The AHCI drivers allow you to use your SATA drives in AHCI or RAID mode, as opposed to legacy IDE mode.
Finding the AHCI drivers is a real pain, as they are stored in the "ASUS Make AMD RAID/AHCI Driver Disk" zip file on the ASUS download site for the M4A77TD. You can also get the same exact drivers from
http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_catalyst.aspx?driver=Integrated/xp32-chipset, under "Raid Driver".
Since there is no floppy drive controller, it is particularly hard to use this "make disk" tool so that the driver can be loaded during install. There's probably a way using a USB thumb drive, but I haven't attempted it. It's much easier, but still rather obscure, to add this driver after you have installed (which means your main hard drive must be in IDE mode).
First, extract the files and save the WINXP/x86 folder to your desktop. Then open the Windows Device Manager (under the hardware tab of System Properties). Scroll down to the Unrecognized PCI device with a big question mark, and the proceed to update its driver (why couldn't they at least give it a more descriptive name??).
Tell windows to use the INF file from the WINXP/x86 folder on your desktop. You'll need to tell it that it's a RAID driver, or it won't recognize that you've found the right file. Ever so annoyingly, Windows also offers the option to "install", when you right click on the ahcix86.inf file in the x86 folder, but trust me, this does nothing. When you've actually installed the driver, the hard drives will immediately become available.
Friday, May 14, 2010
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Updating the bios & the Error Occurred While Erasing Blocks message
Updating your BIOS is easy, in theory. Download the latest ROM from ASUS, put it on a USB thumb drive, insert, and turn on. The EZ-Flash 2 utility is built in, and knows how to read FAT32 disks, USB, or otherwise. You may, however, get the following message after loading the ROM, and confirming that you would like to update:
Error Occurred While Erasing Blocks
Sounds bad, eh? Indeed, but as it turns out, if your ROM file has more than 8 letters in its name, this error can show up even if your BIOS is fine. Of course, ASUS tends to name their files with >8 letter names all the time, so you can arrive at this through no fault of your own. Just rename the file & reboot (you have to reboot, or you still get the message).
I have to say, this level of quality control does not inspire. Especially, since if you search around you'll see that this problem has been popping up for at least the last year.
Error Occurred While Erasing Blocks
Sounds bad, eh? Indeed, but as it turns out, if your ROM file has more than 8 letters in its name, this error can show up even if your BIOS is fine. Of course, ASUS tends to name their files with >8 letter names all the time, so you can arrive at this through no fault of your own. Just rename the file & reboot (you have to reboot, or you still get the message).
I have to say, this level of quality control does not inspire. Especially, since if you search around you'll see that this problem has been popping up for at least the last year.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
M4A77TD Review first impressions - layout and install
The motherboard comes with 2 SATA cables, 1 ATA cable, a thin backplate, and a thin manual. The motherboard has 6 USB sockets built in, and 3 additional pinouts on the motherboard where you can connect external USB panels (purchased separately), each providing 2 USB sockets.
Somewhat annoyingly, the box is completely unsealed, so there's no way to make 100% sure you didn't buy somebody's unmarked return. The cables are sealed, however, so you can try to infer from that.
Inserting the motherboard into the case I found two small faults. First, the backplate was made with 'fingers' that press against the IO connectors on the MB, as is typical. These fingers, however, were really 'extended', such that a significant amount of pressure was required to get the MB to slide into place so it could be screwed down. I had to remove the MB twice and bend the fingers back a bit before I could get it screwed down, and even then I needed a second set of hands to apply lateral pressure while I fastened the screws. Annoying, but it was dealt with in a couple minutes. The other notable is that while the M4A77TD claims to be a full ATX, it doesn't quite extend far enough, so one side of the MB is left hanging - the part where the RAM and a few of the HD connectors are. This means that the MB flexes a bit more than necessary when inserting those items. It's not hard to imagine a few MBs get broken during this stage of the install. I put a temporary brace behind the MB to prevent flexing. Otherwise, installation was easy.
The layout is generally good. I miss the floppy connector, but then I'm a legacy kinda guy: part of the reason I bought this was the serial port (For winlirc). The top PCI slot is right next to the 16x PCIe slot, but both can be used at the same time so long as your video card isn't one of those double wide varieties with a giant cooler. All of the on-board cooling is passive, so there are no fans to make noise or fail.
The BIOS reset jumper is somewhat poorly located, just below the 3rd pci slot, and thus blocked if you use that slot. Because it's in a cramped spot, it can also be hard to tell if you have the jumper on the right 2 of 3 pins to clear CMOS. Trying to unlock cores generally led to needing to reset CMOS in order to be able to boot again, so I speak from experience!
