AtomicInternet Archived News

Preparing to relax and enjoy my Saturday night, I booted up my workstation and noticed the BIOS version on my ASUS A8N Premium motherboard was 1009. A quick check revealed 1303 was the latest, which I promptly downloaded, and discovered dynamic BIOS updating was yet another thing my newly reloaded 64-bit Vista did not support. After installing my floppy drive from 1998 to complete the bootable BIOS update, I was disappointed to see my NVIDIA RAID firmware remained a lowly version 4.84. A quick Google search revealed ASUS is not as diligent as most motherboard manufacturers with their BIOS updates, and typically don't bother to update integrated device firmware. Fortunately the same search produced a link to the Award BIOS Editor which just by downloading makes you feel like you're sticking it to "the man". After loading a BIOS update I found on MSI that users reported also updated their RAID firmware, I was able to extract the RAID update and replace the old 4.84 block with the new 5.60 in the "official" 1303 BIOS for my A8N in the editor. Unsure if my hack update would work, do nothing at all, or completely brick my motherboard, I was surprised to have it work perfectly. The old NVIDIA RAID 4.84 configuration screen now calls itself NVIDIA MediaShield 5.60 with a moderate performance gain.