Hacking the Clevo W870CU bios

So, after spending several days around the net looking for some way to do what I need, I have come to the conclusion that it is currently impossible to disable hyperthreading in a Clevo W870CU (possibly excepting the extreme + unlocked bios version; since I'm not spending a grand on a processor, I dunno).

I then decided to attempt hacking the bios, but unfortunately both the update file and the dumped bios cannot be opened by Phoenix BIOS Editor. So I was wondering if anyone either had a bios dump that works for editing by this program (should be .rom or .wph format), or knew of another program that could open it.

While I'm fairly handy around computers, hex editing a bios from scratch is a bit out of my league, unfortunately. I'm really hoping to get this worked out because one of the main reasons for my new laptop is PCSX2 testing, but hyperthreading completely screws over my framerate, as the program isn't truly multithreaded (it effectively cuts my framerate in half).

I just don't understand why in the world Clevo would lock-enable hyperthreading on quad-core (or even dual-core) CPUs... it's got to be one of the dumbest things I've ever heard of in computer hardware, but I love everything else about the case (ok, I'd LIKE OC ability but it's not that big a deal), and I'd hate to have to sell it just because of this one issue.

On a related tangent, has anyone thought to start a petition to Clevo to at a minimum unlock standard features (such as VT and hyperthreading options)? I understand them not wanting to enable overclocking, as that puts them at risk for RMAs, but simple stuff like that?

 

Editing a system bios is way out of my knowledge zone, but the place to look for help is the Bios Mod section at MyDigitalLife. Lots of help, lots of tools. Bios Mods.

Have you tried playing with the Affinity settings for the affected programs?

 

affinity isnt gonna help, the problem that the program isn't multithreaded. thus, splitting my 4 cores in half and making 8 virtual cores means that the program can only access half of a core (thus halving the processing power available to it).

technically the program IS somewhat multithreaded, as it uses several threads, but the way it does it is by splitting internal threads across processors. so in other words (as it is an emulator) it will spread the sound emulation to another "core" -- but the vast majority of the processing takes places in the Emotion Engine emulation loop, which isn't split -- and it can't use more than 4 cores, so for my particular case, hyperthreading is in actuality halving the processing power available to the program.

and thanks for the link, I had come across them several times, but quite frankly they seemed to be swarmed with SLIC mods. I'll go back and look over it more closely though.

edit: request posted. let's see if anything turns out -- if not, i'm willing to offer 50$ to anyone who does it so maybe that'll get someone's attention.

 

Good luck. Sorry I couldn't help.

 

you should have a look here : Software Upgrade

specialy this: http://74.212.252.103/Sagernotebook/misc/876bv110s.zip

won't unlock the hyper threading but at least the VT become available.

 

much thanks, at a minimum it provides more info for trying to hack the bioses.

really makes you wonder tho, why in the world sager would go thru the trouble of modding it to add VT and leaving out HT...

 

Check this thread

 

oh sweet spaghetti monster, THANK YOU!

seriously, you just made my day. pcsx2 went from:

avg ~48fps, full speed hacks, 100% EE
to
avg ~50fps (PAL version, so that's full speed), no speed hacks, 90% EE -- though when playing, I leave a couple of hacks on, so that I keep full framerate even in crowded areas, with some hacks it averages about 65% EE

that's on FF12 in case anyone cares.

 

So you're saying you flashed the BIOS and disabling hyperthreading works?

 

What are your specifications and what version of PCSX2 are you using?

What resolution did you play at?

I tested FF12 NTSC with no speed hacks enabled and I average 58 - 60 fps. I have no way to disable Hyper Threading in my Bios.

 

laptop -- first of all, you have a 820, while i have a 720. secondly, i still havent gotten my second stick of ram so im running single channel. that likely explains the differences.

version is latest beta, image is oceania PAL, running off an ssd.

running at full 1080p, the gpu is the only thing affected by resolution and the 5870 easily runs it so thats not gonna make a dif.

also, if you only benched it, how did you bench it? the loading screen will always get high fps for any game, and the opening dungeon isnt very intensive so youll get above-average fps there. a good place to bench is after you complete the intro, and show up in rabanastre for the first time. as an example, running an ntsc version, i got about 55-60 avg in opening dungeon but only about 45 avg in rabanastre (without everything tweaked perfectly, as this was when i was first fooling around with it).

and yes, both HT and VT show up as disable-able.

