Can Gizmo 2 use GX-420CA and 2GB chips w/o issues?

Question

I own a pair of GizmoSphere Gizmo 2 SBC's and with the first I also bought an AMD GX-420CA 4-Core, 2Ghz processor and more recently I purchased 5 (but only need 4 of them) Micron MT41K256M16HA-125E DDR3 RAM chips. I'd like to install them all, but I want to make certain that I will not have an issue after having made such changes. I know that GizmoSphere had intended to install 2GB of RAM chips from the start (but for $ savings did not), but I've seen no evidence that the 4-Core AMD GX-420CA 2Ghz processor had been intended, yet it's power usage is close enough to the AMD GX-210HA they did use that it should be fine so long as I don't overdo the use of the additional PCI slots through the High Speed Connector. 1) So, will the GizmoSphere Gizmo 2 work just fine and display all of the RAM of the 2GB RAM chips, or "No!" 2) Will the GizmoSphere Gizmo 2 work fine with the AMD GX-420CA, or is it too power hungry (or otherwise) to allow function of the SBC? 
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balearicdynamics · Accepted Answer

When I got the Gizmo2 for a project of a client I had a lot of issues ( helped me a lot) managing the options supported by the board. In the same period I have also explored with the guys of the GizmoSphere about the possibility to add memory easily but they told me that it was not needed - at least in theory - any extra hardware (the design includes the 2nd 1 GB RAM) but that they discovered unstability in the bios with more memory so decided to start the product with 1 Gb only. That's all what I know and it is a while I am not using this board (but I have in mind to use it in the near future for some local small server managing 3D printers. Enrico

monkeyman_stones · Answer

It requires flashing the BIOS for the 2GB RAM to work. There's a source out there in which the user had already installed and created a BIOS file to flash for 2GB of RAM (it may have been through GitHub, perhaps). The RAM is no problem whatsoever. Viewing early docs for the board they clearly had intended to make it a 2GB bearing board (but a single, internal memo which mentions a change to 1GB would increase profit margins from within GizmoSphere is out there). Your answer is reversed. 2GB RAM is no issue at all (so long as also Micron made DDR3 of the same [excluding memory capacity] type there is no problem with the install of Micron 256Gb DDR3 chips for 2GB, once BIOS flashed). The portion you had no answer for was the important portion of the question (the RAM was $35, but processor was $123 with shipping). I'll edit this post to give a link to the 2GB RAM BIOS file once I find the bookmark in Chrome, Chromium, Firefox, Midori or Opera.

monkeyman_stones · Answer

This is becoming exceptionally frustrating... Every search term so far has been a flood of 60+ Google pages about OTHER SBC's (and my search term included "Gizmo 2", meaning "The words between these quotation marks MUST be included in all results" but after page 2 very few of them do). There are now so many Single Board Computers that it may take me 4 months to find what I am referring to. But I cannot block out all the other SBC's because if there is an ad for any of them then Google won't show that page to me.

The page exists (or, existed as the site it was on may be dead) and I will continue to look for it. I'll post it here once I am able to get through all the nips of my hands, feet, arms, legs, face, ears, neck and other parts by the many hundreds of others of SBC's. I'll find the page or at least the BIOS flash file for the functional 2GB of DDR3 RAM in the GizmoSphere Gizmo 2.

monkeyman_stones · Answer

Think I found part of it (many, many thanks to Enrico Miglino above for the "Gizmo2" post which made things so very much easier), at least the Coreboot bios update info about it: From - https://mail.coreboot.org/pipermail/coreboot-gerrit/2015-May/027085.html "commit 1d9c7c5da78f7c3680c2a30093dab0883b3881dd Author: Fabian Kunkel <fabi at adv.bruhnspace.com> Date: Mon May 25 17:08:17 2015 +0200 mainboard/bap: Add support for BAP ODE E20XX Adding new board based on AMD Kabini. Most of the code is copied from gizmosphere/gizmo2 Board is developed by BAP - Bruhnspace Advanced BAP ODE E20XX has 2GB ram soldered down on the Q7 + +# 0 Number of SPD Bytes used / Total SPD Size / CRC Coverage +# bits[3:0]: 1 = 128 SPD Bytes Used +# bits[6:4]: 1 = 256 SPD Bytes Total +# bit7 : 0 = CRC covers bytes 0 ~ 125 +92 + +# 1 SPD Revision - +# 0x10 = Revision 1.0 +12 + +# 2 Key Byte / DRAM Device Type +# bits[7:0]: 0x0b = DDR3 SDRAM +0B + +# 3 Key Byte / Module Type +# bits[3:0]: 3 = SO-DIMM +# bits[7:4]: reserved +03 + +# 4 SDRAM CHIP Density and Banks +# bits[3:0]: 3 = 2 Gigabits Total SDRAM"

balearicdynamics · Answer

Hello David,

I experienced the same problem in past when I started to study Gizmo2 for SSD disk add-on and other features. The first issue is wiritng Gizmo 2 in the Google. you find almost nothing. I am sure of this as I always forgot to write it correctly for a while. If you put Gizmo2 (no spaces) you find the exact keyword and all the reference material to the Gizmo2 and Gizmosphere only.

Inside this I have just tried to search Gizmo2 bios customization and I have found a lot, including the several links to the SageBios on GitHub. Below some references (not checked):

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/48998-bios-system-customization

BIOS Customization - NEXCOM

https://mail.coreboot.org/pipermail/coreboot-gerrit/2014-December/017694.html (the more useful I suppose)

Then try including both gizmo2 and sagebios and you dramatically reduce your search. Searching for sagebios gizmo2 RAM you find just 5 pages on google.

Hope this is helpful. Enrico

Can Gizmo 2 use GX-420CA and 2GB chips w/o issues?

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