AMD FirePro M5100 overclocking - vBIOS mod (Dell Precision M4800)

WARNING - CORRUPTED vBIOS FLASH MAY RENDER YOUR VIDEO CARD UNUSABLE!
PROCEED AT YOUR OWN DISCRETION.
​

It is now possible to overclock the FirePro M5100 thanks to a modified vBIOS created by NBR user valuxin. He is also the creator of other vBIOS mods for the FirePro M6100 and several Quadro cards.

If this modified vBIOS is helpful to you, I strongly urge you to donate to valuxin to show your support for his hard work.

The modified vBIOS is based off of version 015.036.000.006.044815.

Features:

• Core voltage increased from 1050 mV to 1100 mV
• TDP increased from 40 W to 55 W
• Max core clock increased to 1200 MHz
• Max memory clock increased to 1500 Mhz
• TDP OverDrive limit to 50%

If you want to share this modified vBIOS, please link back to this thread instead of reuploading the files. Thanks.

SHA-1 stock 015.036.000.006.044815 vBIOS:
f6c1ec4a4c8ff8e3ea45088ccd11a1376ce8049f

SHA-1 modified v0.1 vBIOS:
e26daaf75285f7dce6fa8b131b9764a8a507d17d

Tools required:

Spoiler

• ATIFlash (Windows) - ATIFlash (DOS)

• GPU-Z

• MSI Afterburner or Sapphire TriXX

• FurMark, Unigine Valley or other GPU benchmaking/stress testing software

• Rufus

• HashCheck

• USB flash drive for DOS recovery in case of corrupted flash, or if you prefer flashing via DOS

Guide:
Preliminaries:

Spoiler

• Backup your original vBIOS using GPU-Z

• Download the modified vBIOS, verify SHA-1 hash using HashCheck to ensure there no corruption of the vBIOS files (right click file → checksums).

• Create a bootable DOS flash drive using Rufus. Copy ATIFlash and the stock + modified vBIOS files over to the flash drive.

• Ensure that Secure Boot is disabled and Legacy ROM is enabled in the UEFI to allow DOS to boot.

Flashing:

Spoiler

• There are several options to flash the vBIOS:
  • Flash in Windows using ATIFlash GUI
  • Flash in Windows using ATIFlash via command prompt
  • Flash using DOS

• I personally flashed in Windows using the ATIFlash GUI. Close all other running applications before flashing.

• If your flash is corrupted, or fails, you will have to recover your video card via DOS. I cannot help you with this.

Overclocking:

Spoiler

• Overclocking tools are down to your personal preference. I used Sapphire TriXX.

• A good place to start with overclocking is setting core clock to 875 MHz and memory clock to 1250 MHz. I believe that most, if not all, FirePro M5100 cards should be stable with this overclock.

• Run your stability test for 10-15 minutes and look for any signs of instability (e.g. application crash, graphical artefacts, texture issues etc.)

• If stable, increase the core clock by 10 MHz and run another set of stability tests.

• Then increase memory clock by 25 MHz and run another set of stability tests.

• Continue until signs of instability are found, revert back to your previous stable overclock.

• Note - even if the overclock passes your stability tests, other applications may case the overclock to fail. For example, one of my overclocks was stable in FurMark and Valley, but caused CS:GO to crash.

Results:

• In the end I was able to achieve a stable core clock of 930 MHz and a memory clock of 1375 MHz (stock core clock is 775 MHz, memory clock 1125 MHz).
• This overclock boosted the performance in the Valley benchmark (Extreme HD preset) from 538 to 597.
• Please post your overclock results in this thread!

 

I just flashed mine and am about to start testing. Do you recall what kind of temp increases you saw from stock to max?

565 on stock and 668 running at 925/1400

 

Temps seem fairly consistent, I'm seeing a max of 75*C (ambient room temp 20*C).

 

I just installed an m5100 in my precision m4600. I am new to overclocking, so im sure i could be missing something. I didnt need to flash the vbios to overclock this card.

seems to be running fairly stable at 985/1500, but my Valley score was only 544(extreme HD) and 513 running on stock.

I dont have any other benchmarks really, except Heaven and PerformanceTest 8, but if you guys have results from either of those id be interested to see them...not sure why it isnt performing as well.

 

Ok so that proved unstable, driver crashed playing Dishonored. Now ive got it stable at 975/1400. Played Bioshock on ultra for an hour and some Dishonored, and Ori with no problems.
max temp was 68 which happened during Bioshock.

I reran Valley and got a 640 which still seems a bit low but more in the ballpark. Any ideas?

