Asus KFN5-D shipped with CrazyBIOS

ASUS shipped its otherwise nice KFN5-D dual Socket-F mobo with BIOS so hopelessly borked that it'll make a few people bald in the process of figuring what's wrong. Hopefully, they fixed it fast. Here's my experience.

After installing the CPU, memory and all components, I booted the Asus KFN5-D with excitement... only to find the message "New CPU installed. Please enter SETUP to configure your system". Of course, the "please" was just a matter of good manners, as the experience turned mandatory. I thought it was a matter of saving the CMOS settings for the first time and that it would go away. No, I was wrong. The annoying message kept popping up on every reboot. I entered the BIOS setup, checked everything was correctly identified, and saved the settings: the message returned. I tried clearing the CMOS memory using the provided jumper in the mobo. No dice. For some reason, the AMI Bios decided that the AMD dual core Opteron was a "new, just installed" CPU on every single reboot.

The problem. Options provided are enter BIOS setup screen or lose your previously saved settings, on every reboot

If you think that was a minor annoyance, let me assure you that it wasn't, as having to press F2 for "load default settings" erased any customization that you did in the BIOS. It was ugly and annoying. At that point, sending the board back to ASUS was the only rational solution. A web search found lots of users experiencing the same problem. Unfortunately, most of the posts were in Chinese.

In addition, something was very broken with the "Smart Fan" speed control: after powering it up, I realized that the BIOS set all fans to maximum speed, it sounded like a jet engine before take off. I removed the cooler: everything was right, thermal contact was perfect and the cooler fans were working okay. When I booted linux, the fans continued running at full speed.

The solution, right at ASUS web site

In addition, the options provided after such "error message" were two: "Press F1 to run Setup" and "Press F2 to load default values and continue". Selecting the second would obviously reset any customizations you made to the "boot order" screen in the BIOS, thus making booting from a USB diskette drive (to update the BIOS), impossible. If you enter the BIOS setup screen, modify settings -for some reason my USB FDD needs to be changed boot order so it's identified- and save them, the error message will be back right after the settings are saved. A perfect Catch-22!. To make a long story short, with no bootable DOS CD at hand, I had to install an old-fashioned internal diskette drive, in order to boot from a DOS diskette and run the AMI Bios updater provided on the ASUS page.

Booting from USB diskette drive to update BIOS?, no way...

In the end, the "Smart Fan" full-speed issue was a BIOS bug as well, as installing the latest version fixed it, and now the fans never get to full speed, running at the lowest possible speed most of the time with Linux booted and the system idle, and with speed increases being moderate when in use, never going to the full speed.

The solution: installing a FDD drive, booting DOS and updating BIOS

In case you experience any of these symptoms with an ASUS KFN5-D board, you don't need to RMA it, you're just experiencing the features of "CrazyBIOS"(TM), or version 0132. The fixed BIOS version is "0142" available over here.

Leaving aside this issue, the KFN5-D is a very impressive motherboard about which you'll read more from me in the next few days. I bet someone at ASUS quality control was kicked a bit after shipping this board with the original broken BIOS. Now why ASUS insists on listing the older brain-dead version for download along the fixed one is something I have yet to find out. Caveat Emptor! µ

L'INQs
ASUS KFN5-D support web page