Acer Predator (Vega 56+Ryzen 2) Helios 500

According to prime day this laptop is 1300 USD for those that might be interested.

 

No but the BIOS is 16MB.

 

Certain mobos can have high capacity BIOS chips with the actual bios taking up 15x less space - but 16MB is not unexpected considering how locked up the BIOS is and the 'non-fancy' UI it uses.

I can see Acer producing an updated BIOS for Zen 2 if they drop support for Zen 1 in entirety and also enable high speed/low latency RAM support (which would have to function on all 4 RAM slots).

An unlocked BIOS at the very least would probably allow us to OC the factory pre-installed RAM to 2900MhZ and tighten up the timings somewhat - this would produce better gaming performance at 1080p (native resolution) on 2700.
But a new BIOS with 3700x for example, unlocked bios and high speed RAM would probably be the biggest possible upgrade one would see in this system due to a combo of IPC, clock and RAM.

 

Do you mean that if they were to release a refreshed Helios 500 AMD with a 3700X but keeping the Vega 56 and B450 chipset? I think if they did do a refresh it would be far more likely they would try to upgrade the GPU to a RX 5700 along with using the B550 chipset. The previous track record with other Acer models tends to be no bios updates or driver updates at all after the first year or so, but I guess this is a pretty special model so maybe it will be an exception. Hopefully the sales of the Helios 500 AMD were good enough that they will release a refreshed model - we need more AMD options in an Intel / Nvidia dominated market.

That being said unlocking the bios to gain access to better memory timings should certainly be possible. I will try to dump mine and get it modded soon.

 

I suppose it depends how much work they want to put into it. Changing the motherboard and/or GPU would be a lot of work, but adding some microcode to the BIOS and telling the production line to start installing 3700X CPUs and 266/2933MHz RAM would require hardly any and would still give a benchmark-able/marketable performance boost they could put on adverts.

I mean lets be honest here, the entire GeForce 300 and Radeon HD 8000 series of GPUs were designed specifically so companies like Acer could market machines with new component names without actually changing anything, it's not like they're above making an inconsequential change to try and boost sales so a change that delivers results for almost zero work should appeal to them lol.

 

Ubersonic does make a compelling point.
Its a lot easier for Acer to simply upgrade the BIOS in Helios 500 to include support for Zen 2 and high speed/low latency RAM (that works in all 4 slots) than it is to change the entire motherboard and GPU on top of that (which would require a lot more time and effort).
Its an extra expense, so it makes more sense (from a cost efficiency point of view) to just repurpose what's already there (since its capable) with a simple BIOS upgrade and switching out the slower RAM for 3200MhZ low latency one.

But, that's an optimistic scenario.

It wouldn't be surprising to see Acer make an update with say B550 chipset and RX 5700 as you said.

After all, we hadn't seen Asus upgrading its GL702ZC to Zen+ (Asus focused on mobility Ryzen 12nm parts instead).

Someone on Acer's forums did mention that a BIOS update for Helios 500 is very possible/likely.
Though admittedly, the reasoning behind this is in a youtube video which I hadn't had an opportunity to watch (Computex).
Here's the video:

 

I am just thinking in terms of the fact that the Predator line is primarily marketed as a gaming product. The GPU should always be the priority.

Another thought is maybe they intend to kill the Helios 500 off entirely and if a new AMD model is made it will either be a Triton with the Ryzen mobile chips, or a Helios 700 with full 3900X and RX 5700.

 

3xxx and lower latency would be a compelling buy, Im just sad that nothing exists that can rival my Ranger in storage capacity. Ill probably just have to compromise but for the time being Im still happy with my Ranger for my use cases

Helios 700 that is unlocked would be a guilty pleasure at that point.

 

I dumped the bios this afternoon with my Skypro since there has been interest in this. Its a MCIX 25U12835F 128MB chip. I am not sure about an AGESA update but unlocking all advanced options should be possible. Looking at the bios itself there is probably about 40% or so that is just padding so additional microcode may be possible.

 

In that case you guys should relentlessly bug Acer about releasing the latest AGESA . Zen 2 looks beastly.