 

What is your gpu temp on the load after overclocking?

 

Disclaimer: i realize this thread is about the m4800. However, i am continuing to post here because it seems to be the only thread about ocing firepro m5100.
I didnt need to use the modified vbios on the m4600, overclocking is already unlocked. The maximum voltage cannot be changed but it is already set to 1.1v. I have no way of monitoring the total power consumption(that i know of). Im definitely an oc newb.

My maximum temp so far was 68. However im facing some serious inconsistencies that i dont understand.

The clocks are stable (at 975/1375) and multiple programs confirm them when it goes to 100 percent load.
However, most of the time, it performs much lower than it should on these unigine benchmarks (lower 500s on valley) and seems to not get as hot as it should.
Then sometimes it acts how it should with results to match. Im at a loss to explain the difference. Power settings are always the same and i cant find anything in background processes that explains this

 

It seems like it's not just only me, who modified the vBIOS (obviously). The overclocking and performance impact are limited by TDP settings of the vBIOS and max power consumption of the card itself. For ex., you can overclock to 975/1375 and if the vBIOS is limited to 40w TDP - you'll gain almost nothing in performance on full load. If you want, you can share your vBIOS so I can say exactly what was changed and what impacts performance.

 

Haha i think theres a slight misunderstanding.. Im not even using a modified vbios, im just using msi ab to overclock. I guess i didnt have to use a modified vbios because im on an m4600 and not an m4800 (this card was not recommended for the m4600 but it happens to work). The max voltage is already set to 1.1v(probably because the driver thinks its a different card), im not sure exactly how that relates to the maximum TDP, but im definitely seeing somewhat of a performance increase just based on the voltage. I dont think I can change the voltage or TDP anymore without modifying the vbios, but in terms of voltage it seems to be the same as in your modified vbios.

Whats confusing to me is how inconsistent the performance is on the Valley, I havent tried enough other benchmarks i guess to see if its just this one or not.

Is any of this making sense? like I said, i dont really know what Im talking about..

 

It's 100% that you card using modified vBIOS. Just share it with me and I'll tell you what was changed vs original and what can be changed to increase performance.

 

I would love to!

please tell me how to share it

 

As I said previously - all I need is your vBIOS.

 

ok got it, sorry i didnt understand how to upload it

 

Hm... Looks like it's original rom. Yeah, it's possible to overclock GPU with stock vBIOS in Afterburner, but I can't get why you have 1.1v under load. To improve performance, you could try vBIOS mod.

P.S.Your previous card was also AMD FrirePro?

 

Yeah i dont really understand it. Im attaching an image from HWinfo, maybe you can see something i dont see.

Ive never used a vBIos mod before, im a little worried to because for some reason my intel graphics doesnt work. But id like to try it.

P. S. yes it was an m5950.

 

Flashed to your Vbios! you were right, with the max power set all the way up its consistently performing how it should be. 970/1375 gets me a 658 on Valley Extreme HD every time. Thanks Valuxin.

 

what graphics drivers are you using? m4600 owner with m5100 gfx card here and the drivers from amds auto detect give me a BSOD with this vbios.

 

I just downloaded the latest "crimson" from the amd website. Ill check when i get home tonight which exact version it is.

I do know that i used the drop down menu rather than auto detect, and selected firepro m5100

 

Good evening ladies and gents!

So after going back to mobile as my main I decided to look into upgrading my m4600 to w/e I could. Last time I checked the latest known card to work with this machine was the m5950 / 6770m.

Got the m5100 after discovering other people had success with this and luckily so did I. I flashed the bios from here and ended up soft bricking the card, spent two days working with it to get it back up and running. If it wasnt one thing it was another preventing this card to work with this laptop but right before giving up on it, the m5100 finally awoke from the dead.

I had to take the original rom and mod it with vbe7? I just copy/ paste the settings that were applied on this rom and it ended up fixing the card.

The last problem I seem to have though, is how the heck can I get the GPU to push 1.1v? Do I need to unlock voltage in MSI Afterburner or something? Last time I activated the overclocking tools in Afterburner the laptop wouldnt boot so I am a little hesitant to just flip a switch lol.

In GPU-Z it states the card under load is using 1.025v and with that I can get 900c / 1550m. Though it seems there isnt much benefit after 1450m or so as my Valley score doesnt change at all. So I want to push the core some more, but reflashing doesnt seem to change the voltage to 1.1v.

Any idea's to try before just flashing the card again?

Oh and Valley Extreme preset maxes out at about 638

Thanks

 

Do any one know difference between firepro m5100 red and blue?
i bought a blue and it doesn't work on m4600.

