BIOS A04 for M17xR1 now available from Dell

DP/N J938H (FLEXTRONICS) Thats what I am showing hmmmm....

 

I also have the same PSU model as Batboy...but as I can see, this BIOS update won’t do anything good, so I can't take risks trying it: Dell will never repair my system if anything goes wrong, because customer support is unavailable here.

 

Ok I'm back on A03 for now. Hopefully the power adapter problem doesn't persist through the revert.

 

I re-flashed BIOS A03 without issue. Not sure why a few are seeing an error when attempting to reflash. Will flash back to A04 in a moment to continue looking at this.

 

I wasn't concerned about A03 re-taking. I'm concerned that this "EC" change might not be reverted because the update notes say the BIOS itself was unchanged. Without knowing what this "EC" is, there's no way of knowing for sure if the "EC" is a part of every single BIOS update short of possibly comparing ROM sizes, which still isn't a certain thing.

 

I also have the DP/N J938H (FLEXTRONICS) power supply. I was seeing 193 Watts in the BIOS screen. I reverted back to A03 - had no issue doing so but remember, there was an issue with the winphlash for A03 (at least was for me) so I had to use winphlash from A02 pointing to the A03 rom. With A03 everything is working as expected again.

It forced me to run on battery and in stealth mode (meaning 9400m). It was very annoying.....I got the ac adapter warning EVERY boot and it NEVER worked with A04 after the initial flash.

 

Great info scook...

So are others seeing this same issue with DP/N J938H (FLEXTRONICS)?

 

I have the DP/N J938H, but so far I didn't have any kind of issue. I flashed many times back and forth between the A02,A03,A04 to test a couple of things and no problem. I don't know weird things Maybe I should try to unplug it and run it on battery.

 

I am just scratching my head on why this BIOS was even released for such seemingly unimportant changes?

 

Maybe those were a couple of simple fixes that didn't require too much of an effort

 

Finaly, I just updated to the A04 version. Nothing to report, everything is still OK here (I'm using a Delta DP/N# 0J211H PSU).

There's something I will check with this A04 BIOS: the random freezes many people are having at this time...maybe this new version solves it, I heard that it was in part caused by power supply problems...maybe I'm wrong, I'm not an expert at that.

+1

 

my cs1.6, cz and source started to lag after this update, BIOS shows 240W, everything looked fine until i tried the games above.

 

Make sure you are not in Stealth Mode. I have played a few rounds of TF2 and L4D2 (both Source based) and have had no issues.

 

I'm also playing Modern Warfare 2, no issues.

EDIT: I don't know if this will last but I've got no more freezes with Modern Warfare 2. I played for more than 30 minutes without having the usual freeze.

 

I have Dell PN 0J211H PSU no issues but I did have to reset the OSD

 

I updated the warning at the top of the first post to current relevance.

 

I have no lag issues in new games, it only lags in the 3 games i mentioned so far. stealth mode is definitely off. BTW the 'lagness' actually looks like microstuttering.

EDIT: by playing a new game (dragon age) for a while and start cs, the lag (microstutter - non-DPC related) is gone. But once i leave it idle for about an hour n start cs, it lags again, perhaps something to do with GPU temp (too cold after idling)?

 

GPUs don't stutter from being too cold.

Chris from Dell is aware of this thread now and he forwarded it off to Dell engineers to investigate.

 

I say to Chris from Dell, just make a BIOS A05 with 5870 CF support...

 

As much as they investigate the chipset drivers, the dpc lastency and those bios features...

 

So glad I never tried this BIOS, I'm not changing unless they have voltage support, but I guess we will never get that .

 

hmm thx 4 ur reply, looks like I'll have to wait for another BIOS or wadever driver to come out to fix my problem, again.

 

So is there any consistancy as to what is causing the problems with the A04 BIOS?

 

Things are quite fuzzy, I don't see a pattern here...

 

yes its very random, some boot ups do not prompt the warning, some do its not very consistent.

 

PSU DP/N : J938H Flextronics

I finnaly managed to revert back to A03 as I kept getting the psu warnings every boot (193W in bios aswel).

 

i was thinking the same... really they should be ashamed, leaving us like that after getting our hopes up.

Oh and btw i have no issue at all with Bios A04 for now

 

Flashed back to AO3 for now. I hope ac adapter prompt warning was a software problem and not something that was internaly wrong with my system, although it never happened before who knows if the prompt was actually telling me something that was wrong with my system?

 

Nothing is wrong. Way too coincidental for those that applied A04 to suddenly all have the warning at the same time. The problem goes away flashing back to A03.

 

I tried the A04 and got 4 blue screens.
Can someone give me a link for the A03?
---------------
nvm, got the link. But whenever I try to flash, the program crashes.

 

I'm not sure if this has anything to do with the new bios.
But it started happening only after i flashed the bios, so maybe it does.