 

Well in the course of dumping the bios somehow I bricked my machine. When booting it now just lights up the keyboard but otherwise just displays a black screen. The Acer Community forums seem to indicate that this issue is a corrupt EC, but trying to do a crisis mode recovery didn't work nor did simply writing the bios via the Skypro. For some reason the bios file stored in Acer's update is larger than 16,384kb so I am not sure if it is encrypted or signed or can otherwise be written directly with the Skypro.@DRevan any thoughts? I think you had this issue at some point with an Helios 500 Intel.

 

Ouch... that's no good.
Did you save the original BIOS prior to dumping it and could you overwrite it or at least reset the CMOS by removing the battery and then re-attaching it (much like we'd do on desktops - that is if we used them)?
Problem with the battery CMOS removal is that laptop MOBO's are configured differently so they don't exactly have a removable one (I think).

Question: what are the latest Realtek Drivers for our Helios 500 with Ryzen/Vega? Control Panel is non-descriptive about the proper name of the sound card...

 

The Ryzen model has a battery reset switch just above the M.2 slots. I tried holding that down with the battery and AC pulled for a few minutes, but it didn't make a difference.

I did dump the bios, and tried to rewrite it a few times. If the EC is corrupted I am not sure how I can recover that. I can access the EC flash, a GD25D10BT 128KB chip, but I do not have a good backup of its contents and the chip was not listed as a supported target in the Skypro software.

 

So forgive me for hipping in to this thread, but it seems like there's some people here who are pretty tech savvy and very interested in getting this model to support the 3700x.

Hello - I have this exact laptop and a 3700x.

My knowledge of hardware is limited at about "what it's called" and I can't tell you much more than say...the BIOS is the software? on the motherboard stored on its ROM. So TL;DR - I had a friend at work try to install the 3700x in place of the 2700 (which I knew was unlikely to work but possible given the AM4 socket). Obviously Acer could add support in a BIOS update but has not and has ignored requests on their forums for a commitment either way.

That said, my friend believed that it would STILL be possible if he flashed the BIOS and did something I didn't understand, but that also did not seem to work. It's back to factory settings, but I wanted to post here and see if any of you had ideas or could potentially guide me in to getting it to work.

If there's a fair to high level of confidence that you know how, I'm willing to be the guinea pig and to try it out. Thanks, I'll check back to see if there's any responses.

 

They key would be to find the desktop motherboard it's based on and use that bios. Acer don't make their own motherboards, so if we can figure out who made this, they may have a b450 desktop board that's essentially the same thing we can leverage for the bios. I believe that's how the Asus GL702zc guys got zen+ working on their laptop.

 

It's a Quanta ZGX and the Intel version is a Quanta ZGQ. Quanta is (or was) big but I don't know if they make desktop motherboards. Good idea anyway, thanks for the tip.

PS if anyone ever comes across someone selling the ZGX schematics I'd be very interested, ditto anyone selling the USB/headphone daughterboard schematics.

 

Does the skypro support 1.8v EEPROMs? Thinking maybe the main chip is blown and the EC stalls without a go-ahead signal...
Don't know why the file is so large however it _is_ encrypted and not a valid BIOS image unless decrypted, dumping a programmed BIOS via the flash utility seems to produce a valid one though.

 

Yes it supports 1.8v with an adapter. The Skypro is the same setup I used to do Pascal TDP mods on my MSI GTX 1070. I was able to successfully dump the bios, and can still read / write it. The failure to boot started happening after I initially dumped the bios. I have had it apart before even farther (motherboard completely removed) to swap the included ram to 32GB.

I tried a few other things like popping out the RTC battery, so it was basically completely battery-less for ~1 hour. Another person at bios-mods.com checked my dumped bios and verified it was good (checksums, etc) and was able to unlock it for me. Sadly flashing (and verifying with success) either the original dump or the modified version doesn't help it boot. I actually took it to work today intending to try booting it up hooked to an external monitor, but got too busy and forgot to try that.

 

Meant to come back here and check this thread earlier...thanks for the specificity. It's actually extremely difficult to find ANYTHING about the Mobo in this laptop (at least for somebody with like "device manager is a thing I know how to use" skills).

AIUI the MoBo is a "modified x450" but other than that the above posts are the most information I've been able to find anywhere. So....TL;DR should I be looking in to this brand/BIOS above, or is this a totally lost cause that I should accept and move on from?

