L502X modded bioses download (GPU voltages and more!)

then it looks like we both are running the same modded bios and gpu clocks, It seemed stable for me too, and with the undervolt my card didnt went over 80º yet.

 

The last time my video card broke 80 was when I did the ultimate heat test:
furmark on max settings
turbo boost turned on (usually turned off)
prime95 running on max heat generation

 

I have been flashing manually with WinFlash, this probably explains the errors.

An update on the undervolted GT 540M:

A large number of people report problems with the GT 540M crashing/freezing during most if not all games (permanently), I have this problem with AoEIII (crashes within under a minute of play - have to hold in the power button to restart). Undervolting appears to be a workaround (so far) as the game will now hang for a few seconds, and then continue without problem. I should probably request a motherboard replacement, but there isn't a guarantee of a fix.

I still need to do testing (*cough* gaming *cough*) to make sure it isn't some coincidence. (I am on holidays!)

Need more people to try the under/overvolted GT 540M BIOS!

Thanks

 

That was the undervolted version I have also tested the overvolted BIOS version.

As the voltages only change the Nvidia GPU, there sadly isn't a drop in temperatures whilst non-gaming (this relies on the Intel Graphics) and hence fan speed. Depending on the game, you might see a drop in fan speed, but probably unlikely (if only!!)

 

edit: srry for this double post but my firefox became mad.
so this useless post can be deleted

 

@nomygod

I have to run that test too, before I was talking about ingame temps, like crisis,assasins creed brotherhood..

what was the max temp did you reached with that ultimate test?

@Matix5

yep, I found the similar issues while flashing manually, thats why I made the batch file, I also included a readme.txt file asking to open it

as for those crashes/freezing, I experienced them , but only while I was testing unstable overclocks, never happened with the stock 525m clocks.

(since the 540m just seems a little OCed 525m) maybe the stock clocks of the 540m are not stable for everyone? (in that case DELL made a terrible and cheap election)
I also saw some ppl asking on forums that downclocking the 540m to the 525m clocks (600 mhz core) was a fix for the issue.
(a very cheap one in my opinion, since you paid more for something suposed to work better, not just for a bad OCed card ..., definitly the DELL guys are the nuts, lol)



also, I'm curius about undervolting semi-fixed it for you.

shouldn't be the oposite?
I mean, higher voltages should make it to run more stable I think.
thats why it sounds a little weird for me lower voltages improved it for you.

EDIT: oh, just forgot,again thank you a lot for testing the 540m modded bioses.
I will give u rep points ^_^

 

The readme? you mean the 'don't read me'! lol

Apparently the GT 540M has some type of power issue, I can play fine without the power cable plugged in, but usage is limited to the battery.

I am also surprised that undervolting appears to half fix the freezing for this particular game. Played for almost 2hrs no problem. (Famous last words). Temps are much cooler and I can still overclock to a respectable 800/1000. (Not as fun as the burning 860/1015 ish

Worked out how to rep lol, +1 for your hard work. Thanks!

 

thx ^_^
hehe, yep, its named "DONT READ ME.txt", I noticed ppl usually do reverse stuff, so thats why I did xD

oh, yeah, I also noticed about the battery thing at the forums, I have to test higher GPU clocks on battery mode, would be funny that it run stable at higher clocks only in battery mode, lol

oh, and nice clocks for a undervolted card

 

+1 rep added

Happy new year to all!

 

Just two ideas i might add here:

1)Higher Voltages can make Cards become more unstable because of more heat dissipation and therefore more leakage in the transistors. That causes a higher chance for structure and function hazards which results in failures.
BUT in most cases you´re right, higher Voltages(within a range) makes clocks more stable.
For Example of this, just look at Sandy Bridge Desktop extreme overclocking. They are just fine within 0~30° anything below will make them less overclocking friendly (i.e ASUS X79 Rampage IV Extreme Socket 2011 Motherboard Review - Page 15)

2) You should share you´re fan speeds and temperatures, because they are depending on each other. The optional 9 cell or 6 cell battery could also play a role here

*keep reading*

MFG Jubeltrubel

 

hi just letting you know i tried out your undervolted bios for the gt525 card today but noticed full system hangs when viewing videos on youtube and such as for the gaming side of things it is perfect i was just wondering if you could perhaps create a version that has the undervolted 3d profile but 1 also with the 2d profile kept as stock would be very pleased if you could do this thanks again

 

@jkbuha
thank you :3

@Jubeltrubel

holy cow, a 5'4 OCed ghz i7, that would be enough to move any current demanding app.
yep, you are right, every OC is a world.
oh, and I have the stock 6 cell battery.

