AW18 - 7 beeps, black screen and no POST

Hi, guys!

Really need help here...

Here's the story:
A while ago I sold my AW18 to my friend. It's got 32GB RAM, i7-4930MX and 980M SLI (bought from woodzstack) with Prema VBIOS.
Worked fine under my ownership, but somewhere along the line my friend started complaining about the laptop crashing a lot. I found out that the CPU overheats nearly instantly under load, so I figured I need to change the paste. I previously had CLU on both GPUs and the CPU, but she's been banging the laptop around a bit so I figured it must have come loose.
I disassembled the lappy, nothing unusual, repasted with normal compound (not CLU this time) and put it back together. Voila - it works! No more overheating and it passed the XTU stress test.
There was a bit of power throttling, so I adjusted the XTU setting to lower the voltage slightly and upped the current limits - throttling is gone.
We then decided to test out a game. Enabled SLI in the NV Control Panel, rebooted...nothing... no POST... Rebooted again - 7 beeps...
And that's pretty much the problem - 7 beeps of doom...

What I've tried since:
1) Removed the SLI bridge - same 7 beeps
2) re-seated all the ribbon cables, etc - nope.
3) Removed all memory and CMOS battery, booted up, let it beep for a bit, then put it back together - same 7 beeps.
4) Replaced the CPU (7 beeps is said to be CPU-related) with an i7-4700MQ I had laying around, thought maybe the 4930MX got damaged somehow - no dice, same 7 beeps.
5) Tried dumb stuff like wrapping the laptop in blankets and letting it heat up a bit like people on the youtubes - no dice. (I replaced the CPU after trying this, btw).
6) Tried the old-fashioned methods like unhooking the battery, 30s power hold, then power button while holding FN - this did nothing, still 7 beeps.

I have no idea what's going on here... Did the BIOS screw up somehow? Is there a blind reflash method I can try? Is there a way to reset BIOS settings on these new secure flash BS mobos? Was it because I undervolted a bit (by 0.05V / 50mV), even though it passed the stress test and was fine up until the reboot? Was it something to do with SLI, even though the SLI bridge got removed?

I'm confused and I just want this to work... :/

Any help would be appreciated greatly!

 

Well this is not good. You might have fried something with the CLU.
Have you tried cleaning everything around the socket with isopropylalcohol? The issue with CLU is that sometimes when you try and clean that it likes to spread in small particles over the board when wiping the CLU off your CPU and heatsink, this might cause some issues right now or might even have shorted something when you tried to startup ur notebook. (When starting up ur notebook all hardware gets a voltage spike)

An undervolt of 50mv won't cause ur system to stay like that, it will reset after failure, especially when changing ur CPU.

I'd suggest taking the board out and clean it completely with alcohol, to make sure that there are no particles from the CLU on the board anymore.

 

Hmm, I'll have a look, but I've dismantled and re-assembled the laptop like 6 times by now... I wiped the heatsink away from the mobo, but the CPU was still socketed while I wiped it off. I sounds bizarre that anything would fry from micro particles, but I'll have to take your word for it.

Any ideas how to blind-flash the BIOS though? Or reset it somehow. I'm somehow certain it's a BIOS issue as everything seemed totally fine for a good while and then fudged up after a restart after messing with XTU (though that doesn't really change anything in the BIOS, from what I recall, and it should just reset itself upon failure - at least that's what my dekstop RVE board does).

 

Rather unlikely, I mean the moment you put another CPU onto the board is the moment it reset your CPU settings. As I said, just pull the entire board out, clean it wth alcohol and see what happens, a lot of times solutions are actually that simple. Also when assembling the board, try your 4710MQ first, then if it works put the MX in again, since I have a suspicion that you might have killed it and it somehow causes your mainboard to be funny as well. Only a hunch tho.

 

But if something's fried then I've already ruined the 4700MQ too, right? Because I've put it there already... I'll have a thorough look, see if I can blow the particles off with a strong fan and clean the obvious areas with alcohol. This confuses my face...

That being said - IS there a way to reflash on AW18?

 

That's the beauty of such things, it's not that simple to fry stuff. You board might simply be in some sort of protection mode which basicially shut down the circut to your CPU. My Clevo shutdown the connection to my GPU when I did a hard vcore overclock to push my GTX 970M to 1.55ghz, I had to turn it off, reset the EC and wait a bit until it would boot the GPU again normally, card itself was fine and all settings in afterburner etc. were resetted.

So If it's just a short caused by particles or your maybe dead XM CPU, then it could be easy fixed by cleaning the entire board and try out uf 4700MQ, when it boots normally, try the XM, when it again doesn't boot, then u can be sure that ur XM tries to short your board.

Reflashing without CPU is impossible without any external tools, you'd need to raspberry it, which is also very unlikely that BIOS reflash will help in any way.

