Gateway FX 6800-01e BIOS Update from Gateway Unsupported

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gr, i hate power saving settings sometimes. I've got the smartfan turned off and all other power savings features turned off for max performance. Is there no override for this feature? I might not upgrade if this is the case.
 
If I had known SeaGate was going to pull a fast one like that, I would never have upgraded the firmware for my drive.

As it is, I've gotta check their website out to see if there is a way to disable the sleep setting.

I only downloaded the SeaTools a week ago cause I was working on another system and I had to pull the drive and connect it to my system to check the drive. In doing so, I had to download the manufacturer tools to do a complete diagnostic on the drive. But no sooner than I started the program than it told me that there was an update available for my drive.

Like a fool, I decided that it couldn't hurt. 🙁
 
I'm going to hold off on updating until this is confirmed :/ Sorry you got stuck w it. Must be a way to disable the power saving feature, just has to.
 
just n update here: after re-installing everything a few days ago, all is well so far. the only problem i've ran into now is sometimes when it wakes from hibernate it will go to the login screen and after login the screen goes black and it freezes. i have to manually shut down with the power button then start it back up. it only does it occasionally. other than that it's working perfectly.

CPU temps ~117F
graphic card temp ~140F
ACPI temp ~80F
HD temp ~100F

the ones that i'm not sure of using CPUID HW monitor are the TMPIN0, TMPIN1, and TMPIN2. these temps read as follows:

TMPIN0 ~230F
TMPIN1 ~115F
TMPIN2 ~80F

the TMPIN0 worries me a little but everything else looks good.
 
Hibernation is one setting I prefer to stay away from as Microsoft has had problem with this feature until recently.

So I honestly don't trust them to have all the bugs out of hibernation yet.
 
my temps on those three even after a gaming run of 4or 5 hours never get that high. but I have seen TMPINO reach 163F and those are your ram temps. The other two always stayed lower around 115F. I put a I put a ram cooler on them and now they stay around 105f while im gaming and around 70 at idle.
 
well i seem to be having another issue/annoyance. i mentioned that the problem happens when waking from hibernation. it also happens at startup occasionally. i'll log in and then the screen goes blank. also, sometimes it will load to the desktop then when i click something ithe screen will turn a certain color and have different colored vertical bars. it seems to be something with the video card/driver. i haven't installed any drivers after installing Win 7. all default drivers are working, or at least nothing showing up in device manager. this isn't a huge issue but i would like to resolve it. could it be the power supply being too weak?
 
Like I've mentioned earlier, Microsoft never really did get all the bugs out of Hibernation which is why I prefer not to use it.

When you use Hibernation Mode, you are bound to run into issues no matter what system you are running unless the company puts forth the effort to provide fixes for the system in question.

But with Gateway (Acer), you'll never get those fixes cause of the simple fact that they fail to provide access to the motherboard documentation to their own techs, never mind the customers.
 
There are no driver updates for the hard drive, but there may be a firmware update for the Seagate hard drive depending on the serial number.

You need to go to the Seagate website to the download section and get the SeaTools for Windows. This will check your SeaGate drive and alert if there is a firmware update available for your drive. Follow the instructions to verify that your drive does qualify for the update and it'll let you download the new firmware.

One thing I have noticed about this firmware update is it enables mandatory power savings in the drive itself and this overrides the power settings of your system. So even if you have your system set to never let your hard drive sleep, the SeaGate drive will go to sleep when it is not being accessed which is very annoying.
Click to expand...


Very annoying indeed, it takes mine 3 seconds to spin up from sleep mode and the clicking sound it makes is scary . The funny thing is I did not update to the latest seagate driver , it comes like this .
 
I have the same problem with dhay13 where I would get freeze just after boot or getting BSOD most of the time. The worst part is if I disable the smart fan, it will certainly get the BSOD or the stripe screen right away after boot. I'm still in vista 64. I have an extra 4670 GPU so I decided to replace the card and since then I never got any frreze or BSOD. Everything is working perfectly the way I expected it except with the downgraded GPU. I still don't know what was wrong if it is the power supply or the GPU but my guess is the GPU since I am reading a lot of problems in 4850. When I get a win 7 I'll try the 4850 again but for now I am enjoying this great pc.
 
Hi All,
Well, I just bought a FX 6800-01e and so far so good. I did a new install of Windows 7 pro without a hitch. Had some issues getting Itunes to work, but found that only a certain version works with Windows 7.
Ok, here's the 64K dollar question. Do I dare update anything at this point? I have the 2008 BIOS, do I update it to the latest or do I just stay where I am at.

Also, do have two things I would like to do.

1) Install two drives in a RAID 1 - I have a couple of 250gb drives that came out of another RAID system, and I'd like to place them into this computer, then have the 750 as a second data/backup drive

2) Increase RAM. I have a stick of Corsair 2gb RAM that is the same as what is in there .... can I just add it to get 5 gb total (for now) or will that cause problems?

Anyway, that's about it. Btw, to Renegade .... you are amazing how much you have help people in this forum. Wow!

Thanks

 


My 4850 1gb works great, but it draws too much power compare to the new 5xxx line, I already replaced the weak-sauce 450w PSU with a good 750W corsair, once the 5770 price goes back around its MSRP, Im going to get 2 of those and cross-fire :sol: . 2 x 5770 power draw = 1 4850 , performance wise is close to 5890 .

jpnielsen , 1) the lates bio will unlock more features for our i7 , well not manditory its recommended .
2) make sure yours is ddr3 ram not ddr2 , and if you install 4 sticks of memory , you will lose tri-channel memory config, don't know how much of a performance loss though.
 



