This equipment is funded by research grants from the Carnegie Foundation and South Africa's National Research Foundation (NRF) .......................................... For more on high performance computing in SA, visit www.chpc.ac.za or School of computational and applied math (CAM) @ wits: http://www.wits.ac.za/academic/science/cam/6327/staff.html . . A light introduction to parallelisation was presented in a couple of seminars. Here are some slides: http://www.dianewilcox.net/GPUFinance_Wilcox_April2011.pdf

Sunday, January 16, 2011

Step 11: Updating the BIOS

Borrowed i7-950 from a nearby mail server

The i7-980x is removed and the i7-950 installed

The thermal surfaces were all cleaned, this can be done with cleaning detergent and alcohol.

The 8-pin BIOS PDIP was shipped with the 0504 BIOS which did not support the i7-980x (Gulftown). If no additional CPU's are avaliable to update the BIOS this PDIP can be popped out with a  hair-clip and then replaced with one with the updated BIOS. 

The CMOS battery was removed and replaced along with the use of the BIOS reset pin (the little blue rectangles next to the green power diode. The ASUS Q-connector can be seen in lower right.


The BIOS is updated from 0504 to 0904 using EZ Flash

The i7-980x is re-installed and the machines boots up correctly.

The machine is now ready for the OS installation and the additional 2 Tesla GPU cards.