m11x r3 battery clocks - BIOS mod advice

Hi Guys,

I have been tinkering a lot with my m11x R3 and love the performance but I would love to customise it a little for better battery use.

At the moment you have 2 choices on battery max battery (200gpu/300mem at 0.8v I think) or max performance (675gpu/900mem @ 0.98v)

Now max battery is the biggest waste of time for me as nothing is playable and if I want to watch movies I use the intel gfx so I have no need for this setting and obviously set the laptop to max perf on battery.

Now performance is great but it kills battery life in 1-1.5hours. A lot of the games I play I could dial down the 3d clocks and still play with good fps on battery (say 450/600).
Now I can adjust the GPU to this speed but because it is still at 0.98v's there isn't much of a wattage saving (I will put some power use figues at the end of the post).

Does anybody know a way I can modify the gfx card with software or bios to adjust the battery clocks and voltage? If I could get a 0.9v @ 450/600 I would be over the moon.

To give you an idea of the power savings I have made so far I monitored a kilowatt meter whilst playing SC2 at high settings and found the following:

cpu turbo boost on and gpu 675/900 = 63watts
cpu turbo boost off and gpu 675/900 = 58watts
cpu turbo boost off and gpu 550/750 = 52watts
cpu turbo boost off and gpu 450/600 = 47watts

If anyone can help or offer advice it would be greatly appreciated

 

There is a way of doing it and it should be possible. However i have no idea how to extract the nvidia bios from the dell bios to edit it. I am in a similar boat and would like to raise my voltage a little. It sounds like DavyGT has done this before but from what i can tell he is not active on the forum right now.

 

Thats a shame about DavyGT! Sounds like he may have been the person to ask.

I will keep searching around for a way to modify the BIOS. I dont mind risking it if I can find a good guide. Think the benefits could be huge. And yeah a small overvolt on 3d clocks would be good. I am already at 825/1050 so not sure how much more I could go.

 

There are 4 voltages listed in the voltage table: .83v, .85v, .98v and 1.00v. It's not possible to enable .9v since it's not listed.

For this mod, I can either undervolt the upper 3D and let you use the lower clocks or overvolt and overclock the 2D state. There is no distinction between battery or plugged in use in the BIOS.
You can also try forcing the lower 3D state to enable by crashing the driver with a high overclock and use that instead. The low clocks can be BIOS modded out and it runs faster then the 2D state.

 

Before I answer your question, I need to be clear.
If I set the laptop to max battery it runs at 200gpu/300mem @ 0.83v, what mode is this? I thought it was low power 3d as I thought nvidia had 2d (50/100), low power 3d (200/300) and 3d (672/900) settings.

PS, thanks so much for showing up! You could make this laptop perfect for me with a BIOS mod.

 

Looking again at the clock domains, I believe your 2D clocks to be 50.5mhz core and 135mhz memory. Is that correct? I made a mistake by reading the shader clocks as core clocks and not dividing them in half.
If so, looks pretty simple then, push the voltage to .85v and push clocks up all round.

 

Yep that sounds right.

If you could adjust the low power 3d (0.83v 203/300 i think) to 0.85v 400/600?
the 2d and 3d clocks are fine for me as I just overclock in afterburner when necessary.

The only difficulty is I do not know what clocks I can get away with at 0.85v, how easy is this BIOS mod? as the only way I can test clock speeds at 0.85v is to flash the BIOS. Might take a couple to get it right. If you can show me I am happy to adjust the clocks (have used ati flash, nbitor and many others so am pretty competant).