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    Test BIOSes for Intel Nahalem and newer Processors

    Discussion in 'Hardware Components and Aftermarket Upgrades' started by 3Fees, Feb 16, 2011.

  1. 3Fees

    3Fees Notebook Deity

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    The Intel BIOS Implementation Test Suite (BITS) provides a bootable pre-OS environment for testing BIOSes and in particular their initialization of Intel processors, hardware, and technologies. BITS can verify your BIOS against many Intel recommendations. In addition, BITS includes Intel's official reference code as provided to BIOS, which you can use to override your BIOS's hardware initialization with a known-good configuration, and then boot an OS.

    BITS functionality fits in three broad categories:
    •Validate: run test suites to verify recommendations
    •Configure: override BIOS using Intel reference code
    •Explore: experimental tools and information gathering

    BITS consists of a modified GRUB2 bootloader, with many additional commands to probe and manipulate hardware configuration, as well as scripts using these commands to test and reconfigure hardware.

    The current version of BITS focuses primarily on CPU configuration and power management. It includes extensive support for Intel® processors based on the microarchitecture code name Nehalem and newer, which includes Intel Core i7, i5, and i3 desktop and mobile processors, and corresponding Intel Xeon server processors.

    BIOS Implementation Test Suite

    I emailed Burt Triplett and asked if theres this kind of bios test for Merom CPU's,I'll update this post when I hear anything,, This program is the same you'll find on Intel site,, a download for intel processors ver 2.95 from Intel or 3.00 from Burt Triplett's site. Excellent program,,,,,,,,

    Cheers
    3Fees

    UPDATE

    My Question:

    Currently BITS only works on Nehalem and newer processors,, is there
    a BITS for Merom L,2L and gl40 chipset ?

    Burt Triplett email answer :


    BITS should boot and run on that platform just fine. Extra tests do exist for Nehalem and newer processors, but the basic tests and other functionality should work on any x86 platform. Thanks for taking a look at BITS!

    Regards,
    Burt Triplett

    I asked today if there plans for a X86-64 or X64 version of BITS, When in doubt ask questions, 2/17/2011.

    Cheers
    3Fees