1.2Ghz Athlon & R0114K5 bios Results

March 08, 2002

Hello All,

Updated December 3, 2002

A table of Athlon processors has been found on a Russian site. The table lists a lot of the Athlon chip model numbers. More importantly the table identifies 3 different types of Mobile Athlon processors

The mobile Athlon replacement processors used to date have been of the 35W Desktop replacement variety. I have a hunch that the 25W and 16W processors will work a lot better in our laptops.

As you might be able to guess from the title I broke down and bought a 1.2Ghz mobile Athlon processor, from Charles at iThinkComputers inc.,  for my FX210. Actually it was supposed to be for my business partners FX210, more on that later. I have been running the 900Mhz "Morgan" core Duron processor for a couple of months now and have been fairly happy with it. However, you know the old saying faster is always better. :) 

I received the new processor on Monday, March 4. I immediately attempted to install the processor in my business partners FX210. His FX210 still had the "Spitfire" core 800Mhz Duron processor in it. The install went smoothly. However, when I attempted to boot the laptop with the new processor I encountered problems. 

The bios post occurred normally. Win2K made it through the text portion of its boot process and started into the graphical splash screen. Unfortunately it did not make it any further. The laptop hung and required a power cycle. I attempted another boot. This time the machine hung during the text boot portion. I cycled power again and the machine did not even perform the bios post. 

Uhoh. I figured I had a real problem now. Unfortunately my business partner needed his laptop to take on a business trip. So I removed the Athlon and put the Duron back in hoping that I had not hurt anything. Thankfully the laptop booted up and worked fine. Now the big question was, did I fry the Athlon or not?

Sooo. I opened up my FX210 and swapped out the 900Mhz Duron for the 1.2Ghz Athlon. Crossing my fingers I powered up the laptop. The Sony bios post screen appeared. Hurrah the Athlon wasn't dead. The Win2K text screen appeared followed by the Win2K graphical screen and then the Win2K login screen. All right, now I was ready to do some testing.

Why did my FX210 work with the Athlon while my business partner's FX210 not work? My FX210 was running the R0107K5 bios while my partner's FX210 was running the WXP01K5 bios. However, I did not think that was the problem. Oh well, I had the processor running in my machine time for some testing. 

But before talking about results there is one more issue. On February 27, 2002 Sony released the R0114K5 bios for the FXA47/49 laptops. Sony provided very little information regarding why this bios was released and Sony did not release the Bios for the rest of the AMD based Vaios. Unfortunately I did not have detailed information on the FXA47/49 laptops. So I was not sure if the bios would be compatible with the rest of the AMD based Vaio laptops. 

To further complicate matters I did not know if anyone from the Yahoo forum had a FXA47/49 or FX50x laptop. That is why I requested everyone send me information on what model laptop they had. So far I have heard from 23 people. Only 154 to go :) Please help me out and let me know what model of laptop you have as well as any other pertinent information.

On Tuesday, March 5 I was able to stop by a Circuit City store. Thankfully they had an FXA47 on display. I loaded H.Oda's WCPUID program and pulled text captures of all the screens. If you have seen the updated comparison page you all ready know that the FXA47/49/FX50x laptops are identical to the rest of our AMD based Vaios. (Side note: The only real difference among all of the laptops is that the FX201, FX210, and FX215 have an older Southbridge chip than the rest of the models.) Now I knew that the new, R0114K5, bios would probably work on my FX210.

On Wednesday, March 6 I decided to give the new bios a try. So I stripped the R0114K5 bios out of the InstallShield wizard that Sony packaged it in with i6comp. I then took the bootable disk image I had created for the WXP01K5 bios and replaced the WXP01K5 "bios.rom" file with the R0114K5 "bios.rom" file.  This gave me a bootable disk with the new bios on it. (An image of this disk is on the bios page).

It was now moment of truth time. Crossing my fingers, toes, and everything else I booted off of the bios boot disk. The prompt appeared asking if I wanted to update the bios. Selecting Yes I held my breath. The bios flash process seemed to be proceeding normally. When the bios flash process completed the laptop shutdown. 

OK, did I have a paper weight or a working laptop. I powered up and thankfully it started to boot. I checked the bios setup screen and sure enough I now had the R0114K5 bios on my FX210. It was time to see what was new with this bios.

After booting into Win2K I had to reinstall my video driver for some reason. Other than that everything looked OK. On a whim I fired up WCPUID to see if it saw anything different. Surprise, SSE support was now enabled. Among a couple of other things this bios finally enables SSE support for the mobile Athlon and "Morgan" based Duron processors. I then passed on the good news about the new bios to the Yahoo Forum. Tony (toneman) reported back to me that the new bios also moved the touchpad/mouse Interrupt (IRQ) from 9 to 12. 

The R0114K5 bios has made a huge difference in stability on my FX210. I have not had a system freeze or touchpad/mouse freeze since I updated to the R0114K5 bios. I think the main reason for the improved stability is the moving of the touchpad/mouse interrupt from 9 to 12. It will be very interesting to see if Sony officially releases this bios for the rest of the AMD based Vaios. They should.

OK. Now for the benchmark numbers for the 1.2Ghz Mobile Athlon. All the benchmarks were done using the R0114K5 bios and SiSoft Sandra Standard Version 2002.1.8.59. I did compare scores to the R0107K5 bios. There is no noticeable performance difference between the two (2) bioses.

Processor

Memory Benchmark

Arithmetic Benchmark

Multimedia Benchmark
800Mhz Duron
900Mhz Duron

1.0Ghz Athlon    
1.1Ghz (OC) Athlon    
1.15Ghz(OC) Athlon    
1.2Ghz
Athlon

Hopefully I can get Tony to fill in the blanks for the 1.0Ghz Athlon??

Today Friday, March 8 my business partner returned and I once again tried to put the 1.2Ghz Athlon in his FX210. Unfortunately, I met with the exact same problems. So I still have the 1.2Ghz Athlon in my FX210 and my partner has the 900Mhz "Morgan" core Duron that used to by in my machine in his FX210. ;-)

I don't know why the 1.2Ghz Athlon won't work in his FX210. I have a hunch it has to be a thermal problem but it doesn't make much sense. Why don't I have the same problem? The two FX210s are identical to each other. Anyone got any ideas?

One other oddity with the 1.2Ghz Athlon. PowerNow! under Win2K and WinME does not work with this chip. I think that the PowerNow! drivers for Win2K and WinME are old enough (latest version I can find is 2.0.0.12) that they don't properly recognize the 1.2Ghz mobile Athlon chip. The error message I get in the Win2K event log is related to the "gemwdm.sys" file not initializing properly. If you have WinXP I don't think this will be a problem because WinXP implements PowerNow! support a little differently.

Battery life -- Using the BP1N battery I get about 70 to 80 minutes of run time. This is identical to what I was getting with the 900Mhz Duron. I have not tested with the BP71 battery yet but I expect the same results as with the 900Mhz Duron.

In Conclusion:

 

As always your comments are appreciated.

Later
Brad
mailto:bhite@rocketmail.com

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