E6520 Owner's Thread

Worth trying if NVIDIA gpu is not soldered.
What you trying to achieve with gpu pull?
If its for battery life,
You may try NVIDIA optimus.

Sent from my Motorola ATRIX™ 4G on Aircel

 

Yes, I want to improve battery life. Optimus helps, but from what I've read battery time is still noticeably better with Intel card only, even in the tests like webbrowsing where nVidia GPU shouldn't be used.

 

The NVS4200 is built into the motherboard, so you'd have to replace the whole motherboard to remove it.

About Ivy Bridge compatibility, it has been confirmed that you can plug an IVB CPU into an SB CPU socket. Usually when Intel decides not to make things compatible, they'll move a pin or 2 to make it so you can't physically plug the CPU in, but that is not the case with Ivy Bridge. Rumors have circulated that Intel is not going to provide the firmware information needed for people to write BIOS's to support Ivy Bridge xx67 and xx65 chipsets, but the rumor I believe has only come from one source and may not be true. I do not see why Intel would do this.

I personally would love to have IVB support. There's no way I'd get a whole new laptop just for the IVB speedbump, but I am very interested in purchasing just a CPU if it is supported, and I am thinking that others share my thoughts.

A fun fact about IVB. Intel stated that a restart would no longer be required to overclock IVB, unlike SB. This means that us with BIOS's that do not support overclocking (like the E6520) can overclock through software in windows with the 3920xm.

On a side note, has anyone been able to extract the HDR file from the BIOS .exe? The old -writehdrfile command does not work anymore.

 

even if intel keeps it compatible,what about dell?
will they release bios update to enable support of ivy bridge.
that will be like killing next gen E6530 for ivy bridge.
I hope dell proves me wrong with enabling bios support for ivy bridge in sandy bridge systems.

 

@Khenglish

What AC Adapter are you using for your E6520 with the 2920xm?

 

Having worked with Dell products for a number of years, I know for a fact they have released BIOS updates for various laptop models with support for newly-released CPUs. I don't recall how much time elapsed between the release of the BIOS and the release of the CPU, but Dell has definitely provided support. Whether they will with the E6520 is certainly unknown, but assuming all that's needed is a BIOS update (meaning the hardware is otherwise 100% compatible), I speculate it will happen.

In regards to it "killing next gen E6530 for ivy bridge" I imagine Dell will have enough other upgrades to make purchasing a whole new laptop beneficial - faster RAM, video, better display, smaller / lighter form-factor, etc. Additionally, I imagine the number of people willing to actually disassemble and upgrade their laptops is very small in comparison to the entire market.

 

The 90W one that my laptop shipped with. It's the coolest running power brick I've ever had for a laptop.

 

The difficulty here is that this rarely ever happens. Intel usually releases CPUs and chipsets as a set.

The last time something like this happened was during the Yonah to Merom transition (Core Duo -> Core 2 Duo socket M). Some laptop manufacturers provided a firmware update for Merom, but some did not = no POST. I think Dell D620 and D820 were used for both Yonah and Merom (no model change, both used the mobile 945 chipset), so there was a firmware update for it (though only because it was the same platform).

As far as manually adding it to the firmware, I suppose it might be possible if there are UEFI BIOS tools, the changes are known and the BIOS isn't encrypted/signed (I vaguely remember seeing something about that in the BIOS changelog). If it really is signed, you probably won't be able to modify it.

 

It is signed and they add new keys for every update.but their is one thing,you can disable that check for key.
Its uefi based bios so editing can be quite possible

 

I hardly see any promising tech.
Only thunderbolt along with usb3 and msata ssd as default addition.
Display wise they can start offering rgb led as default.but again all this will jack up price.

I think they will upgrade when 22nm new architecture of processor comes out,that time intel has to release new chipset.thats when i think real upgrade will happen.