[GUIDE] Dell Precision M6800/M4800 sBIOS mod

Hi voluxin I have issue with my dell precision m4800 , bios is signed firmware and it's version is A09 , after programming it coz of resetting bios password it became laggy and boot time before dell appearing is about 27 seconds, i decided to flash it's bios million times but unfortunately i couldn't flash it coz of read and write not availabe. I search in net and fortunately I find your post here, I decided your method and it remains still on A09 :'-( i never finde audio chip and i don't know what is the bridge on pin 1 and pin 5 at all . Please help me and describe more about your method

 

'How update bios with signed firmware update enabled'
Or please attach here signed bios version for m4800 or
Please attach here A10 bios version
Best regards

 

In another place I saw the list of nVidia graphic cards that are recognised by M6600 laptop by its BIOS. The list was in form of unreadable characters mixed with nvidia & ati card names in open text "(...)NVIDIA Quadro 1000M.....NVIDIA Quadro 2000M.....NVIDIA Quadro 3000M.....NVIDIA Quadro 4000M.....NVIDIA Quadro 5010M(...)". It was allegedly obtained by:
"opening the bios with andy's phoenix tools, than after the Dump map appears, opening a specific rom with hxd and seeing the following listing"
"that was using phoenix tool 2.56: EFI/Insyde Bios (dell HDR)"

I have a question if someone could copy/paste such list of supported / whitelisted GPUs for M4800? I don't feel technically able enough to come up with such a list as even Phoenix Tool is recognised as full of viruses in my Windows installation and I didn't run it.

A lot of people want to put a faster GPU in m4800 laptop and a list of BIOS-recognised cards would be appreciated.
Thanks

 

There is no GPU whitelist in Dell Precision series. M*600 have problems running Kepler and higher (due to some errors in ACPI table). AMD runs fine. M*700 and higher have no compatibility problem and can run any GPU (if you have eDP). If you have LVDS - most recent cards might not output to the internal screen. All Kepler based cards can do both LVDS and eDP. Only certain Maxwell cards can do LVDS (K2200M, GTX 965).

 

No, Mx700 & Mx800 does not work with Pascal by default. *** Retail card with ES vbios doesn't work too.

 

Pascal card error message is ACPI_BIOS_ERROR (tried with Win7/8/10). Do you have any idea if this can be fixed by modding the system bios?

 

Just a quick question @valuxin do you remember which part of ME or BIOS has the flag power planes, meaning which control power based throttling?



I've successfully dumped bios and me regions and opened them in editor but was unable to locate those flags. Since few months ago my CPU is unable to go over 37W TDP I was hoping to bypass it in this crude way since Dell is of no help.

I did that Grub unlocking thingie of Platform power limit locks and TDP locks but to no avail.

EDIT:

Did manage to unlock everything, but dosent change the fact CPU drops to 37W which it did not use to few months ago. I guess its due to EC update or something similar.

 

Dell Precision M4800 overheating after Dell a19 bios upgrade. Through T&E I have found that after a19 bios upgrade, if the power supply is left in after power down and power up, all 4 cores are running near 60C with load on the cores and near high end MgHz running all the time in idle. Near max temp when doing anything. If power down, take the power supply out, and wait 30 sec, plug power supply back in, and startup, cores running at what they should be, 798 MGhz and core temp mid 40C at idle and normal temp and such under load. Have repeated this more than 20x with consistent results. Maybe just my machine, but... Can anyone confirm? Dell m4800m, 16 Gig RAM, i7-4800MQ CPU, Mushkin Reactor 1Tb drive, using Open Hardware Monitor to monitor.

 

I'm on A19 and don't see this behavior.

 

Is there anything similar for its precedessor, the M4700? Any way to unlock the turbo bins? Thanks.