Posted 04/01/09 at 08:40:48 PM by The Maximum PC Staff

My roommate, with my help, built a brand-new PC worthy of mention in your magazine; it has a Q6600, 4GB of DDR2/1066, an ATI Radeon 4850 GPU, and a DFI P45-T2RS motherboard. After installing his student copy of Windows Vista x64 and some of his favorite programs, I advised him to run CPU-Z to ensure that the motherboard had set everything correctly, as I didn’t really want him to have to dive into the BIOS unnecessarily. CPU-Z reported that his RAM was cruising along at DDR2/800.

He has a 1,066MHz front-side bus, so the RAM timing was unusual, especially since the board is certified for DDR2/1066. We checked the BIOS and found that we cannot set that frequency without overclocking, which causes the machine to become unstable. We decided that the problem is the BIOS and discovered that DDR2/1066 is supported only in the latest BIOS—but DFI’s BIOS update utility doesn’t work with Vista x64! Neither of us owns a floppy drive anymore, so we thought we might try booting from a USB drive, but we can’t find any Vista 64 capable tools for creating that, either.
What should we do to update the BIOS?

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