XPS Gen2/M170 + 7900 GO/GTX It Fits With A Simple Mod But... - Page 7

Crap... I see what you're saying. That sucks...

I'm sure some enterprising M1710 owner would be fine with doing mods for a fee once 7900s appear. The BIOS fix would be sweeter though...

Allright, then how about this. A blind flash with a modded (ID) bios. Cornholio, does the computer boot to any length? In theory, you could just blindly enter commands (for Freedos for instance), then have a batch file that flashes the bios.

Edit: Dang I see no go. Okay, I'm going to actively pursue this bios issue. I'll try a couple different ways to pull off the Dell bios and take a look at it.

You can easily extract the dell bios from the distributed executable:

http://www.alsway.com/component/opti...pv,0/topic,1.0

Basically is biosfilename.exe -writeromfile or -writehdrfile.

If you open the hdr dump in an hex editor and compare it to the rom dump you'll see that only the first and last bytes differ.

My experience modding bios goes as far as using cbrom to update the SATA RAID bios, which is not very far.

I have gathered some bits and pieces here and there, but if you want to look into this matter I don't want to give you any misleading information.

Problem is, without proper knowledge background, tackling this issue for me is like trying to calculate a comet's orbit without any knowledge of newtonian mathmatics. What I end up with is more about faith and superstition than science.

Although the writerom command and others may work, some of the other commands specified in the alsway.com link no longer work with more modern Dell BIOS updates, so it is possible that the writerom file will not work either. Of course it's still worth trying though!

1.- Download A05MXG51.EXE to a directory in your hard drive (let's call this one c:\\A05MXG51, I'm feeling really imaginative today ^^)

2.- Go to Start > Run, type "cmd" in the dialog box and press "OK"

3.- In the command prompt type "cd \\" (the space between "cd" and "\\" is irrelevant here, but I can't help myself)

4.- Now type "cd A05MXG51" (here the space is relevant )

5.- Now type A05MXG51 -writeromfile

This "extracts" the bios code to a file with the same name and the extension .bin

If you open this file in an hex editor, the first thing you will notice is that is divided in four different sections. I haven't tested with the M170 bios, but with the XPS GEN2 the starting position if each section (or module) is a constant.

Here is where I obliterate science and I jump in the field of superstition. My best guess (and is a very wild guess) is that each section of code is a diferent module in the bios, same as in the bios of my desktop's motherboard, which can be confortably manipulated with cbrom and other tools.

Problem with this particular bios is that I know of no tool that can "extract" those modules to work with them, therefore any manipulation would have to be via hex editor and in it's "packed" form, which is far beyond my skills.

Edit: For the record, the bios files for the M170 and the XPS GEN2 are identical bit by bit.

Edit2: Even if we manage to succesfully edit the bios, we will have to figure out a way to actually flash the bios. Aparently if you run the bios updater (for example A05MXG51.EXE) under real DOS it will admit the command "-readgzfile", which some people speculate it might attempt to read a file with the same name of the executable, compressed in gzip. But afaik this is all theory. Besides, we don't know if it's the .hdr (the file you end up with if you use the command -writehdrfile instead of -writeromfile, which opened in an hex editor shows a few bits of code added both at the beginning and the end of the file compared to the .bin one) or the .bin file the one we need to flash.

In the Dell's server line is the .hdr file the one used to flash the bios, but idk about laptops.

Getting close? seems there is hope ....

in on this

In the address 00089E6A - 00089F7A you will see ASCII strings describing supported graphics cards.

My guess is that is all gibberish because the module is compressed. Aparently in a variation of the LZ algorithm.

Besides is the IDs and not the descriptions what we need to edit. I've tried to make sense of that particular section to see if the IDs follow the ASCII descriptions, but no conclusive find here.

The only problem I see with flashing the graphic card's bios to "trick" the system is if every graphic card "profile" so to speak has personalized setting for let's say voltage or other sensitive parameters.

I really don't know how this bioses work internally, and if they just scan the bus for a particular list of "approved" devices and act acordingly and leave the bus specifications alone or they change voltage/frequency lines acording to which device is plugged in the bus.

Changing the driver's .inf file to install the card with the apropiate parameters is dead easy, what scares me out of this "workaround" is ending up frying the card itself or voltage regulators on the laptop's motherboard due to incorrect hardware parameters being applied.

I think the PC bios allows a certain voltage to be had by the card. I read the 7800 GTX mod for I9300 thread, and there's apparently someone who can run the card with the original 9300 bios. This is interesting if true... probably undervolts the card.

Either way, voltage-wise, aren't the 7800 GTX & 7900 GTX pretty close? I don't think they can be fried by the PC bios. At least I don't see how, since the video bios is responsible for selecting appropriate VID's (like cornholio said).

The other thing is, there is apparently a Phoenix Bios Editor somewhere around the net. I've been trying to find it. It may allow us to edit Dell's bios, since it seems to be a Phoenix bios. I can't find it anywhere though, it's very strange.

I ran a 6800 Ultra on a 9300 BIOS. The core ran fine and even over-clocked up to 500MHz at standard voltage (1.3V). However, the memory had to be down-clocked from 1.06GHz to at most 900Mhz before the computer would boot with no artifacting (note that I acheived this by modifying the throttle settings in the BIOS). It seems that the power available to the memory was being limited by the motherboard..and there must have been some other limitation because, no matter what I set the 3D full power settings too (even really low values), the computer always switched to the throttle settings.
However, the situation was a bit different, as the BIOS was designed to think that it had only a 90W adapter available.

Oh lordy, the excitement!
Too bad I speak no Matrix or whateverix, but I'm willing to pay to enable a self bought 7900 to run in my XPS2... within reason