@daryld1988

mmm, 0.83v is stable for me in the 2d profile, or at least didnt experienced any issue yet, anyway every computer is different, so I uploaded the 0.85v 0.85v version for gt525m, give it a try and tell me if you keep experiencing crashes at the 2d profile.
give us feedback plz

 

thanks capitankasar i will try it out now n give my feedback after i try it the undervolted 1 was causing crashes in google chrome viewing youtube videos and then playing videos in vlc it was doing the same if any1 wants to try out any of them things 2 see if the same happens to them i will post back the results shortly thanks again

 

I'm using the undervolted bios and now my laptop doesn't crash anymore while playing games on stock speeds ( GT 540M at 672 MHz) and performance seems to be fine, thanks!

 

so far so good thats the gaming side and watching hd videos all good so far no system hangs or crashes thank you capitankasar

 

pleased you liked my modded bioses guys ^_^
you are welcome
and thanks for the feedback :3

 

I had a l502x about 6 months ago but had to send it back due to the annoying fan on/off cycling problem. This was a common issue, with no cure, and nobody had any help off Dell.
Do these bios's do anything to help with this. It didn't seem to be related to temperaure as such, it seemed to just ramp up the fan speed randomly. Are there any manual controls in the new bios, or has this been fixed completely. I would probably buy another of these laptops tomorrow if iI knew the fans would be quiet in normal operation.
Thanks

 

@btn125
well, I didnt had those problems with the fan, it happened for me just some rare times for less than a minute, so I didnt considered it annoying at all.
relating to the L502X modded bioses, we are on a very early stage. I was able to modify the vbios voltages and some text from the setup menu (like a way to know if the mod is installed).
but nothing else for the moment, I was trying to get the oem logo replaced by a custom logo, or unlock the POST screen advanced messages.
but dont know how to do it at all, I asked for some help at the bios-mods.com forums, but I also want wait till I get a fully working bios recovery method.
before I get inside harder challenges, I need to make sure I will not have just "luck" to continue, need a way to recover the system in case something went wrong.

at the tests, I also found a hidden diagnosis tool at the l502X firmware(no cdrom or usb device needed), to enable it, all you need is to hold FN+B while the system is booting, and it will pop up after dell's logo.

about getting a new laptop, I suggest to search for another one with stronger GPUs, cause the 525m and 540m are just OK for gamming, overclocking the card have noticiable results, but even with OC, them will not handle newer games like bf3 very fluently, specially on 1080p resolutions.

I like the L502X cause the design,sound quality, and some other stuff, but I would love to buy another laptop with better specs, I just had a very limited cash and had to find a good offer with decent hardware, and as you can see, I still have the stock screen and a i3, wich prove I adquired it with the very basic config, anyway ,after a while I got the second hdd caddy and ram upgreades by myself anyway cuz it was a cheap , usefull and easy upgreade.

 

any chance of producing a modded bios @ gt550 speeds based around the gt540 that i could use with the slightly increased voltages?

 

it depends of your chip OC tolerance
testing will be the only answer ^_^

try with undervolt, stock clocks, and then overclock as much as you can if you can go with the stable clock speeds , there are ppl with 800 stable core speed arround.

about making bios with custom clocks, it would work only for a few ppl, cause every chip have different OC tolerances, I suggest you use the modded bioses just for the voltage , and you modify the clocks with msi afterburner or another software.

this would be the correct way of finding your max stable OC and also being able to create OC profiles

 

* added some download links for the required/aditional tools and more info/images to make the flash process more begginer friendly

 

Thanks for the reply. Mine was an i7, which possibly didn't help, but then again it didn't seem to me temperature related. When did you buys yours- I'm wondering if Dell have fixed on newer models without telling anyone. Most of the forums I was looking at have dried up, so either people got sick of it going nowhere or the newer ones are better. No way of telling unfortunately.

Good work on the BIOS. Is there anything useful in the diagnostics that could help with fan speeds i.e. manual overrides? I wont be using it for games too much anyway, maybe just a bit of MS flight sim. I need something that is cheapish, hi res screen, powerful enough for virtual machines. It fits the bill in every respect other than the noise levels fluctuating.

Good luck and keep up the good work.

