*M18x R1* Full Potiental Has Been Unlocked In Modded Bios

Thanks much appreciated

No A00 BIOS in sight!!! grrrr

 

I love trying to help out where I can, hopefully this lead will help out. Is there any way you can get ahold of rafix73?

http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m18x/591447-m18x-a00-bios-5.html#post7669480

 

Hi Folks,

It looks like the A00 BIOS is located here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/7731361-post14.html ... Hope this helps, thanks.

 

I got a disc and was one of the first to get the m18x. How can i check if its a00 ?

 

Thats gonna make some nice smiley happy faces!! - good work +rep. (superb "first NBR post too" I might add!!!!)

 

i dont believe the bios is even supplied to us on the driver disc.

 

you can type "system info" in the start menu & enter (without quotes) and it will tell you there....may not be needed now though by the looks of Nick's previous post to A00....way to go Nick! +rep for you too hahaha)

 

Look on the disk under drivers and see if the bios A00 is there and if you can extract it.

thanks

 

unfortunately i already had this one, but thanks anyway i was looking for that thread. +rep.

Looks like the unlocked A03 EC needs to be modified without the help of A00. Never say Never!!

 

Cant be that many A00's knocking about lol....are you meaning A01 ??? - didnt Dell just go from A00 right to A02 for some bizarre reason....I dont recall flashing A01 and mine came from the sweatshop with A00....

 

No A01 ever released! your correct!

 

All A00 BIOSen posted so far were dumped with Universal BIOS Extractor, it is an incomplete copy missing some sections. InsydeFlash is the only tool i've found that does a complete dump, so ideally we would get one from that (which no one has posted afaik)

 

Maybe you could start a new thread in the m18x forum asking for everyone to check their current bios version and if, by chance, someone is still running it....you could get A00 properly dumped from them.....long shot?

 

bar-code, i thought i sent you the bios.A00 already to you.

 

GReat I am without power right now and on mobile I'll try it thanks Da G until that bios is unlocked and all settings work we can use that method! Sweet! With Hwinfo covering bases of fan control we got on slick DTR on our hands. What do TMi 1 and 2 do?

 

Little update!!

I think we are totally forgetting about the A00 bios now! So thanks to all for your posts.
They are trying to tackle the EC FIRMWARE Registry's to give us fan control and hopefully get rid of this throttle with the help from the HWinfo creator which is good news

 

Extremely good news ...

 

Yup we'll be tinkering and testing over their. His forum name the creator of HWinfo is Mumak. We had been testing a lot over in Mumaks thread on fan control at Tech Inferno... so far our testing revealed slight problems but use of his beta which is posted now works good I personally like the manual control since for now the auto profiles I have found sudden drops in the fans sometime sand this is not observed for me with the manual control. But this may have been localized to just my system... Not sure no other reports of it.

 

using his auto profiles work pretty good...the key is not to set it for the outer limits..set it between 2k and about 4k(over scale) and it works pretty damn good. well it did for me, not sure about anyone else.

 

Halo, little off the subj, Can you tell me how u oc you 2630qm? i keep hearing you cant overclock the sandy bridge processors but u some how manage to do it. can you share ur bios settings?

 

I slipped a little donate link in my sig by popular demand

Writing a little app to dump the Insyde HII forms now, with the short term goal of lifting the artificial BIOS limits on stuff like TDP, multiplier, etc. for a fully unlocked BIOS not requiring register modifications to bypass limits - and a long term goal of writing an app that will do so with any Insyde BIOS.

I asked over at the bios-mods site if they could give me some guidance re: their method to unlock the menus, but got stonewalled. Did some research on it and the menu forms begin with magic ASCII string "$IFRPKG" in the SetupUtility binary. The forms follow a standard specification developed by Intel and publicly posted here, I was already able to duplicate their menu patch (which should be applicable to any Inysde BIOS) and am working on lifting the limits too. I don't know why they are treating that as such a secret as that particular method of unlocking menus was already partially documented here but not fully explained.

