I have just done some testing of various manufacturer's BIOS on my Triton chipset motherboard. This was an experiment to see if a motherboard can use the BIOS from a different manufacturer.

The answer: Most Yes, but somewhat No. For the most part, it works, but your mileage will vary. This WILL, however, allow you to upgrade to a newer BIOS that may even fix some (or many) bugs.

NOTICE: My motherboard never became totally dysfunctional with any other company's BIOS, but be aware that I may have just been lucky!

DO NOT ATTEMPT TO USE A DIFFERENT COMPANY'S BIOS UNLESS: 1) You have an EPROM programmer handy. 2) You have another flash capable motherboard handy and know how to do the "hot-flash" method. 3) You like living on the edge and are willing to risk killing your motherboard.

The experiment: I wanted to upgrade the BIOS on my Amptron PM7700B motherboard from a v4.50PG BIOS to a v4.51PG BIOS in the hopes of fixing a Power Management bug (monitor blanking out randomly, and HD falling asleep even while I'm typing). My config: Maxtor 1.6GB HD Pri/Master, Aztech 4x CD-ROM Sec/Slave, SB16, AMD 5k86-75 oc'd to 90MHz (older SSA-5 version).

I tried the following BIOS's: Award v4.51PG from ASUS for their 430FX motherboards, Award v4.50PG from FIC for their PT-2003 430FX board, Award v4.51PG from ECS for their TR5510 board, and Award v4.51PG for Shuttle's HOT-541 board.

NOTE: You often CANNOT flash another manufacturer's BIOS if they use a different flash program (ASUS is one such company that uses a different flash program than others). AWDFLASH v5.2 works fine to flash all BIOS except ASUS's. I discovered that MR-BIOS's 29C010.EXE (use the program suitable for your chip) will flash ANYTHING into the chip. You can find 29C010.EXE and 28F010.EXE on ftp://ftp.mrbios.com. Their shareware is gone, but those programs can be found inside a few of the .zip files found there that are >60k in length.

Results:

• ASUS BIOS worked fine, but only detected (and counted) 8MB when I really have 16MB. Win95 auto-detected many new devices, but promptly got rid of this one due to the memory detection.
• FIC 430FX BIOS, couldn't access floppy (system would freeze if I tried), but HD booted and worked just fine. Promptly got rid of this one.
• ECS TR5510 BIOS, this one works great, and is what I'm using now. It fixed the APM bug, and also fixed a bug where before, SHIFT-F5 would throw me into Safe Mode while booting Win95 while it's SUPPOSED to boot directly into DOS. ECS BIOS fixed it to where it works correctly, I am assuming this was caused by a slight incompatibility between Amptron's BIOS and the AMD 5k86 CPU (which Amptron tech support had already told me wasn't quite stable on their board). Also, the ECS BIOS benched considerably faster with the AMD 5k86 under WinTune96 (RAM access and HD access also increased a few MB/s).
• Shuttle HOT-541 BIOS, this fixed the same bugs the ECS BIOS did, and also ID'ed my AMD 5k86-75 (SSA/5) as an AMD K5-PR90. Although this was the newest BIOS (8/96), it didn't allow Win95 to detect my CD-ROM drive so I reverted back to the ECS BIOS.

In Conclusion, none of the 4 non-Amptron BIOS that I tried had any permanent and unrecoverable negative effect, and most worked about 90-100% (the ECS even fixed bugs that were in the original Amptron BIOS). Some IMPORTANT things to remember if you wish to try something like this: Use *ONLY* BIOS's from motherboards with the SAME chipset!!! Also, make sure the I/O chip from that motherboard is the same as yours, in my case, I only flashed BIOS from motherboards that used the UM8669 I/O chip. I don't know what might happen if you flash a BIOS designed to support a different type of I/O chip, your serial ports might not work... or worse! Lastly, you must make a copy of a KNOWN perfectly working BIOS and flash program on your hard drive, this is in case your floppy drive won't boot, but your hard drive still can.

Anyhow, these were my findings, and I am very pleased to have found that the ECS BIOS fixed every single bug my motherboard had. I also don't recommend doing this without some kind of backup plan. I own an FEPROM programmer so if a BIOS killed my motherboard, it wouldn't have been a problem to fix it. I never had to use it, but you may not get so lucky. Sorry for the lengthy message, but I thought someone might find this educational.

Shawn Lin - slin01@mail.orion.org