Really disappointed that Acer is staying totally silent on this - I'd rather have them confirm it won't work and explain why than total silence.

 

I sure hope you get it working soon, been in similar situations with other notebook computers...

It's a Quanta ZGX custom motherboard for the Acer Predator Helios 500. Don't know if Quanta makes the BIOS too but doubt it.

With brand do you mean Acer? I don't know if Quanta which is the actual designer/manufacturer make desktop motherboards for Acer.

It doesn't work as the BIOS doesn't contain the required CPU microcode and chipset support code, either Acer or someone else will have to release an updated BIOS for it to work.

 

I am tempted to contact Acer Support and tell them that I tried to upgrade the machine and it is no longer booting. I feel responsible for the repair costs as it was working before I took it apart, but I have no idea how much they will charge for the repair. I have tried reflashing the bios with the Skypro about 4 times, done a complete disassembly again to re-install the original wifi and ram.

 

Or, just tell them the machine stopped working, and you don't know why (tell them it just stopped booting). That way, you could avoid potential issues of having to pay for the repairs (especially if you leave no trace of you going in there).
In all likelihood, they will simply replace the motherboard after testing it to confirm its not booting.

 

Word of advice guys:

AVOID installing latest GPU drivers. Once I've put the machine to sleep and tried to wake it up, the screen was all in static. Took a hard shut-down and start up for the display to behave as it should.

I was worried the GPU might have started failing, but then just tried rolling back to 19.5.2 drivers and now, going to sleep and waking the laptop seems to work fine (no static issue on the screen, just a regular/stable image).

 

I contacted Acer yesterday and talked to them about the repair. I guess they offer an onsite upgrade for their Predator laptops in the US so I bought the upgrade and will setup a time for someone to do an onsite repair. It is kind of odd because up until now I had assumed the only brand that did onsite repairs for gaming laptops was Dell / Alienware.

I am really disappointed that I can't get it going again on my own. I have a feeling that the EC is probably ok because the keyboard does its usual sectional light up routine which would be done by the EC (it has a combo EC / keyboard controller made by ITE) Also key combos like Fn+Esc work on boot to put it into bios recovery mode. The symptoms my machine has are exactly the same as some other users that had a failed bios update that was pushed through Windows Update.

 

So, you bought an upgrade?
What kind of upgrade and why?
Wouldn't it be easier to just have them repair it for you on site without having to buy the upgrade?

 

The included warranty for US models is a 2 year mail-in. The upgrade is for onsite service so they send someone to you to repair it. The strange thing is today I called in to setup the repair and the rep said I was too far away from the repair center in Texas so I would have to mail it in anyways. So this onsite service seems to not be like Dell / HP / Lenovo onsite service where they contract someone from a local repair company. The rep did however send me a shipping label to send it to Texas, which is nice because the standard warranty they only pay for shipping one way.

 

At least you have that.
Have you told Acer that you tried dumping the BIOS?
Because if you hadn't... I'd rather you didn't.
Just tell them the laptop stopped booting up - describe what's happening (or not happening) and do NOT mention anything about you opening it and dumping the BIOS (which would certainly have them charge you for repairs).
And of course make sure the laptop is back up to par with factory specs.

You could also call them again and ask one of their technicians if they plan on updating the BIOS with Zen 2 considering the EEPROM chip is more than big enough (128MB is really large for a 16MB BIOS - they could probably slap a 64MB BIOS in there that's fully unlocked and integrate Zen 2 support).

 

I didn't mention opening it up. The only thing I should really do is replace the pieces of Kapton tape as it obviously looks like its been peeled up and reused.

Keep in mind that the tech support is outsourced and simply getting the point across that it won't boot up is complicated enough. Not even their $9000 Predator 21X had an unlocked bios or even configurable ram timings. It's a sad state of affairs but the only retail manufacturer that kind of supports this is MSI and even that is hidden to general users.

 

In that case, keep it simple and tell them the laptop won't boot up.
Do whatever you can to restore the thing to factory specs internally (even though technically you mentioned that Acer DOES allow us access to the laptop innards - they don't need to know you actually opened it, let alone disassembled it entirely).