 

@btn125
thanks.
I ordered mine on 04/26/2011 (looked right now the documentation wich came with the laptop.)
first thing I did were format, and delete all dell partitions , and start with a clean installation, free of any trash, and I also installed win 7 ultimate x64 with the latest device drivers avalible.
I remember I had a lot of hangs at the begining, I just spent all those months trying different driver configurations, power management, gpu clocks, and finally bios modding until I got this working stable.

nope, the diagnosis tool didnt said anything about fan speed, it just seemed to check basic status like cable / device checking, and others like check if something were being displayed at the screen, cpu memory stability and others.

If you are worried about the cpu fan noises, I suggest upgreade the bios to the latest ones, you can also try my modded bioses wich include different voltages from the stock ones.

you also can try ThrottleStop to force CPU run an a constant speed, this could fix the fan to keep working on a determinated speed, not sure though, I use it mainly at the battery profile to avoid slowdowns on applications due the power save.

 

This topic deserves a BUMP!

 

And maybe an update for the new Bios A09?
Man, all my Valve Source Games crashes were fixed because of the undervolting!

So, a big thank you for your work, Sir

 

thank you everyone for your comments and feedback

glad it fixed the crashes for you

I'm quite surprised the undervolting mod fixed the gpu crashes for a lot of users, then I think a LOT of people would be interested at this topic, and not just the ones worried about heat or OC features

oh, didnt knew about a new bios were relased.

I will start working on modding the new A09 bios on my free time, do you know about what are the A09 enchancements/updates over the current A07 bios?

also, what happened with the A08? I didnt noticed a A08 version got relased, and the A09 is now out, lol xD

 

ok,good news, relased two modded versions of the new A09 bios,thankfully, the procedure were the same, so I was fast and aparently got no problems in the process

I focused on undervolting.

0.85v/0.85v for the gt525m

and

0.83v/0.85v for the gt540m

I tested the 525m version, however need more feedback from users, specially for the 540m version (cant test 540m bioses by myself due the hardware difference)

as allways, links are at the first post ^_^

 

Thanks for all your hard work!! Just flashed the gt540 version and no brick

Too bad I don't play games though... what should I be looking out for?

Here we go:

 

NP
and thank you for the feedback
now I will remove the red text scaring ppl xD

and yep, you probably will notice an improvement even not gamming, general gpu stability (like some users reported) , lower temperatures and maybe a little extra battery time.

the funny thing is that I looked at the mediafire statistics for my files, and the new A09 540m version I posted today have more downloads than the other files :O (59 downloads) and the higher closer file to it is the previus 540m A07 version with 0.83/0.85v (44 downloads)
something must be wrong with mediafire , I cant belive ppl downloaded that new bios that much even with a red text on it asking it didnt got tested yet xD

in the other hand still dont know the real changes of the A09 default BIOS over the A07 default one, I read on some forums that it may help to fix optimus issues, but idk.

edit: huge thanks for the picture!

now I can fully confirm the text modding works for the 540m bios , heh

oh you have a solid state drive
and like me: you are using a secondary hdd using a hdd caddy

 

YAY!
I will test it with some games later... after my 4 hours Math lecture of DEATH -.-

Someone from the german xps-forum.de asked at Dell for the changes and he said, he should get an answer during today.

 

thanks!! : )
plz, keep us updated, it would be nice to know what we exactly flashed on our laptop hehe

 

I tried your 525m bios mod (the first one ) and its good on my dell xps 15
.Thanks

 

thanks for testing the 0.83v/0.98v version, added your nickname as testers at the first post : )

 

Installed the A09 bios for 540. The voltage changes work. Currently Using Afterburner to OC to 750. Will report back after some gaming.

 

@ CAPITANKASAR

hey brother, thank you for the wonderful work you have done. just want to ask you something. Is it possible to mod the BIOS of XPS 15 to support booting from GUID Partitioned Drives, because our XPS 15's BIOS only boots from MBR partitioned drives. Our BIOS do not support GUID partitioned drives. If its possible, then can you please give it a try, as many XPS users like me need it to install Mac OS Snow Leopard or Lion. it will be much easier then.

