Asus P4C800-E Deluxe and BIOS flashing higher than revision 1019

System Requirements:

  • Asus P4C800-E Deluxe

 

The Problem:

I admit it, I spooked myself doing this the first time and never came back to it.

It seems that a common problem with the P4C800 board range stems from people attempting to BIOS flash anything higher than the 2004 release 1019.004 ROM file.

If you do this you (may) as some have reported completely black screens or, as I did when I attempted to flash 1024.001 (beta), 1023, 1022 and 1021 – each time it spat out at the POST an error about experiencing an overclocking related error.

This is nonsense as my board has never been overclocked, there was no reason for this error. In the end I restored from the 1019 backup, which worked.

 

The Fix:

I wont forgive myself for saying this, but I think the problem is really down in the AFlash utility, I used the latest version of it at the time, and each time it dived – apart from 1019.

All this time later when I came back to look at it, having worked up the courage to look into it again, I thought I would go from a bootable 1019 and try the Asus Live Update utility. You cannot use versions lower than about 5.3, Asus say that much themselves in regards to these newer flash files. I found version 7.10.03 floating around on their FTP server and gave it a go.

I should state at this juncture that there have not been any significant hardware changes in the system configuration.

The auto update does not work: “Cannot find update files”, so it has to be done manually.

  1. Pull down 1023 or if you want the beta 1024.001, inflate whichever ROM you want.
    NB: If you use 1024.001 you must rename it .ROM instead of .001
  2. Use Live Update to update from file
  3. Reboot when asked
  4. Worked for me when the DOS utility persisted in telling me I was a bad overclocker
  5. Uninstall Asus Live and let us never speak of this again

If I had to make an observational, gut feeling statement of whether I think there is any point in risking the above, aside form my obsession with firmware build dates. I would have to say that my reaction is that the IDE seems to be that little bit more responsive than it was before.

In addition, the highest version of Asus Probe which works for this board is 2.25.02. ProbeII does not work.