Gigabyte GA-81RXP revisited

Last week we published a letter from Gigabyte announcing Bios 7a, a revision intended to resolve a persistent boot problem experienced when manually changing the vcore for the GA-81RXP motherboard. This bug rendered the board pretty much useless for overclocking, a key target market.

Unfortunately, the link, supplied by the Taiwanese mobo maker, to the bios revision was dud (here's the correct http://www.giga-byte.com/support/intel845.htm#link8irxp). At some point over the weekend, Gigabyte definitely did make available Bios F7a for download. This fix doesn't fix, or so we are told in a dozen emails. Says one reader: "It's more than likely just a hastily hacked F6 bios with the cpu voltage now limited to 1.7volts".

And on its website Gigabyte has changed the description of F7a - it does not now claim to fix the boot problem.

This combination of definitive headline on The Register, dud link and unsuccessful fix has really got up the noses of GA-81RXP mobo-owning readers, some of whom speculated that a: The Register must be in the pockets of Gigabyte and b: The Register must be in the pockets of Gigabyte.

We're not quite sure how this works: The Register breaks story about buggy mobo, leading buggy mobo maker to acknowledge for the first time that there is still a problem with buggy mobo and produces a fix. Which doesn't fix, so customers say it's a fix.

We'll keep you posted: if and when there are any updates. If they arrive before the GA-81RXP becomes obsolete, of course. ®