VIA MVP3 & SiS 5598: Supported Flash Sizes?

[MaPLe]

Hello,

I recently successfully hot-flashed the BIOS of a PcChips M571 (1 MB flash chip) on my Soyo 5EHM (also 1 MB chip). I took a moment to type up my experience:

http://www.veggy.org/articles/bios_recovery.html

Now I have a friend who just ended up with a dead board due to a bad BIOS flash, and he's considering giving the chip to me for me to try to hot-flash the BIOS. However, his flash chip is 2 megabits in size, and all the boards I have handy to hot-flash on (the PcChips M571 and the Soyo 5EH5) have 1 MB flash chips.

After reading some posts on this forum, I came to the conclusion that whether I could flash a 2 MB flash chip on a board with a 1 MB chip depends on whether its chipset can address the extra memory space. These are the chipsets my two boards have:

Soyo 5EH5: VIA MVP3
PcChips M571: SiS 5598

Does anyone have an idea whether any or both of these chipsets can handle 2 MB flash chips? I spent quite a while trying to find this info, but to no avail. I could just get my friend's chip and try, but he doesn't trust me as much and wants me to be sure that I can do it before giving it to me. ;)

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,
Nick

[MaPLe]

I decided to find out the tricky way and started searching for specs of motherboards that relied on these two chipsets and looked at the flash chip sizes. I did find ocurrences of VIA MVP3/SiS 5598-based boards that had 2 MB flash chips, so I take it both chipsets do support this flash chip size.

However, I'd still love to hear comments from people who have actually tried to do this or who know for sure, just to feel more on the safe side.

Thanks!

Nick

[Rainbow]

It depends on the board designer - if the address signals are really connected to the Flash ROM socket.