 

Crap... So in theory it could either be the mobo or the CPU (or both, since I tried both)... Either way, if cleaning doesn't help - I'm out of pocket on this one... wow...

 

Most likely remains from CLU that shorted ur CPU causing ur mobo to go in a protection state shutting of the circut. So the mobo is probably fine, the CPU might be damaged, if u're lucky both are fine because the mobo prtected itself in time and both components are basicially shutdown until you clean it properly and get all electricity out it by EC reset or simply pulling it out for a bit, since u're going to clean it entirely anyways, u'll automaticly reset the EC, so all good. Update us how it went after you clearned the board, who knows, maybe nothing broke and u learned a lesson on how to be way more careful when cleaning CLU from boards

 

Ok, Actually I've booted in now. I've done the cleanup (just blew the mobo with air) and while I did that I found that one of the fat ribbon cables was borked and had a few pins crossed... So I took a needle, separated them and the lappy booted (after giving me 5 beeps for memory, as is usual after disassembly)...
I'm in Windows now.

Where can I get replacement ribbon cables for AW18? I'd rather have normal cables without a fudge like that for the future

 

See? cleaning up often helps finding issues

Honestly your best bet for cables is either ebay or aliexpress.

 

Ok, I'll have a poke around. Maan... Now I need to disassemble everything again and replace the CPU back to 4930MX... What a ballache...

 

You should be happy, that the notebook doesn't have dead mobo :'D

 

I'm used to it. I've never ever had a broken component aside from things like hinges. Guess I'm lucky like that. Or maybe it's that electronics designers make smart accounts for this stuff. Either way - I'm happy

 

So I managed to get everything perfect and working beautifully... Loaded the XTU preset I made before. Stress test passed. All good. Restarted the lappy - F*CK!
I think XTU is messing with something :/
No POST, no beeps... Just as before...
This is ridiculous!

 

Can you post a picture of your XTU settings? I have the 4940MX and I have quite the experience with it and know what settings causes it to act weird.

 

Let me boot first...somehow...

 

Is there an official way to reset the BIOS without changing the CPU or disassembling the whole thing?

 

Normally u'd just remove the BIOS battery, remove PSU, Hold down the power button, maybe press a souple of times to be sure, then wait 1-2min and then u connect the battery back etc.

 

Didn't work, waited over 5min... No POST, no beeps, just as before (before the 7 beep issue).
Ugh, I'm gonna have to disasseble the laptop again, ain't I... Ffs...

 

Well, that totally wasn't ridiculous or anything...
So as per my findings - swapping the CPU is what resets the BIOS. So the laptop POSTed once I put in the 4700MQ,then I had to take it apart again, put back the 4930MX and put it all back together. Good as new.
And I deleted XTU. Restarts are as normal now. My friend isn't that picky about getting the absolute top performance out of the machine, so it'll be fine for her. 400MHz here or there (I used to run the CPU at 4-4.1GHz, but it will now run at stock) - won't be a big deal to her.
F**k this... All that to reset the BIOS?! And somehow XTU can even mess things up like that to begin with? Ain't worth the hassle...

 

Because Alienware went full retard and used something called non-volatile RAM aka NVRAM but forgot to use a key combination to reset the NVRAM (like Apple does..) so they make us either hot swap RAM or change CPUs in order to reset. For that very reason I pulled out the two sticks of RAM from under the keyboard and leave only two sticks under the bottom tray in case I need to reset the NVRAM quickly. It's quite stupid and probably the biggest pain in the ass in owning the Alienware 18.

 

Yeah, I remember about the NVRAM as MrFox was talking about that some time ago.
I'm surprised XTU also messes with things like that too! I happily used XTU for a good 2-3 years on that laptop (back when I had 780M SLI on it) - never needed to reset anything. That boggles my mind.
I'm not gonna ruin the laptop by only having 16GB RAM, so stock CPU clocks will have to do. It's alright for gaming anyway.
I personally moved on to a desktop since the GTX 1080 came out. Now a happy 1080Ti SLI (+ the two 1080s are on the same mobo too) + i7-5960X owner and I can say that I'm loving dekstops so far. Sure, they're huge, but it's kind of a neat thing and nothing is ever ruined. If something fails - I can reflash the BIOS from a drive without even powering the PC on, I can swap out any part without ranting about any BGA bull, etc. Love it!

Though, out of curiosity, are there any lappy makers left that still do proper upgradeable laptops? Sager, Clevo, Origin? Any of those still ok?

 

Clevo is all that remains. Origin, Sager, Ibuypower, etc are rebranded Clevos

 

Sad. But I guess us enthusiasts are a rare breed and regular users don't care about upgrading and want slim BGA garbage...

 

Pretty much. Also I think MSI MXM is only a thing in their GT 80s series.