HA, I am chicken *** to update it. Actually, I should do it now as it's still under the 30 days new policy.

So, you think I will lose more performance losing the tri-channel performance than I can gain from the extra 2 gigs? I will say it seems to run nicely on 3 gigs.

You guys are awesome. Thank you.

Jeff
 
I'd really like to get the ability to boot from usb in hdd emulation mode in the hacked bios. Anyone been able to get it to work?
 
well today i install a 700W OCZ power supply and a corsair RAM fan. the PS is working fine so far and the AM temps have dropped 30*F. #3 was running about 220*F before and now its at 187*F.

i disabled sleep mode awhile ago but still kept freezing at startup. i'll let you know if it happens with the new PS.
 
I am too having problems with sleep mode. If I make the system sleep and restart it within 1 hour it works fine. However, if I leave it for the night, it will go to login screen and then it blank out.

I order a new power supply. I think it's the video card, but I will keep you guys posted on the finding.
 
Update:

1) the upgrade on the BIOS 181 version went fine ... and was easy.

2)sent the 2 gigs of DDR 3 ram back until I could afford three sticks of the same thing. Having said that, it runs pretty well on 3 that I can tell.

3) Per Mr Warrior, I straightened out the SATA cables that are hooking into the mobo. Once again, Mr Warrior really helped out on this one. I can't imagine what they hooked it up the way they did. I first time I placed a drive in the removable front bays, it tried to boot it. This is because in the default configuration, those drive bays are hooked into lower drive numbers and computer was set to use the lowest number first.

4) RAID: Ok, need some help here. I understand you can do RAID via a controller on the mobo or you can do a software raid in Windows 7. This Mobo has a onboard hardware Raid controller so it makes sense to use it, righ?
Once I set controllers (sata controller) to "RAID" in the bios, I could now hit Crt-I to get into the RAID setup and set up a raid volume. I have another computer that uses this same method so I was in familiar territory.

Here's the problem, however. When I make the RAID volume, the setup utility says that it will wipe everything from both drives. Well, if I were stating out fresh, I would be happy to do that. But since I have everything working on the original 750gb drive, I really don't want to start over. How to I mirror this working drive without wiping everything first??
So again, what I want to do, is mirror the 750gb drive to the first 250 drive, then remove the 750 and re-mirror the first 250gb drivce to a SECOND 250gb drive. This way, I end up with a RAID 1 using two 250gb drives ..... and I will use the 750 as a second data drive.

That is what I am asking .... how does one mirror a working drive into a RAID 1 or mirrored configuration? I know how to do it by wiping both drives clean .... but I don't want to start over. I want to take the current drive and simply mirror it in Raid 1.

Ok, all you genius people. Whatta think?
 
robtmak, so far the new power supply has fixed the sleep mode issue. it's been 3 days now and now one problem since installing it. hopefully that was it.
 
I have the FX6800-11 model, and ran into the error message: "unable to recognize driver." Running afuwin.exe alone gave me the same error message, which got me thinking that the bios flash file was incorrect or corrupted, so I took a look around ami.com's support site and discovered there are different versions of afuwin.exe -- 32 and 64-bit, and AMI also specifies which drivers are appropriate depending on your OS. If you are running 64-bit Win Vista, download the zipped afuwin file, right click on it, select extract files, and then run afuwin64.exe with the bios image (.ROM) file you got from Gateway. Gateway uses a batch file, flash.bat, to do this, but you'll need to edit the command line to say afuwin64.exe; or just open a command prompt window and run the command and the parameters yourself. Note that the files must all be in the same directory for this to work. It also may take as long as 15 minutes to complete, so do not interrupt the process. I did have to manually reboot a couple of times and thought for a while I'd fried my BIOS, but everything worked out ok. The upgrade doesn't seem to be all that significant, however. I couldn't detect any noticable changes or option to enable "turbo boost" as Gateway claimed. The version number was changed from R01-A2 (12/08) to -A4 (2/09).
 
The BIOS update files for the FX6800 systems do not need any OS specific drivers as the updates have been working just fine. The FX6800 BIOS updates contain both 32-bit & 64-bit system drivers. If there is any corruption, it is most likely caused by your Anti-Virus during download.

The only problems there have been has been with how Gateway (Acer) has been releasing the updates as they've been messing up with little things.

The first update they messed up with the naming convention and they took about two weeks to fix the problem by adding the Ignore ROM ID switch to the Batch file.

Then the subsequent updates they have been messing up with the switches.

Then to top it off, anyone who still has the original factory BIOS from the fall of 2008 who would like to update to the newest BIOS would still need to use the Ignore ROM ID switch.

-

As it is, I have spent a lot of time and effort in this thread helping others with their FX6800 systems, especially with the BIOS.

The latest BIOS Update thread I had originally posted Here - FX6800 New BIOS Out 842P181G
 
i reenabled sleep mode and so far everything is working fine. it was freezing almost every time but hasn't done it since i put the new PS in.
 
installed my 600 watt ocz 80 plus and it still have problem. freeze from sleep after 4 or more hours. weird. is it not powerful enough?
 
i don't know what the minimum would be but my 700W works fine. i still haven't had an issue with it since installing it. i've left mine on overnight a few times and it starts back up fine.


EDIT: the one that i bought was an OCZ 700W modXstream-pro 80 plus. PN#on the SKU tag is 42024 00912 and below that it says OCZ700MXSP. i got it from tigerdirect for $59 after rebate (89 regular).
 
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