Thanks

 

@sujinge9

thank you, added to the first post ^^

@eggy_brahma

thank you a lot

well, that should be posible, however there are some problems on the way:

* my bios hacking skills are very limited, I took a long time before I managed to know how to unpack and repack the l502x bios and make it work properly, relating the changes,for now I just know how to make changes over the vbios, and adding or replacing some text at the menus, however I am in in touch with jkbuha and AHMED HOSSAM at the bios-mods forums, so as soon as I get the required knowledge to modify new features of this bios, I will let u know ^^, also, if you know someone experienced with bios, I would love to have some help from him : )

* as far I know, we dont have yet any recovery disk or method avalible to recover from a bad flash, this mean, if something goes wrong during one of my tests, I will not be able to recover it, being unable to connect internet, post, work at the bios or anything, and I will probably will need to order a new Motherboard or call dell.

I am now trying to unlock the UEFI menu and be able to replace the oem splash logo for a custom one, anyway no luck for the moment (well, I also admit the school got me a little away from this project)^^

 

@ CAPITANKASAR

Tested the A09 540M bios, played Skyrim for 4 hours (overclocked at 550M numbers) without issues:



Uploaded with ImageShack.us

Gracias por tu gran trabajo .

 

@squallmx

thank you ^_^

added to the first post : )

note/offtipic : wow, thanks to those screenshots I can see a lot of ppl are using the second hdd caddy, did someone got the second hdd activity led working? , it doesnt work for me

 

A09 Bios Changelog:

1. BIOS add re-try mechanism between BIOS and EC.
2. Add re-try mechanism between EC and adapter PSID. (Re-try 3 times every 500ms to extend detection time for Adapter plug-in)

Source: Drivers and Downloads | Dell [United States]

 

What do you mean second hdd activity led?

 

How much lower (than stock) are people getting for temps on the undervolted 540m mod?

And how much higher (than stock) are people temps on the overvolted 540m mod?

Thanks for making these!

 

I had a maximum of ~91°C while playing BF3.
Now, undervolted, it reaches only ~78°C.

Edit: Nvidia GT540M

 

@Cyb3rfr3ak
thx, I though the new bios would have more stuff, but as I can see the changes are minimal.

edit: nice GPU temps

@rabbitz

I mean,when you replaced the optical drive for the second hdd drive caddy, it comes with a space and connectors to connect a new hdd/SSD, and it also include an activity led for the new hdd/ssd.

the second hdd placed at the old optical drive works fine in my case, but I never got the activity led working, tried replacing the led by desoldering/soldering but no luck.
didnt found any fuse or something like that to replace or bridge at the second hdd caddy enclosure.

 

Mine ( 2nd SATA Hard Drive HDD Caddy Adapter for Dell XPS 15 L502X L501X | eBay) doesn't have an LED either..

 

i got mine from new modeus

2nd HDD or SSD Caddy for DELL XPS 15 (L501x, L502x) [OBHD-SATA12-SATA-BU] - $44.75 : NewmodeUS, Hard Drive Caddys for Notebooks

the funny thing is that when I googled to fix the problem all I found were ppl crying because the led was to bright, and they wanted to disable it. funny stuff lol xDD

 

By the way if there is a bios to turn off the laptop's LEDs, I could put my laptop to sleep in my dorm without covering it with a shirt (I like to use it as an extra alarm clock and those LEDs are bright)

 

haha I got one of those cheap $10 ebay adapters as well... didnt come with any LEDs I just switched the faceplate with the one that was on my dvd drive

 

Installed the undervolted Version from your Bios.
Worked fine. I´ve upgrade von the latest Bios A07 to your A09 File.
Temps with old Bios.
Clocks@Default: 76° GPU
Clocks@760: 78°
---------------------
Temps with your Bios
Clocks@Default: 71°
Clocks@760:72° (BUT one Fanspeed level lower than the default bios)

Tested with MSI Combuster with the integrated Burn in method running each clock about 10mins

Great Work(as i already said about 5times )

MFG Jubeltrubel

 

@rabbitz

yep, mine was a little more expensive, and I suposed it at least would work better, for example with the activity led, but as I can see I just wasted money, well at least I got the same shipping price after including a esata to laptop optical drive cable and a fabric case to carry the old optical drive and keep using it when neccesary via the fast esata port

@Jubeltrubel

thank you x5 times ^^

well as I can see, thanks to the users feedback of those initial mods we all archived mainly three goals:

* huge decrease of the GPU temperatures
* fixed crashes and stability issues for some users
* more OC stability

I hope this project keep evolving : )

 

care guys, dell removed the official A09 version from his site.

also I saw comments like this:

anyone else found similar issues while using the original or modded A09 BIOS version?