Ask them about integrating Zen 2 support as you read online that someone else checked out the EEPROM and noticed that the chip is 128MB... which means that integrating microcode for Zen 2 would be more than doable if Acer decided on doing that (which would automatically mean support for high frequency RAM - and ergo, we COULD disassemble the laptop and replace the factory supplied RAM with better specced one such as 3600MhZ when it comes out for laptops - laptop RAM has atrocious timings though and not high frequencies apparently - at leas the available RAM on the market here in UK is lacking that).

An unlocked BIOS might be too much to ask admittedly... in which case, we'd have to find a way to do it ourselves (safely), but I suspect that regular methods of dumping and unlocking the BIOS won't work because they are meant for Intel mobos (not AMD).
Meaning, we might need specialized hw to dump the BIOS, if not potentially do it via Windows?
And its also possible Acer used some kind of encryption for Helios 500 which makes any kind of tampering with the BIOS (even dumping it) at risk of ending up broken (though I doubt they'd go to these lengths - unless we have evidence of OEM's doing this before?).

 

All that I really need to do is put new pieces of kapton tape in to the machine - they currently obviously look like they have been peeled pack and retaped.

An unlocked bios should be possible using a SPI flash programmer. The bios updates are already encrypted, as they have been for the past five years. Whatever happened to my machine causing it to not boot has also happened to other users who randomly had a bios update fail.

 

So Tech YES City tested the Ryzen 5 3600 on the cheapest A320 board he could find, it ran flawlessly after the Bios update, so the whole Bios and Chipset BS does not matter at all, and in the case of the Bios size, MSI is re-releasing their B450 and X470 Motherboards with a bigger bios, yet their current B450/X470 boards received Zen2 compatibility bios update, all they did is a reduction on the GUI quality to make them fit, they still have all the functionality...
VRM wise the B450 on the Helios 500 should bemore than enough to handle the 3600 or even the 3700x, being that the A320 with the pitiful VRM setup could run the 3600 at 4Ghz without going over 72 deg. And the Bios of the Helios 500 is big enough to fit the Zen2 compatibility, as it is the bios is ultra bare bones so a GUI wouldn't be needed.

All we need is Acer to do the right thing...

Video:

 

Are anyone familiar with which 1.5 gen Ryzen CPU this laptop support? I was wanting to get one to replace the Alienware with, I was looking to put Ryzen 5 2600X in it because of the poor memory speed support, or Ryzen 5 2400G for better battery life.
Also what kind of power limitations exist on this laptop? Can I slap the lower power use Ryzen 5 CPU in there and lessen the power restriction on the GPU or are they both individually BIOS restricted?

 

Not sure on the CPU front, I imagine they would work but no first hand knowledge.

The GPU has a TGP of 120w iirc

 

I think the 2600X would work. Not sure how the 2400G would work. The Vega 56 is always on so I doubt it there will be much power savings. Also 2700X is confirmed to work at 105W TDP, without any throttling of the Vega 56. That should be the most powerful option unless we get Zen2 working somehow.

 

Hey guys! Does anyone of you have disassembled this beast for repaste, or planing to do so? If anyone can measure the dimensions of the fans (the rotors' diameter and thickness) as well as their P/Ns. Thank you!

 

Aright, reason I am asking for 2600X is because 2700X with 2133MT/s memory is pretty garbage and a stutter mess in certain situations.

 

To be expected really as you would be swapping a 65w CPU for another 65w CPU. However anyone putting a 3600 in a Helios 500 would be mentally challenged as it's a significant downgrade over stock.

 

If that is the case you should see a doctor, and a damn good one too.
https://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreviews/3489-amd-ryzen-5-3600-cpu-review-benchmarks-vs-intel

 

Yeah, I think I'll stick with 8 cores thanks

I mean, don't get me wrong, to each their own, however if I wanted to sacrifice two cores for better single core performance and a few FPS I would have just bought the Intel/Nvidia Helios 500 in the first place (and got Thunderbolt ports to boot). It seems retarded to make the decision to buy the 8 core laptop then pay even more to convert it into the worst of both worlds.

 

There IS a 8c/16th 65W TDP Zen 2 (3700x).

Now if we can get the bios up and running for it, we should be able to slap that bad boy in and get a nice performance increase.
On most tasks that are single threaded, performance should be the same as on 3600... but in multithreading, 3700x would have a distinct advantage.

