12 PIPE M9800 BIOS!!! - maybe - Page 5

Thomaszak, that's terrible about your friend (sux about the laptop, too, but computers at least can be replaced...)

take the hardrive out, connect it to your pc/laptop and erase the contents that you'd rather want dell not to see.

Before you send your lappy into the repair depot, simply remove the hard disk, the battery, and keep the AC adapter. Dell doesn't want that stuff in the package.

Today is a sad day...

Thomaszak, your motherboard has a built in graphics card, can't you boot from it if you remove your radeon?

I dont believe it has built in video, I could be wrong, but where would the ports be?

This is something I have been wondering also. When my card went down, I could still boot up in safe mode, from there I would try to remove the drivers, etc. Could you try to reinstall the new drivers from there???

Currently, it will not start up the hard-drive. But the hard-drive is not dead, because I put it in my Nomad Jukebox, and it works great. I will have to call it quits, and let Dell fix my rig. Until then, I have this old 5100. I guess it works! :-P...

Hey someone either send me the MRX800 bios or give me the device id's and ill try changing them

you may need to pm hulk cause he might be in the centrino forum. SO you are going to flash to a m9800 bios with the device id changed and then try and re-install the drivers and hope it detects 12 pipes?

This statement that HULK quoted seems to imply that changing the DeviceId in the bios only cannot be done, at least for the R9800SE that he was talking about. Maybe a similar thing applies to the mr9800?

If you still want to give it a try...

To change the DeviceId just use Rabit. Start with the bios from your mr9800 and change the id to that of the mrx800. That is how HULK performed the last set of changes that he made. Using Rabit the DeviceId from the mrx800 bios that was posted in these forums a while back is:

5D4A Radeon X800 series (R423)

Just for reference, the DeviceId from my mr9800 is:

4A4E Radeon X800 series (R420/M18)

The question I would ask based on this is what is the difference between the R420 core and R423 besides the PCI-e / AGP difference? I'm sure someone knows the answer? The only desktop bios I found which had an ID of R423 was an X850.

If you want the actual mrx800 bios PM me and I'll send you a link to it.

please do give me a link to the proper bios... i did the device id swap in rabit and flashed to a dead screen again... seems like everything i try flashes to a dead screen...

maybe you have the "real" bios i need...

If you have already tried that then what I have will not help you. What device id did you use? This is what has been tried on the latest round of testing:

thomaszak tried: Desktop X800 (R420) Device ID, SubSystem ID, SubVendor ID inserted into a mr9800 using Rabit.

whackamac tried: mobility X800(R423) Device ID.

The result of both of these was a computer that could boot but a dead screen. I have heard of changing the Device ID of a card before but not all three values. Maybe thomaszak should have tried only changing to the desktop Device ID not all three changes? But then there is the statement from the creator of rivatuner:

"Opposing to NV40 series, R300/R350's pipeline config is set by _driver_ after loading OS using PCI DeviceID as pipeline count selection factor. It is impossible to change R9800SE's PCI DeviceId to R9800(Pro)'s one in VGA BIOS without changing strapping resistor located at GPU package. So forget about it."

I'm not sure what the strapping resistor is, but we should probably get more information about the statement from the creator of rivatuner before proceeding. I believe there is a method for opening up the pipelines on a 9800SE. Anyone have information as to how the 4 to 8 pipes mod is done on a 9800SE?

using vnc or something else, can you check the number of pipes? even with a dead screen? Does the DVI/D-sub work or is it the same as before with nothing working.