In summary,
*LZMA decompress the firmware volume(s), dump the FS, locate SetupUtility.pe
*Dump the $IFRPKG forms
*Patch out the "should this menu be hidden" and "limit to min/max values of:" settings to fully unlock the BIOS menus
*Re-compile FS and re-compress the firmware volumes with LZMA
*Flash
*Profit!

The LZMA compress/decompress part can easily be handled by EzH2O, might incorporate that into my program too though so it's standalone.

 

DA_G keep the good work you have the first small donation on your way is from gonzalez4360

 

yeah, he got one coming from me as well...soon as i get off the phone with dell...lol

 

Gteat to hear. I haven't tried that perhaps that is the issue. I didn't cap it at the 4k rpm. On manual max on the slider is 7k and it locks them at 4k on this with no trouble. On auto I'll have to try capping it... for the record in case you'd like to help test too. I posted data and pics and graphs on it in the fan control these in Mumaks forum at T | I. Oh the trigger points for the mentioned issue were either Intel burn on very high 8thread for a test or two and the fans would drop to 0rpm. The second was furmark after a few minutes at max settings you could see temps skyrocket on the graph and hwinfo reported 0rpm. I need to send him a debug file when this happens again but i have no power from Irene hitting here in New York. You could test for it too? Any help we can get is more info on improving the fan control. If you sit in the sensor tab with ec enabled so fan control and fan speed sensors working sometimes you can see a 0rpm drop without ever touching the fan control. But setting a fan speed right away manual or auto profile both stop that from happening. It came to my attention when i had a few thermal shutdows from it and started tracking it. Did a bunch of work thus far with Mumak... Anyone else helping add info would be great. Over at Bios mods we are trying to get the unlocked bios functioning fan support as well thanks to Mumak again for all his efforts. Unclewebb and Mumak deserve an award for their contributions to the entire computer community at large.

 

once i get my machine back up and running, ill be glad to help.

and i did get the 0rpm because on manual setting it was fighting against the ec profile setting. i did notice that using custom seem to work allot better and was more reliable. then also notice that if i kept the fan spinning with in the 2k to 4k range..everything seemed to rise and fall and not completely shut off like on manual. but i didnt not have enough time to test because my machine went out. i tried it with 4.5k and i would get the dropped fan speed to zero over time. i'm thinking that with the 2 to 4k and disabled ec sensor...it never dropped. but don't quote me just yet... i still need to run some other things to be sure.

also in agreement about this Unclewebb and Mumak, but also...there is a new comer to the table and he unlocked to power potential of the m18x as well (da_g) which is of vast importance in the world of over clocking

 

Thanks for the support, guys I hope that the bios-mods guys will be a little more open about the EC firmware part of things, I would like to contribute to the development, but without 580m GPUs to test and any insider knowledge on the Compal EC I am stabbing at the dark.

BTW, those with AMD video cards, take a look at my post here about Muxless PowerXpress (AMD's Optimus-equivalent) - one of the hidden BIOS options controls switching between a binary toggle (what we use now) and Muxless switching - no idea if this functions but it warrants testing, dynamic GPU switching may be implemented and simply turned off

 

Switching GPU on the fly should be nice I am tired of having to reboot all the time lol I hope it works better than optimus thanks DA_G you are DA man

 

i concur....

 

I love this site. You guys that are IT gifted or going for a career really help the enthusiasts like myself learn a lot. If anyone can help me understand a bit about overclocking a 2720 besides the bus manipulation it would be appreciated. The youtube video helped explain some aspects of OC'ing the 2630 but there is one difference and that is on the 2630 the short term power window is "enabled" and on the 2720 it has a value of "28" which can go as high as 99. Not sure what to do. Any 2720/2820 owners manipulate anything other than the standard bus clocks?