 

2133MT/s memory bottleneck gets worse with 8 core Ryzen 1.5 gen, I believe you are not very familiar with how much bottleneck is made, the Acer is awfully crippled on the memory, there no point in adding more cores when you actually see negligible performance improvements.
https://community.amd.com/community...emory-oc-showdown-frequency-vs-memory-timings
https://www.legitreviews.com/ddr4-m...ryzen-7-2700x-on-the-amd-x470-platform_205154

For 2133MT/s to be least bottleneck as possible you need CL10 or CL12 memory, to my knowledge does not exist for DDR4 SO-DIMM.
Having used 2400MT/s CL14 memory on my Ryzen 7 1700 and having upgraded to 3200MT/s CL16 and OC it to 3533MT/s when BIOS got good enough, I noticed huge differences in games, a lot of games that had stutter issues were gone, Premiere Pro would render much faster, Windows overall was vastly more stable.

Of course Ryzen 3 3600 will be equally crippled with such poor memory speed, that is why Ryzen 5 2600 might be better option because historically the Ryzen 5's were less memory picky.

 

Before I bricked my machine I was running 32GB of ram at 2133MT/s CL12. It seemed to stutter less than the stock ram at 2400MT/s (CL unknown).

 

Yeah, you have much faster response times with CL12 than anything higher of course not as fast as 3200MT/s even at CL16 but WAY better than 2400 at CL16, mind if I ask what type of memory you used? Or did you tighten the timings on it?

 

Its a HyperX 32GB kit, part number HX426S15IB2K2/32. They are rated for 2666MT/s CL15. Sadly the Acer bios selected the slowest JEDEC timing that is available.

 

OK, hope one of you PC experts can help, I'm trying to download all drivers/software I need to do a clean instal on a 1TB SSD NVME - this replaces the original 256GB supplied SSD, I've got a copy of Windows 10 Enterprise I can use legally from my business account and have started looking at what I need to DL from Acer and AMD, no real issues with the Acer DLs, but totally lost when it comes to AMD downloads. Have Died the Adrenalin packages, but am lost with the actual Chipset DLs, namely, its a AM4 socket, but then we have 6 further choices, do I click B450, or is it one of the other choices?

 

The AMD drivers are fairly simple.
First go to Acer's support page for Helios 500 Ryzen/Vega and download the GPU drivers from there (install them first if you wish to retain Freesync functionality).
Then you can go to AMD's website and download the latest GPU drivers for Vega 56... but I'd suggest you find and download 15.9.2 version as it's less buggy for Vega (the latest drivers are more for Navi and have apparently broken Vega to an extent by the screen displaying static noise if I bring it out of sleep).

As for the chipset drivers... yeah, you need to select B450 on AMD's website as that's our motherboard.

Also, always select 'Express update' option in drivers when updating GPU drivers.

 

Many thanks for your assistance, will try and do as suggested - further, I take it its a good idea to clone the original SSD in the Predator so I have a bootable exact copy - hoping Macrium Reflect 7 will handle this as will clone the Hynix 256GB SSD to my Firecuda HDD, once done, will just remove original NVME SSD and replace with a Adata one and undertake clean instal on the Adata SSD, which means I'll lose Acer Recovery Partion, but will not touch the original SSD as will be handy to have the original SSD on hand with original installed Acer stuff?

 

Don't think there's much benefit to the Acer Recovery partition since the recovery is broken (doesn't work).
I tried using it once but the system couldn't find anything (the same problem happened on GL702ZC - for some reason, OEM's just end up breaking the OS in some fashion by making it impossible to create a viable recovery image).
You're better just making a clone of the OS and keep it as a separate copy, but otherwise do a clean install of Windows.

 

So AMD is sending me what should be a BIOS update for my laptop via their boot kit program, they saw that Acer wasn't supporting the upgrade path and they saw the model/situation and once I submitted my receipt/serial/transcript with Acer it looks good to go.

Once it gets here I'll let you know if it works, but I hope it will as it really just is a software issue; not sure how big the performance gain will be, but since I already have it all might as well

 

Wait, what?
You're getting a BIOS update from AMD?
What kind?
Does it include support for Zen 2 and faster RAM?

EDIT: How'd you contact AMD and what did you tell them exactly to provide you with the software and new BIOS?