Alienware M17x R3 A09 BIOS Discussion

Whats new from A08?

 

Link for A.09? I still see A.08 on the Dell Support Page...

 

Based on his message, i'm going to guess he mistyped A08 in the title.

Basically, the A08 downclocks your system a bit and supports the 2nd gen of 2nd gen i7 cpu's.
so like the 2670 2760 2860, so and so forth.

 

Not a typo, my previous R3 has the A08 and I just got my new one yesterday and it has A09.

 

Really? A09? Seems like Dell have rolled out something. We may see it in the Downloads section soon. Perhaps native XM CPU support?

 

Yay, 600 and 7000 gpu's incoming soon

Though it's just a guess.

 

^^ I sure hope so for you guys

 

Holy hell yeah I forgot. Please please be 600m support That would be just awesome.

 

Would kind of suck if they made mxm 3.0c motherboads T_T

 

Don't say it, don't! You'll jinx it. However MXM 3.0a and 3.0b have the same connector, just the length is different.

 

Well I guess this is news, anyways here is a pic of my bios.

 

Nice rig. Welcome

 

600s! Sweet! I don't think we'll see Ivy bridges since Intel is going to delay them a quarter. The cougar delay threw off manufacture's ability to clear the chips gen 2 i5/i7s in time I bet.

 

Dude no one knows for sure it is for the 600m's we are just speculating/wishing.

 

post deleted.

Merry Christmas

 

well.....i concur....my replacement M17Xr3 with the 6990m (i surely hope, cuz' it sez 6970M in there...but it has the correct no.of shaders) came with the A09 bios

PS this is my 4th M17xr3 since 8 mo ago when i placed the order for the first

 

My new M17x R3 also came with the A09. Yay for new owners!

 

Booo. Still waiting on the update on the Dell website

 

Can't see it. Is it A09?

 

As of now Im having problems with my system with power issues. The tech support guy said the engineering dept that A09 isint even released yet and thats whats causing my problems, so he said to flash back to a08 should i do it? Oh and the pic is missing in my photobucket for some reason ill post it back later.

 

Maybe for new AMD 7XXX mobility support. AMD will unveil their new mobility range 5th.

That sort of confirmed by HP since they said Envy comes with new AMD 7XXX and will release 7th.

 

My power problem issue: http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m17x/628803-power-problem.html

Pic of my bios:

 

See if you can dump it before you flash A08, maybe a BIOS enthusiast would like to take a look at it.

 

Yea lol thats what I was thinking maybe somebody may want to see it but can I get an idea on how to dump it?

 

I dunno how to dump a bios but if/when you do, head over and post it to bios-mods.com and ask the folk over there to unlock it

 

Gpu-z can bios dump i think.

 

No GPU-z only dumps vbios for the video card not the system bios.

 

That's for nVIDIA graphic cards vBIOS totally different thing.

 

isn't the the V-bios not the actual computer bios though?

edit: oops was a bit late

 

no, vBIOS = video cards BIOS, the chip is located on the graphic card.
The system BIOS, the one we're talking about is flashed on a chip located on the motherboard.

 

knew that, meant to say that I don't think GPUz will export the mobo bios. gotta work on my wording skills

 

UPDATE: the A09 breaks my M17's capability to do SATA3 on a Crucial M4 using the very latest RST on intel's website

any comments?

 

Use an earlier one. You shouldn't really need it.

 

Yeah I already kinda did, however I did ask Dell Tech,and he confirmed it was the latest and greatest and had no stability issues

PS my SSD seq.score went upto 504 and 190

 

Dell Support will say = newer is better
Me and hopefully the rest of the world = Wait on newer stuff that isn't tested because as you said, ur ssd score lowered, and "99% of the time" Dell downclocks more stuff.

Like the cpu. That and they add more forms of throttling, whether heat or power.

 

I just got My M17xR3 and have A09, Ill try to dump it, I lost SATA III as well. The other R3 I had before this one only had SATA 3 in slot 1 NOT slot 0

 

What port do you have your ssd in?

 

Here is the BIOS A09
http://c651320.r20.cf2.rackcdn.com/M17xR3-BIOS-A09.rar

After I did the A09 to A08 update Both of my SATA III SSD's are showing SATA transfer rate of 6 Gb/s In the Intel RST Manager

 

another broken bios, who would have seen this coming

 

Hi, can you explain how to downgrade bios form A09 to A08? Thanks

 

Download A08 and then run the exe file as admin.

 

I tried but i had this message:

"the requested operation requires elevation"

Many thanks

 

A09 BIOS turned the two SATA ports back to SATA-II instead of SATA-III. If anyone has the new A09 BIOS and uses a SATA-III SSD, go back to A08.

 

good info thanks for the headsup

 

You have to right click on the exe file, and run as administrator.

 

why is the A09 not listed in the Dell website?

 

It's probably like the A05-07 bios, which were never released.

 

Sounds like its better to stay with A08 atm anyways lol

 

Hi,

Is it possible to use the A09 file posted by YouurMoma to re-upgrade the BIOS?

To cut a long story short, I flashed A08 to get the 6Gb/s speeds as part of a plan to rebuild my laptop after borking my previous windows install. But it appears I have done something horrible to my laptop as it no longer shows the RAID controller screen before the BIOS at boot. The BIOS itself says I have two drives but windows can only see the drive in bay 0 when in RAID mode.

It may not be the BIOS flash. I did also secure erase the drives with the Samsung USB boot tool (based on posts elsewhere recommending secure erasing SSDs to help with performance) which has stripped the Serial numbers from both drives, and I'm wondering if that might be confusing the controller. But having spent the last few hours tearing my hair out re-installing windows on every combination of bios setting/drive setup I can think of, I thought I'd find out if its possible to re-upgrade the BIOS to rule that out as the problem before trying anything else.

I appreciate that this thread is for discussing the changes with the new BIOS not for troubleshooting my borked machine, but I figured it was worth asking about the upgrade here as this is the only place I've found any useful info relating to the A09 BIOS. If the answers "no, you cant upgrade with this file" then I'll be on my merry way and start a new thread elsewhere to ask for help troubleshooting further.

You might be interested to know that I am getting SATA III speeds from both bays when windows installs under A08, and it feels significantly faster on a single drive at SATA III with A08 than it did running on RAID0 at SATAII with A09.

Any advice would be gratefully received, thanks

 

I haven't played with RAID or SSD's before, but it sounds like you need to stay with the A08 bios so you achieve maximum speeds. This site troubleshooted a desktop issue similar to yours, so it might help you fix your issue Idk. Best of luck and I hope this helps you out.

Edit: Perhaps Mr. Fox's guide could help you out as well. Its for the m18x but the process should be similar.
M18x SSD - SATA III - RAID 0 Questions, Troubleshooting and Discussions