AMD 790FX Phenom Chipset On Linux

BIOS:

The Gigabyte MA790FX-DS5 ships with an Award Software BIOS and its modifications and extra options are similar to the other recent Gigabyte motherboards we have reviewed. Through the Motherboard Intelligent Tweaker (M.I.T.) the CPU, DDR2 (up to a +0.50V increase), Chipset (up to a +0.40V increase), PCI Express, FSB, HTT (up to a +0.40V increase), and HTR voltages can be adjusted. The frequency adjustments for the CPU range from 200MHz to 500MHz in 1MHz increments. The HT link, PCI Express, and DDR2 frequencies can also be fine-tuned.

BIOS updates for AMD 790FX motherboards have become quite important with the Phenom TLB erratum. On December 21, Gigabyte had released Version F3, which contains the fix as well as adding boot-block checksum support. For those using Linux as their sole operating system, updating the motherboard's BIOS can be troublesome if the manufacturer just offers a Windows-based utility and/or a program for flashing the motherboard from MS-DOS. However, with Gigabyte's Q-Flash utility it's a smooth and easy process for Linux users. Q-Flash is able to read/write from a local hard disk for upgrading the BIOS or backing up the BIOS, and is not MS-DOS dependent. For upgrading the MA790FX-DS5 BIOS to the F3 image, we had started by creating a small FAT32 partition. Gigabyte only offers the BIOS files for download by bundling it inside a Windows executable, but simply running this EXE file with WINE will extract the contents. After moving the ma79xds5.f3 file to the FAT32 partition, we had rebooted and proceeded to enter Q-Flash (just hit the "END" key while POSTing) and had no issues finding the copy of the updated BIOS. After that, Q-Flash proceeded to update the BIOS and everything had worked without touching Windows or MS-DOS.