I've been a very bad boy and felt an urge to make it up with myself. I tried a bit and find out that if I pushed on the BIOS chip while booting, my motherboard was very satisfied :D.
I could'n believe it, putting some force on the BIOS chip did the trick. Sure this isn't for daily use, but I wanted to bench since I felt so lucky :D.

Here are my results: with one stick of DDRII, a triple RAID Raptor setup and a USB hard disk to save my screenies, not the most ideal setup:

http://valid.x86-secret.com/show_oc?id=155404

and :

:D

http://www.madshrimps.be/vbulletin/a...1&d=1168456931

setup:

E6600 cooled by Zalman 9500
AW9DMAX BIOS 14.A02
1 stick Elpida DDR800 DDRII
ASUS 7950gX

Lol, brilliant!

Score is not bad, going the phase change way again soon?

No, going to look for other motherboard soon :D , this isn't the ideal way of computing :D.

Just a needle to remove the bioschip was fine, i don't understand how you could damage the housing so badly. Brute force i guess:D

Easypanic is back doing some oc's ^^

Screwdriver did its bad magic :D

Lol, got frustrated? :D

Anyway, nice to see easypanic back in action

this gives a whole new meaning to "press button to start computer"

very nice overclock, wish my Core 2 mobo went that high up

solder de bios to the housing

I asked geoffrey to do it, apparently he can solder good.

He's my first hope :)

I demand pics+article: "reviving the Abit AW9D after crushing" :D

arf, seeing a board molested like that always makes my heart ache...

gl with the soldering.

Should it be voltmodded too? Maybe memory voltmod or something like that.

Lol, if you can :D

Mods are very welcome :)

guarantee on the mobo is ****ed anyway, you might as well go all the way ;)

http://xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=118248

the more mods, the merrier :D

Perhaps I'll drop by, to test your Cell Shock stickies :D :D.

how's the revival going? any pics yet:)

No not yet, I did 3/4 of all pins, but then came into trouble. You see, the side closest to the Sound Module Slot was impossible to solder with normal tools. I kept touching the black slot, until I gave up and started thinking about other possibilities. Now at work I had a chat with one of the technicians. He had tool based on hot air, which is normally used when soldering mainbords and stuff. I gave him a shot at those last pins. We rendaiz-vous tomorrow.

bring a videocam :) hot air gun always fun

Pfffffiew, this surgery took hours and hours, but we finally managed to repair our patient. System is booting now and seems to be in perfect condition. I'm heading over to the voltage mods now, the Super Soldier should be finished this afternoon ;)

hihi :D

test your conroe I'd say ;p

Is it going inside a case? I'm adding a molex connector for easy reading voltages ;)

Yep, a Lian Li PC2000 :D

You're the man :love::cheer:


:excellent::david:

Wow, I would love to see pics of the board.

You've got great skill Geoff ;)

Mods are done, looking very good as I say myself, testing will be for tomorrow, going after some food now.

Did it work out ok?

I'm not at my adres in Zele, expect the updates later this evening ;)

ahaaa :D

Pictures

















As said, the black connector was really a problem, but it should still work.

sweet

my hero :)

Last picture, getting my +-4 hours of sleep :)



The board is acting really weird though. Been strugling to get it booting, finnaly found out that the S3 Trio card was causing the problem, everything seems to be fine with the 7950GT plugged in. Memory was booting at 2,3V also after clear CMOS, not exaclty the thing you want either. Then when I reset the mobo it didn't boot, I first had to power off the whole system first.
The boot screen showed my E6600 at 400*6, though I didn't even take a look inside the BIOS.
BIOS version (M606C_14.A02 ) should be safe: http://forum.abit-usa.com/showthread...=117944&page=4

Next, I played a bit with the Vmods, they are set to their 'working area'. Dunno how to explain in English, but what I mean is that when you turn them 2/3 times you will see the voltage changing. Those 100k trimmers are really big, when I started turning them I had to do like 10 rounds before I saw anything changing on my voltmeter. Vcore mod was not working, I desolderd it again but I give it another shot tomorrow afternoon when I get back home.
I might throw in my CPU waterblock and have some fun :-p

hardcore modding this, that resoldered bios chip shot looks ubergood

This board can do at least 460 FSB ;).

Is it possible that the board can't do dual channel? Or are there some bugs known with dual channel TEAMGROUP DDR800?

Some memory sticks are causing trouble, yes :s.

Lol, I got it booting in dual channel some minutes ago. Did some benches but performance was worse then when going single channel. After a few reboots I got that weird error again ('20' is showed on the digits), time to go single channel again I guess.

VCPU mod working also, but remember setting a certain voltage in BIOS before tweaking anything. VDIMM overvolts 0,35V, the lowest value in BIOS (1.75V) gives me 2.1V on the DDR RAM. I just found out my RAM can take up to 2,8V :D

I guess it's ready for pickup easypanic ;)

no pickup today or tomorrow, very ill ;(.

some guys on XS had the same 20 error...

Great skills geoff, it really looks good.

You're have to be one lucky man, Easypanic ;)

Thx :drink: