***NEW*** Prema Mod Alienware 15. 15 R2 / 17 R2 and R3 Performance vBIOS

Hey guys, I wanted to ask you about voltage settings. How safe is it to adjust voltage for GPU? I reverted back to stock vBIOS but I just flashed Prema vBIOS again to try to find a stable OC (everytime I OC this machine it BSODs after a while in Heaven so I gave up).

EDIT: I tried to increase the voltage a bit and then increase the core clock by 300 MHz and memory clock by 430 MHz. I observed a very strange behaviour. It's all nice while I play games like that but after a minute or two passes my battery won't charge anymore and the light of my 180W adapter turns off as if I unplugged the adapter. I got a little worried thinking it will explode or something so I immediately stopped the OC

 

Any overvolt has a possibility of killing your computer. Leave voltage to experienced OCers.

Edit:
P.S: I cannot stress how bad of an idea it is to overclock on the 180w adapter, with a 980m.
P.P.S: In case you actually spend time patiently reading this time (as you should), Nvidia does have safeguards against death by voltage. However, you are still killing your computer slowly if it's grilling daily on 90'C+.

 

Oh, you're using a 180W AC adapter? The behavior you are seeing is because you are totally depleting the capacity of your AC adapter and overloading it to the point of tripping its internal circuit breaker. Since these new machines have some sort of hybrid power, the machine might stay turned on using the battery, but this might actually cause some damage. A 180W adapter is just barely adequate for normal use and moderate gaming. You really need to be using a 240W or 330W AC adapter for any kind of GPU overclocking. That may also be causing your BSOD, as the system will become unstable if it is power starved. I really don't understand how/why they thought 180W would be adequate on a machine with a GTX 980M.

 

Mine did it too... and i'm on 970m, so you can imagine
180W is crap, and 970's users cant get a 240W for free from Dell.

Light off = Your PS is protecting itself from exploding.

 

Do you know of any test/game i can do/play so that dell will be forced to give me a 240w adapter for free? . i was able to grab a 180w over at amazon for 5$ +11$ for s and h.

 

Well the temps were max 82C so I wouldn't say it was grilling

This makes sense.

It makes me a bit more comfortable that I am not the only one experiencing such behaviour. Although the fact that my PSU was going to explode if it didn't protect itself makes me feel disturbed.


So after all these comments I decided to stick with the stock vBIOS and stock clocks. They are enough for me since I do gaming and I can play almost anything on ultra 55-60 fps @ 1080p if my CPU works well (recently I have issues with 800 MHz throttling which drives me crazy ). I am going to try my friends 240W adapter a few weeks later and I'll do some tests on that one.

 

Light toasting If you want to do tests, get the 330w adapter (take it from someone with a 240w). The 240w works, but the overclock gains won't be much (if at all) over stock vbios for 980m.

Edit: and for that 800mhz throttling, makes me wonder if what @Papusan said about the 4720hq previously has some truth to it...

Running games on 4k maxed demonstrates it well enough (tested with GTA5 and Witcher 3). In my case, I notice battery drain after gaming, with the 180w adapter attached.

 

I read all posts here and didn't see anyone with 980M GTX posting here to show something works when OC the GPU. I tried several, and when go too high, the screen started to show some of vertical lines appear very quickly than disappear (like half a sec).

This is the good OC I have been tested so far. I didn't go further because of the vertical lines. When playing GTA V with High and some Ultra settings, It report the GPU heat around 75oC, and CPU around 80oC. Is it a good temp for both of them?

I use the A05 and 240W psu

I increase it by 215/320
and Firestrike test is 9699.

 

I did a series of overclocked tests with Firestrike (both on stock and modified). Modified actually yields worse results on A00, i.e. +135mhz core is higher on stock, but lower on modified, whereas +125mhz is higher than +135mhz on modified. My assumption is unlocking the stock vbios limit leads to another type of constraint on A00/240w.

It's on the warmer side, but pretty normal. Especially on A05.

I'm going to guess the A05 hybrid bios draws the additional power needed from battery instead - any results on A00 from anyone?

 

Remember not to look at the overall result. In order to see the actual performance difference we have to compare the GPU score.
(Overall score is highly influenced by the CPU).

 

I do take note of it, and the modified vbios works well in that aspect. The problem is when it works too well, and starves the CPU (hence my dialling back on OC). I guess it's a choice between A00+330w, or A05 and pray the battery doesn't die in the warranty lifespan.

 

Hey mate I've tried flashing my BIOS of my 980M to your one however myself and Mr Fox still can't get it to work.

Nvflash just seems to freeze and won't do anything?

I was wondering if you know how to break the protection on the 980m to flash it?

 

I would disable the Nvidia card first, before running a .bat file in the same folder as the bios (which I call restore.bat):

nvflash -i 0 -6 GM204.rom

Name of the rom has to match. What steps did you guys take?

 

We've done all of that.

 

I don't get that you said A05 will use the battery to boost for gpu OC on 240w? When playing GTA for like 1 hour. I didn't notice my battery draining or anything.

I did know A05 is hybrid power source for 180w, but I'm not quite sure if I use it with 240w. Will it still eating battery?

 

No, hybrid power doesn't drain the battery actively. It's supposed to "borrow" power from the battery during short bursts (when it hits peak power consumption), and then replenish it afterwards, so it's indistinguishable (unlikely to impact battery life significantly).

Example:
You might have a peak of 250w on OC, but your average is only around 200w. So a 240w adapter might not be enough at times, but is sufficient on average (so it only drains slightly when it hits peak).

It's actually a good idea - as long as the battery is alive, because once the battery dies, you're stuck with insufficient power, whereas someone with a 330w adapter would be fine.

 

I got VSYNC working again by deleting the SSFIV config file in the Documents folder/CAPCOM. You can back up the file if you like.
Next time you start the game a new config file is generated with default settings and VSYNC is on. That worked for me!

 

Ah, thank you. I get it. But if the battery drain when hit its peak, then recharge itself. Do you think we can notice that? Because if recharging, the alien power head would blink on different colors.

 

To quote what Frank said in his AMA: "... when your system receives a spike for wattage requests that go above the AC adapter’s capacity, it will quickly pull power from the battery to pay off this request for the typical milliseconds in which they occur. This allows your system to fulfill “on the fly” power demands. It also does not affect your battery life."

So it's really a short duration that would and should go unnoticed

 

Well, I would monitor the battery charging from HWinfo to see if anything happen during playing games, I hope HWinfo can recognize that slightly change

 

Still can't flash my poxy 980M what is this!!!!!!!!!

Just hangs and hangs then BSOD....

Tried it all disabled, enabled, safe mode.

What is wrong with my machine peeps?

 

I just looked back and thought about it... so you're trying to flash to the modified vbios? I misunderstood that for "returning to stock vbios" previously, my bad.

 

Yeah, well initially trying to save the old Bios just incase

Having no luck here

 

Just 2 points to check with you...

• Did saving your original vbios work?
• Are you running stock or modified right now?

 

No can't save my vbios at all.
Stock

 

Have you tried it with GPU-Z or different versions of nvflash?

 

Yeah

 

I haven't read your previous messages but I understood that you aren't able to save your stock vBIOS. I had the same problem and my solution was to deactivate the GPU from device manager. Try that and use GPU-z. That worked for me.

 

Done all of that mate

 

Yeah, we used TeamViewer a couple of days ago and tried all kinds of things and we cannot save or flash the vBIOS in @Snodge machine and not sure why it is different than others. Seems to be read and write protected. NVFLASH just freezes every time. I also tried other versions of NVFLASH for Maxwell. Might work with another program like fpt64 to break the read/write protection, but I don't remember the command because I haven't used it for that in a very long time. Unless @Prema has a suggestion, I don't know what else can be tried.

 

This sounds like the same problem I was having when I tried saving the vBIOS for my 13. I'm just wondering how everybody else was able to flash a new vBIOS to begin with given the obstacles present (in some machines, it seems).
Could the main BIOS version be a factor in this?

 

It might be something like that. We did not flash a different sBIOS version on @Snodge machine, so he could try that. Even if it doesn't help, at least that could be ruled out. Certainly no harm in trying it to find out.

 

We had a guy over @ TI, who had a broken flash-chip on his GTX980M (MXM) board, which failed over and over during the flashing procedure.
After soldering a new SOIC8 everything worked just fine.

Snodge could maybe check the solder joints of the chip on the mobo.

 

Shall I try the bios of the main system first ?

As I really don't want to take it apart as its a massive pain

 

I've also upgraded to windows 10 so might be able to do that DOS thing now ?

 

Guys guys, I think there's progress I went for A00 to A05

And I'm getting this message now -

@Mr. Fox @Prema

 

Try the newer nvflash which comes bundled with the Mod.
But yeah it can't communicate probably with the chip...

 

I did I used that the NVFLASH from this thread.

 

IT WORKED, no idea why that is I put it into a different directory and boom it flashed.

Only problem now I don't have the original bios

Does anyone have the original bios just incase

Can I go back to A00 now? from A05 as I like the way the fans work on the A00. A05 just causes the CPU to cook

 

Hi Guys my new 3DMARK score with +150 on the core!!!

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/8386589

However I want to use HWINFO64 to set aggressive fan profiles however when I open HWINFO64 and set all fans to max my frame rate seems to increase however there's so many stutters like 60fps - 30 every 10 seconds or so ?

 

Which directory did you put it in?

 

C:\Temp

So I've got my laptop running nicely and smooth now with auto fans from the A00 bios however whenever my GPU is under load for sometime the number 10 light ( the ones below the touchpad ) the one on the right powers out

So frustrating why can't dell sell a machine that actually works......

 

That's really strange. I wonder if what Prema posted is applicable here and there is a short circuit or broken solder joint that temporarily closed and allowed you to flash. It should make no difference what folder or directory it is in, and remember we tried several file locations, including a folder on your desktop and USB.

I suppose it is possible your Windows file permissions are severely screwed up. That has been a frequent mess from Windows 8 forward.

 

THIS times 1000!

 

Did you OC your CPU as well? I can't get anywhere near that score. +180core and +280mem is the highest i can go. Resulting in 9200 Benchmark Points.

I am running A05 on 240W; 4710hq 980m 16gb ram 256ssd

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/8428241

Is this just the limit for my GPU or do I have to overvolt the Card for better results?

 

I didn't touch any of CPU or volt because I don't have any experience with this. I just OC my only 980M, I have i7-4720HQ.

Did you use Hwinfo for better temperature? For that OC, which temperature did you got?

 

Ah, Ok! Thanks for the information. I just flashed back to A00 due to lower temperatures in idle mode.

With those clocks and A00 i have cpu temp around 76C and gpu temp around 72-74C running firestrike. I had no time to test it during gaming yet.

I OCed CPU and GPU but I got even lower benchmark results. maybe i am running out of power due to my 240watt power unit, but i dont know.

I am running an alieanware 17r2 by the way. the 3dmark link says it would be an alienware 15 but that is not correct. dont know why it says so... ?

 

Can somebody upload the files to a different hose? Mega seems to be down/timing out for me.

 

I've uploaded a mirror to my blog.
Please don't upload elsewhere or old files will float around for eternity without us being able to fix bugs.
(A lot of people once semi bricked their boards for months because we where unable to pull a beta BIOS, which lacked ES CPU boot support, because someone uploaded it to a Chinese server).

 

Firstly thank you Prema for your time producing this custom bios and easy bat file for use to seamlessly update and MrFox for his instructions on backing up the existing rom.

Custom Bios is something I'm familiar with thanks to svl7 and his hard work on the Kepler range.

The Kepler was an absolute beast of a chipset for overclocking with +250mhz easily achieved on the gpu.

With the 980m I can only see circa 180mhz stable. What is it with these cards that are holding them back as the temp is never +60'c whereas 650m would hit 90'c prior to any throttling.