ZNF3-250 bios upgrade

[TheRapture]

WOW, what can I say...I was on the original shipping BIOS until last night. Performance was a bit...less than I was expecting to see. WAY better than my old XP but still seemed a bit behind others with some similar setups...well...

I flashed the BIOS to the "official" but not released in USA yet bios from Chaintech. HOLY MOLY...what a difference....maybe my old BIOS was buggy, but I gained about 10% performance across the bench in Far Cry and Doom3, putting me right on target with what I was seeing on the net using an A64 overclocked like mine and this same motherboard. For example in Far Cry using the Regulator demo, 1280x1024 everything to "very high" in game, no FSAA and 4x AF, I was getting 90fps AFTER the bios flash, and only 81fps before. Repeated and verified many times...I play SP with 4x FSAA and MP with 0x FSAA for more speed.


Anyway, just a heads up, if some of you need this new bios and can't find it, PM me and I will e-mail it to you....it made a huge difference for me...I will test some more synthetic benches and post back here...

 

[Sabs]

I have the VNF3-250 as well. Do you have a link to the BIOS revision you're referring to? Is it the 7/29/04 BIOS (filename VN120729.BIN), or something else completely? I flashed to this revision and it cleared up the temperature reporting and works well for the most part, but I do have intermittent lockups on warm reboots.

 

[Sabs]

Actually, I don't think my temperature readings are correct. With the shipping BIOS, I was getting ridiculously low temp readings such as 29 degrees Celcius. Now, I am getting 52C Idle/60C Load, with a ThermalTake Silent Boost, not overclocked. The heatsink is cool to the touch, so I think it's reading high. (BTW, the DigiDoc utility eats too many CPU cycles and fluctutes more than the BIOS readings). I saw from a previous post you believed your temps to be reading high, is this still the case.