Yesterday I attempted to update the BIOS on my motherboard in anticipation of eventually picking up an Intel E8400. I read on ASUS’ website that the newest 45nm Intel CPUs are supported in the latest BIOS revision, 1502/1503. 1502 was available on their downloads page, so I downloaded it and gave it a whirl. I was coming from what my motherboard shipped with, revision 1203.

Now, my motherboard has a nifty LCD display on the back that displays POST codes, letting me know where exactly it stops, if and when it does. And it did. BIOS 1502 would not post in the rig I currently have shown on my Hardware page. The LCD displayed “MSINSTAL” indicating it stopped while attempting to “initialize PS2 mouse”, which I most assuredly do not have. It even did so with all external hardware besides the monitor disconnected. After some investigation on ASUS’ forums that I probably should have been more thorough with before performing the update, it turns out the issue is that 1502 doesn’t correctly support SLI, and won’t even boot with two cards intalled. Removed the bridge, pull out my second 8800GT, and off she goes. POSTed fine, was able to enter the BIOS configuration, and even boot Vista and then XP.

But I’m not nearly ready to invalidate one hardware upgrade I’ve already performed in advance of a potential one. So I got ready to downgrade. 1401 seemed to be the latest stable BIOS with good SLI support, so I downloaded it from my laptop, put it on my flash drive, and popped the mobo CD into my drive. Rebooted to the CD, ran their AWDFLASH utility with the /f flag to allow a downgrade, and successfully reflashed my BIOS to 1402.

It’s running just dandy now, including my SLI support. I also noticed a setting in the BIOS that explained why my PC stayed “on” during standby. It was doing what’s known as Power-On Suspend rather than Suspend To RAM. Fixed that setting, and now it powers down everything but a little juice to my memory. Takes maybe 2 seconds longer to come back up, but it also goes dark and silent.