Whenever my computer uptime reaches around 2 hours, the physical memory usage shoots up to 94% or something even if i don't have any program opened. If I try to restart, it restarts with a blue screen and then it's fine again. And after two hours, same thing happens again. And I still can't flash back to A03.

 

For me I had to use the program from A02 and point it to A03.rom

for some reason the winphlash packaged with A03 was no good for me

 

Thanks. Now, I'm back to A03 but the memory issue still exists. This is what it says in the Task manager.

Physical Memory (MB)
Total 4094
Cached 677
Available 586
Free 0

If I restart, it gives blue screen. And everything works fine again.

 

It could be bad RAM.

 

I thought about that too.
But they've been working fine until I updated the bios.
-------
I rebooted again and monitored task manager.
It seems like under kernel memory nonpaged keeps increasing until it reaches over 1 GB.
How do I solve it?

 

For those of you who saw the PSU warning/message, do you recall how you flashed to A04? Did you just download and run the installer or did you perform a manual flash (extract contents of Dell R267757.exe and run manually)?

 

Extracted. I'm willing to give A04 a shot again via the executable if you like. Say the word, though I don't see it making any difference.

 

I ran it straight from the executable. Once the dell executable extracts the files the BIOS flash screen will pop up. In the past, its an automatic execute - with A04 you need to depress the button to start the flash process. Give it a go if you like and see if you still have to power supply message or any other issues. I have been unable to reproduce the power supply message or any other behavior reported. This 'bug' is very odd.

Thanks for giving it a run Elkay.

 

And here is the official link for those who would like to flash back to an older BIOS version.

It's strange to see that people are having a lot of issues with that A04 when the same BIOS seems to have solved one of the main issues I had with the A03: the freezes and the BSOD concerning nvlddmkm.sys error + the impossibility to switch from stealth mode to full power mode without having the PC to freeze totally...now everything is solved for me.

 

you know I tried reverting back to the old bios and it still prompted the ac apdapter warning.

 

When I first reverted back (due to the same power adapter issue) it also continued to give the error at first. I removed the battery and power connections and held down the power button for 20 seconds... next time i powered up on adapter, the error was gone.... That did not work on A04 but it did clear the error when reverting back to A03.

 

Ok BatBoy, I'm back up on A04 running only the executable and clicking the update button. This time around, disabling Integrated Graphics stuck on the first boot and I haven't had a power adapter warning in the first couple boots I've done. That only happened to me one out of about a dozen boots I did on A04, though. We'll see how she fairs over the next couple days.

 

Elkay, can you post the extract process you used the first time around? Thanks.

 

I just installed the A04 BIOS update without any issues.

 

Well this morning I got into work and hit the power button and the fans/fx came on but the screen stayed black for 30+ seconds, way more than it should have, so I had to hold power 5 seconds to shut it off. When I powered up I noticed in the POST notes (I have the alien head turned off) that it said my configuration was updated, so thinking fast I hit F2 on a hunch. Sure enough, in the BIOS my integrated graphics were re-enabled again, and my overclock settings were flipped back to default/auto from unlinked 1286/1286. Fixed both and it booted up fine after that.

Not going to back out A04 again just yet though, only for testing purposes. This leads me to believe it had nothing to do with the update method. Regardless, the first time I used WinRAR to extract everything to a temp folder and I then ran A.bat. Shouldn't have made any difference, and it's obvious that something still isn't right with A04 and my system even simply running the update executable straight from Dell.

 

I agree it shouldn't make a difference I just wanted to see how you had approached the flash from a 'manual' method. Wasn't sure if you booted using a boot flash drive with the BIOS on it or what. Thanks for clarifying.

One last question, was the system OC'd when you flashed it? If OC'd, I wonder if that plays into it.

This is very odd - As I mentioned earlier in the thread, I have no issues so far with A04.

 

It was clocked to 1286/1286 at the time of the BIOS udpates. I'm still running A04 as of the moment with all stock clocks, due to issues we're talking about in the other thread.

 

I used the dell executable at stock clocks and had the above mentioned PSU related issues. Has anyone had the PSU warning with a Delta model? Or just flextronics ones so far?

And I got my replacement PSU from dell, is a Flextronics one, will test with it later when I have time.

 

Hey snook, you would be a prime candidate to test out a problem in the stutter thread that I've tracked down. Will be very interesting since you're running QX9300/1333 RAM too, but have the XFire solution. Can you install and run FurMark (Multi-gpu mode, it's a separate executable) and check in ThrottleStop if your CMod is dropping to 12.5% like mine is? We think we've tracked down the true throttling problem to Dell forcing use of ODCM.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware/410440-m17x-stutter-new-post.html

The fun starts on page 70. Plenty of screenshots and examples.

 

Installed on my machine and no issues so far. I don't OC and use Hybrid mode.

BTW I noticed there's an item called "Failsafe" something on one of the screens. Is it possible the BIOS is switching to that in the cases where people are seeing their OC and GPU settings being switched back?