I am looking for some help to mod the BIOS of an Intel DG965SS board. I know the board is ancient, but I am asking for help for two reasons. First, I still have this board running WHS 2011 which includes running Plex for my movies and music. Second, I like to tinker with stuff which is how I learn. I have two of these boards so if I blow one up, I am still OK!

My tinkering has resulted in this request for help. I have an E6700 Intel Core 2 Duo 2.66MHz in the server and I recently came across an E7600 Core 2 Duo 3.06MHz for $5 (what a deal!). Little did I realize that the E7600 is not supported by the board's BIOS. Undeterred, I had heard about adding CPU microcodes to BIOSes so I figured I would give it a try. I figured out how to extract the BIOS and used HxD to look into the file and see where the microcodes are stored. Trying to keep things simple, I did not want to change the size of the BIOS file so I removed just enough of the old microcodes to provide space to add in the microcode I needed for the new CPU. Quite happy with myself, I loaded the new BIOS and the BIOS flash program (iFlash) onto a bootable USB and tried to flash it with no success. I figured that was too easy, so I went looking for answers.

On this website, I could only find 1 reference to my motherboard and it was someone else trying to mod the BIOS for a different CPU (Q6600). There was a fix for that, but that does not help me with my E7600. Are there other changes that I need to make to the BIOS file when updating the microcodes? Do I need to change the BIOS version? Do I need to change/update some other data in the BIOS? Is there a switch that I need to include in the iFLASH command? Unfortunately, the failed flash did not give an explanation as to why it failed.

Thanks for any advice!


Edit by Fernando: Thread title customized

Hi @oldsports

Intel boards from this era are notoriously fickle with bios mods. I would not even attempt an Intel board bios mod without some form of hardware programmer for recovery purposes.

The CH341A would assist, or alternatively, a Flashcat or Raspberry Pi - there are others but that's where i'd start.