Somewhat annoyingly, the box is completely unsealed, so there's no way to make 100% sure you didn't buy somebody's unmarked return. The cables are sealed, however, so you can try to infer from that.
Inserting the motherboard into the case I found two small faults. First, the backplate was made with 'fingers' that press against the IO connectors on the MB, as is typical. These fingers, however, were really 'extended', such that a significant amount of pressure was required to get the MB to slide into place so it could be screwed down. I had to remove the MB twice and bend the fingers back a bit before I could get it screwed down, and even then I needed a second set of hands to apply lateral pressure while I fastened the screws. Annoying, but it was dealt with in a couple minutes. The other notable is that while the M4A77TD claims to be a full ATX, it doesn't quite extend far enough, so one side of the MB is left hanging - the part where the RAM and a few of the HD connectors are. This means that the MB flexes a bit more than necessary when inserting those items. It's not hard to imagine a few MBs get broken during this stage of the install. I put a temporary brace behind the MB to prevent flexing. Otherwise, installation was easy.
The layout is generally good. I miss the floppy connector, but then I'm a legacy kinda guy: part of the reason I bought this was the serial port (For winlirc). The top PCI slot is right next to the 16x PCIe slot, but both can be used at the same time so long as your video card isn't one of those double wide varieties with a giant cooler. All of the on-board cooling is passive, so there are no fans to make noise or fail.
The BIOS reset jumper is somewhat poorly located, just below the 3rd pci slot, and thus blocked if you use that slot. Because it's in a cramped spot, it can also be hard to tell if you have the jumper on the right 2 of 3 pins to clear CMOS. Trying to unlock cores generally led to needing to reset CMOS in order to be able to boot again, so I speak from experience!
Thursday, May 6, 2010
Price watch: Cheapest source for the M4A77TD
As of 5/6/2010, the cheapest online source for the M4A77TD is Tiger Direct, at $85 + S&H ($2) - $8 when you using Bing Cashback. This is especially true for those of us who live in California, since Tiger Direct doesn't charge sales tax there. If you don't like Bing cashback, and don't live in CA, then Buy.com has it for $85, with free S&H.
Tiger Direct is where I ordered my M4A77TD from, along with a CPU and RAM. While I liked the price, I'm rather disappointed with how carefully packaged it was - there was some rolled up paper stuffed in the box to keep things from rattling, but other than that there was nothing to protect the items from damage during shipping. The CPU, for instance, was smack up against the side of the box, and because AMD has a little transparent plastic window so you can see the CPU, the only protection the CPU had was 1/4th of an inch of cardboard, and 1/16th of an inch of plastic. Pitiful. Luckily, it all worked, at least for now.
Tiger Direct is where I ordered my M4A77TD from, along with a CPU and RAM. While I liked the price, I'm rather disappointed with how carefully packaged it was - there was some rolled up paper stuffed in the box to keep things from rattling, but other than that there was nothing to protect the items from damage during shipping. The CPU, for instance, was smack up against the side of the box, and because AMD has a little transparent plastic window so you can see the CPU, the only protection the CPU had was 1/4th of an inch of cardboard, and 1/16th of an inch of plastic. Pitiful. Luckily, it all worked, at least for now.
ASUS M4A77TD AM3 770 ATX AMD Motherboard outside review summary
A good AMD motherboard should have at least the following features: 4 DIMM slots and an AM3 socket. This ASUS M4A77TD motherboard meets those requirements. Other notable specs:
6 SATA, 0 eSATA.
1 PS/2 port
1 COM port
6 USB
No onboard video.
Express Gate - Instant on Linux distro.
Turbo Key (a blast from the past!) use the power button to cycle over-clocking features on or off.
6-core CPU support.
Core unlocking.
There aren't any mainstream reviews of this board.
This blogger has a short post for the PRO version which doesn't say much more than you can learn from reading the specs.Note: I'm discussing the non-PRO version here, which has 1 more SATA, one less eSATA, and no crossfire support.
Newegg has 103 customer reviews.
- 3 people flat out couldn't get it to work at all;
- 1 had problems getting windows installed
- 1 had stability problems
- 1 had a failure within first week of use.
- 3 people complained about the sound card, but didn't explain why (not Linux users). 2 more said Linux support for the sound card was difficult - they had to make sure they used the latest ALSA drivers.
- several people marked their reviews down an 'egg' because it supports legacy ports (COM/PS2, parallel). What idiots. This highlights the problem with trusting newegg reviews.
The rest of the reviews were positive - a much higher percentage than most MBs sold by newegg.
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