New Gigibyte mother board

[Sundar Nagarajan]

Karl F. Larsen wrote:

>     But I read a wiki about my cpu and it said the running a cpu 
> designed for a MD3 socket in a MD2+ socket may cause some sort of BIOS 
> problem. Well that is odd because on my computer BIOS has a CMOS memory 
> chip which is kept working by a small battery. What does BIOS do with 
> the cpu? I understand it reads the hardware and boots up the computer. 
> Why would the BIOS do anything to the cpu?

Karl,

I guess you mean AM2+ amd AM3, not MD2+ and MD3. Assuming that, what you 
read is right. Technically, AM3 CPUs were designed to work in AM2+ 
sockets (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socket_AM3).

Quoting from that link:

	AM3 processors are backwards-compatible with Socket AM2+, contingent
	upon a BIOS update for the motherboard. Manufacturers including Asus,
	[5] Gigabyte,[6] and others have labeled existing AM2/AM2+ boards as
	being "AM3 Ready" or similar, indicating that BIOS support is provided
	for the specified boards. This allows existing AM2/AM2+ systems to
	upgrade the CPU without having to upgrade any other components

There's also some additional information atthis link (also available on 
the wikipedia page above:
	http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=3169

The AM3 CPU contains a DDR2 as well as DDR3 controller, whereas the AM2 
CPU has ONLY a DDR2 controller on-chip. Perhaps the BIOS update serves 
to allow the BIOS to control the CPU on board initialization to enable 
the right memory controller or Hypertransport transfer rate for the board.

-- 
Sundar Nagarajan
Linux User #170123 | Ubuntu User #2805