 

Hyper-Threading doesn't really mean you only get "half a core". If only one of the two virtual cores corresponding to a physical core is in use, it actually gets the full processing power of the physical core.

 

True, hyper-threading doesn't lower performance much, if at all, and only in very very specific situations, even then, at most -5% performance, the performance difference you are seeing is probably just variance of scene rendering. Hyper threading actually improves performance in most applications, that's why I don't see much point in trying to disable hyper threading, the only thing disabling hyper threading help is probably slight lower power consumption.

 

actually, in some situations hyperthreading can greatly lower performance -- by more than 50% in some (albeit nowadays rare) cases.

in my case (and many other cases), hyperthreading actually DOES hurt -- partly due to programs not supporting it, or the OS not properly handling it (yes, even 7, though being 'designed for hyperthreading', still makes retarded errors when using it).

if youre really all that interested, i suppose i can run a couple benches (pcsx2, just cause, 7zip, which are the only 3 things I do that significantly tax my cpu) to show this, as well as exactly how much disabling HT helped me.

the reasons for this are myriad, however one important thing to remember is that hyperthreading was originally implemented to counter the ridiculously deep instruction line of the P4, and even then it only delivered sporadic benefits. the i7 does not suffer from the same instruction depth issue, and additionally already has several cores (to take advantage of multithreaded apps) -- most experts agree that hyperthreading is useless 90+% of the time, and Intel would be better served using that diespace for more transistors -- or dropping the price.

practically speaking, hyperthreading primarily helps in two situations -- 1) when you have two threads of differing instructions, in which case one thread essentially uses the unused processor resources, and 2) when a thread stalls (most often due to a cache miss). However, first of all, the only time that a quad-core i7 is going to be running more than 4 threads of something that can eat an entire core is when it's doing rendering, compression, encryption, gaming -- very intensive things (and many of these things STILL don't have 4 thread capability, for that matter), in which case all (or nearly all) of the load is similar instruction sets, which defeats #1, and hyperthreading has been shown, in these situations, to increase cache thrashing (as these applications are cache-intensive, but instead of sharing the cache between 4 threads, you're increasing it to 8 -- greatly increasing the number of cache misses), which defeats #2.

now, I suppose that if you were for instance encoding a movie, compressing something else, gaming, and rendering a 3d model, all at once -- hyperthreading would help you... but at that point, your CPU is boned no matter what you do. and to make it worse, windows 7 likes to try and throw threads on the same physical cores in an attempt to get intel's 'dynamic overclocking' to work. so instead of 4 cores running at 1.6ghz (total 6.4ghz), you get for instance 2 cores (4 threads) running at 2.4ghz each (4.8 total, a loss of 1.6ghz, or 25%), AND you're halving the non-shared cache (further increasing the aforementioned cache thrashing). this is what i was referring to with the half a core thing, which was a gross oversimplification, but exactly the situation that was happening to me. yes, I could try manually assigning affinity, but doing that EVERY time I run an intensive program? and that doesn't solve some of the other issues.

in fact, having been a moderator of a gaming forum with ~50,000 members, I can attest to the fact that HT and VT are two of the most-misunderstood aspects of computers (along with ECC and registered ram).

 

haha, sounds like the Egosoft defintion of "multithreaded"...

re win7 thread handling... I've never seen the magnitude of what you describe occur (25-50% performance loss), so must assume it's very old/specific applications I've not seen the likes of, or there's something "interesting" in how your laptop's set up as opposed to mine. I've spent plenty of time staring at graphs and average multipliers and the like with this CPU... I agree HT is a pretty redundant if not deleterious feature in a 4-core CPU (let alone in a gaming laptop) and would very much like an option in MY bios to turn it off ... but really in the scheme of things we G51J owners are just happy to have a BIOS that doesn't BSOD all the damn time which we had to wait for 3 months for. So aren't expecting much.