 

set it to:
80
56
99
increase your BCLK slowly and test a benchmark for stability

 

You rock. Gonna test it out now. Thanks and + rep for helping me out with my 2720.

 

Yes on the fly would be grand even if it takes a few seconds go switch the hardware that's being utilized.

 

Tried similar set up on auto switching with 4000rpm as the max and like you said its working great. I'll retest with a full 8thread load on intel burn later on very high... that was one of the tests the fans kicked down to 0rpm i'll let ya know what happens.

 

Is it worth to switch from A02 to this bios version? I mean, is it stable? Will it blow up my laptop? Can I flash back to A02 if there's something wrong with A03?

I am a newbie to this so, sorry for these basic questions.

 

I wouldn't recommend you to switch to the modded bios right now. You don't have an extreme CPU to take the max advantage of the potential anyway.

I was gonna join the testers but have no time for experiments right now

 

Won't hurt he/she can always downgrade and go back to normal A02 or A03.
Again this A03 Unlocked bios is just that UNLOCKED meaning its the same A03 Dell bios but more features visable and usable.

And yes like Aikimox mentioned if you havent got an extreme cpu this wont benifit you, but it looks good to look around. :0)

Thanks

 

There are quite a few features that are hidden that having an extreme CPU doesn't have a bearing on..

VT Support, Number of active CPUs, HT support, PCI-E hotplug, throttling temp triggers.. etc. etc.

Even the overclocking options still have some (small) effect on non-extreme CPUs by allowing you to raise the TDP/TDC values slightly, allowing the non-extreme CPU to maintain its turbo bins for a longer period of time.

As bar-code said the BIOS is the same as the dell a03 BIOS, only some menu options which were hidden there are un-hidden here.

 

Agree with both posts generally, but... flashing BIOS is not 100% safe even though it will most likely work fine. In the past few years I have seen plenty of bricked-by-BIOS-flash systems. That's the only update I normally do not recommend to our customers, unless it fixes a serious bug and greatly improves the performance.

Don't need to go far, just by flashing from A02 to A03 on one of our M18x killed the macro key lights and no OS/CC reinstall or even the BIOS reflash can help now, the mobo is getting replaced.

Still, that's one machine our of 20 maybe but the risk is still there.

Bottom line, if you're an advanced user, you know what to do and don't need my advice. But if you are asking then I recommend to stay away from it unless there's no choice.

 

Yea and on a non extreme CPU with A02 I am currently running a pretty wicked rig ... I would suggest it would be neat to look around, but I wouldn't take the risk right now for non Extreme users....

That said, I stlll commend Da G, Johnk Bar-code et al for the work they are doing ...

 

What is the setting "Scrambler[Enabled]" for?

 

No idea what exactly it is at this time, but an educated guess it's probably what's called in older BIOSen Spread Spectrum.

 

It's a new feature allowing your laptop to cook for you, in this case to make scrambled eggs, lol

 

lool

 

it sure wont be in the case of the gpus though....but that cpu....that sucker can push the Celsius envelope!

 

Johnkss I aware I nearly melted my rig lol. Thank you John, Barcode, Da G and Ahmed from bios mods for all the hard work. I am not home but soon will post my latest benches in the appropriate thread. Ready for it? 4.6Ghz at 8 theads fully loaded on wprime 8t 1024m. Yes... Holy $hit. That's combining Ahmeds bios and Da G's editing registers

 

And now we know where Global Warming(tm) came from..

 

So Im new with overclocking and such, and I just flashed this bios on my machine. What can I do to improve it a bit without pushing the envelope.

 

you flashed exactly what bios?
stock
hex bios
menu bios

 

I had the A02 bios and flashed to the upload on the first page, with the megauploads link.

 

ok. simple.
bios
f2
advanced
performance options menu
enable over clocking feature
enable extreme edtion
set level 1 over clocking to enabled
hit f10
boot windows
have a great day..
or set level 3 and have a far better day..


side note:

did they give you the 120hz screen with your sli option??