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Compaq Presario 5441/Gigabite GA-5smm need F3 bios

Posted: Sun Oct 01, 2006 11:20 pm
by Hotlynx2
Has a K6-2 475 (with 95mhz bus) now, want to try a K6-2+450 (with 100mhz bus) but it says I need the F3 bios but the Gigabite site only has the F2 and F5 bios. Also I read If you flash with any thing other tha a Compaq Bios it won't work?

Posted: Mon Oct 02, 2006 1:02 am
by Uranium235
The F5 BIOS is the newest version and the one you want. I have flashed the Gigabyte BIOS over the Compaq BIOS on these boards without any problems. I think I used the Uniflash utility but Awdflash should work too.

Some versions of this motherboard may have had a BIOS write-protect jumper that could prevent you from flashing the BIOS. You may want to check if your board has this.

You will also need to change the extension on the BIOS file before you flash the board. Change 5SMM.F5 to 5SMM.bin and then flash the board.

Good Luck. :)

Posted: Mon Oct 02, 2006 4:22 am
by Hotlynx2
Thanks for the info, I am trying to squeeze a little more out of it by putting in that K6-2+450 and overclock to 550mhz, I may have to try a PCI video also as right now it won't hardly play streaming vidio from Youtube with a 700 kb download connection.

Posted: Tue Oct 03, 2006 12:07 am
by halfpennies
I have a PC Chips mobo with SIS530 video (like yours, I believe) and a K6-2+ 533. You Tube and Google video streams are very "choppy" on this computer. My Presario 7360 is a little better with the onboard Trident, but I find that a quality PCI (no AGP slot) card makes the streaming video watchable. On the 7360, video performance benchmarks are noticably better with the nvidia GeForce4 MX440 card.

Posted: Wed Oct 18, 2006 8:33 am
by Hotlynx2
Thanks to Uranium235 the Compaq thinks it is a Gigabyte now and I have the K6-2 450+ in it. Tryed OC to 550 but started getting errors, running at 500mhz (320MB memory)now and stable. Just got a radeon 9200 64MB PCI of ebay for $25. Going to try it out and see how the video does then.

Posted: Fri Oct 20, 2006 1:01 pm
by Hotlynx2
Well the PCI 9200 radeon 64mb didn't help, You-tube still jerky. I guess it could be the nic card but I have downloaded file at 91 kb/second which is normal for my connection. Oh well I am going to give it back and tell him thats the best it will do. What is strange is I have a FIC 503+ with a K6-III+ overclocked to 550 mhz and a Voodoo 3-3000 16mb AGP and the videos are a lot smoother on You-Tube.

Posted: Fri Oct 20, 2006 10:17 pm
by Uranium235
There may be a few ways to get rid of the jerkiness but the VA-503+ will always outperform the GA-5SMM head to head due to poor memory bandwidth.
The GA-5SMM suffers from a small L2 cache which only cache's 64MB of system memory. It may actually run smoother by disabling the L2 cache in the BIOS. The K6+ CPU's L2 will do a better job alone.
When you add a PCI video card and disable the onboard video in the device manager, Gigabyte also advises that you leave the first memory slot #1 empty to fully disable the shared video memory.
The Radeon 9200, being a PCI version, probably only has the same video bandwidth as the Voodoo3. Both cards have 2.6GB/s BW, not much advantage there. A Radeon 9100 PCI, if you can find one, would be a better choice.
http://cgi.ebay.com/XTASY-9100-64MB-PCI ... dZViewItem

Here's a pretty good video guide for comparisons between different cards. My rule of thumb is that bandwidth is king.
http://users.erols.com/chare/video.htm