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    m11x bios

    Discussion in 'Alienware M11x' started by magic_man, Feb 13, 2011.

  1. magic_man

    magic_man Notebook Enthusiast

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    Has anyone here ever tried to reverse engineer the bios. While slg pll is not programmable the bios is able to set the reference pins to 266Mhz, and also disable the speedstep. If we could get the bios or the at least the chip that is setting the reference voltages we could probably overclock the chip and enable speedstep.

    You think if we asked alienware real nicely, they would provide that info?
     
    magic_man, Feb 13, 2011
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  2. kent1146

    kent1146 Notebook Prophet

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    Ummm, I don't know exactly what you are trying to do.

    The Alienware M11x R1 and R2 both allow overclocking of the FSB directly in BIOS as a supported feature of this laptop.

    If you are buying an Alienware M11x R2 with a Core i5/i7 CPU, then you will want to check out a program called ThrottleStop by UncleWebb. It lets you mess around with the thresholds for current / temperatures used by the CPU to determine when to enable or disable TurboBoost. Just about everyone who has used it ends up getting decent performance gains in CPU performance.

    Alienware / Dell will *NEVER* give you access to the code they use to build their BIOS. And I would not recommend that anyone ever try to mess with their BIOS in an unsupported way, unless you happen to need a new $1000 4.5lb paperweight.
     
    kent1146, Feb 13, 2011
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  3. magic_man

    magic_man Notebook Enthusiast

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    I am talking about the R1. I am guessing the reason why the came up with the weird configuration on the R1 is because formula for power, CV^2*f.

    They probably just set up (1.05)^2*(1.3) = (V)^2*f. If you plug in .9 and 1.6 the ratio of those equation is close to 1. However what they failed to account for was that P = Pd + Ps. The leakage current as a percentage of dynamic current is quite high at 45nm and below. So the values they picked seemed like a real back of envelope type calculation.

    Its a 530 dollar laptop so if it breaks o well. However I am not really an x86 bios guy, and I will probably have to do a bunch of research, so I was just wondering if anyone else had just poked around it.
     
    magic_man, Feb 13, 2011
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  4. kent1146

    kent1146 Notebook Prophet

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    What you're talking about is way too technical for this forum.

    I think you'd probably get better luck in forums dedicated to Computer Engineering or Electrical Engineering. You could also try contacting the Engineering department at Dell / Alienware directly, but I doubt they would speak directly to consumers.

    Good luck.
     
    kent1146, Feb 13, 2011
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