 

It could be possible that the m5100 you got was for an HP workstation?

I couldnt say for certain, where did you purchase the card? Ebay?

 

No i bought it from another store in asia.
is hp models blue?

 

I am not sure, I know that my m5100 (that I made sure was from/for Dell machines) is red so I assumed all Dell m5100 would be similar unless there was a possibility of multiple revisions...though I havent read that anywhere yet

 

Tried flashing the mod rom from the OP and the result was the same, a soft brick of the GPU. Reflashing my altered version from TPU gets it back up and running.

I dont know what it is about this ROM but its a guaranteed brick on my system. Shame as this m5100 looked like it can hit 1Ghz on the core and 1550 on the memory is super easy, though pointless.

 

Would anyone be able to look at the ROM I'm using and let me know what the difference is? I am not well educated in this type of stuff besides noticing that the ROM versions are different.

http://www.overclock.net/t/1613976/bios-flashing-the-m5100-amd-firepro-for-my-dell-m4600/0_50

I have the rom in a zip in the OP of that thread, I dont know how to upload here...

 

Man... I have same card (AMD FirePro M5100) but on hp ZBook .. so can I find vBIOS mod for it ?? :-(

 

I recall that you did, was the post removed?

Anyways, bump for further inquiry as to my flash issues

 

Having identical symptoms to TheReiever on my M4800 with M5100, anyone ever find a solution?

 

There are at least two HW revisions of M5100 card. This vBIOS is marked as for rev. A1. if your stock vBIOS version ending lower than .044815 you probably have rev. A0.

 

Even just taking my own vBIOS and altering the values worked for everything save for the voltage.

Was an odd thing, but I am not well versed and couldnt risk bricking it again lol. Would love to try and push 1ghz on the m5100 though.

 

GPUZ shows my version as .046304 so I am assuming I have rev A1? Sorry I could have given a little more detail in my last post but it was late last night lol. Got all the tools, saved a copy of my vBios which I will attach here, flashed and rebooted, Windows 10 refused to start with a bunch of BSOD and relating to something with ati. So then I went into BIOS and turned on switchable graphics (dont know if this actually did anything?) then booted into safemode and disabled the m5100 in device manager, rebooted normally using onboard graphics and reflashed. After reboot I was back to working normally again but I would love to give this a second try. Im also attaching a screenshot of my GPUZ if that helps at all. Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated!

GPU-Z results:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/1fshz445f1sesuk/gpuz_results.png?dl=0

Rom:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/c8qn1j35215ypso/Cape Verde.rom?dl=0

 

Hey guys,
I've rebuilded the mod completely and the main new feature is unlocked voltages up to 1.225v. Testing shows, that 700 points in Valley Extreme HD preset could be easily passed if you have Hynix or Elpida memory. Samsung variant is a bit unlucky, but still on the stable clocks can do 680 points

 

Can confirm, here is my GPU-Z and my latest Valley HD was 725.

Can probably go higher but my 150w doesnt have the budget for it, At 1.2v on the stock fan curve with R6: Siege max temp is about 80C. Max fan brings it down quite a bit though, 70-71C iirc on old NT-H1 and heatsink that needs to be cleaned.

Just be sure to set up a dos drive with atiflash just in case things go awry, so easy to flash back...

 

Does anyone else have the 4k screen? Last time I tried this mod I bricked the card so I was wondering if someone can have a look at my vbios to see if it is the same as the others before I try again. I don't have intel gpu enabled nor can I as this screen uses some weird connector. Also has anyone tried upgrading the GPU in this 4k screen model?

 

Hello

I tested the unmodded and modded bios in the OP, but it did not work for me. I could not boot my laptop anymore and ended up restoring it. My ROM version is 45392, so it should be A1.

Could you take a look at this ROM?
I uploaded it to zippyshare, as I do not have enough posts

Cape Verde015036000006045392.rom
http://www11.zippyshare.com/v/MNc5loqv/file.html

 

@valuxin would probably be the best to help you out, he was able to help me with my own system not flashing correctly.

 

then I guess I have to hope for him to find my posting

 

Well I have no idea what amount of time valuxin spends on the forums.

You can try the modded vbios he made for mine which is in the GPU upgrade m4600 thread but I have no idea if it will work for yours.

 

Hello,

Where can we get the updated unlocked voltage bios? I've searched your thread on the front page but none of the one drive archives contains the bios for M5100, only stock ones.

My vbios is 015.036.000.006.044815 and exactly the same version as op's. Thanks.