bios memory profile location

[prawny1]

I have an hp 3010 micro tower that I picked up a few weeks back for £35 with the intension of upgrading it a bit (specs said ahci for my ssd's, 16gb ram support etc) my g41 board just wasn't cutting it and I wanted to usethe old 4gb and the 8gb xmp kits of ram I have.

The thing is hp have crippled the ram support on the bois by using an unusual timing table so only a select few rams will work (hp approved parts ), the originals are actually 1333/pc3-10600 sticks clocked down to 1066/8500

I initially though my luck was in as the pc booted straight up with the 12gb of ram and the 800fsb Pentium e5400 that was in it, I had so I ordered another set of hyperx genesis to make 16gb and made a start on my 771 xeon microcode mod.

All that went well so I switched in the e5450 xeon and nothing, no beeps just fan at full speed I switched the two 1gb Samsung rams in that the pc came with and it booted straight up with full support for the xeon.

After a bit of searching it seems that hp want you to only be ableto buy ram from them so cripple the timing profiles,

cpu-z shows that the Samsung and Kingston modules have the same jedec timings at first glance when I fit them in my old g41 fujitsu motherboard (4gb modules have xmp 2gb ones don't) but spdtool shows some different timings.

My question is what module in the bios has the memory timings in and how would I alter them? hex editer maybe? extract from another bios?

The rams are £30-40 a pair used and £60+ new so I would rather edit the bios on the £15 ipiel-la3 eureka3 motherboard than the ram spd chips using spdtool, that and the fact I've never used spd tool before.

If it comes to it and I have to mod the spd, does anyone have experience using it? or thaiphoon burner 6.2/6.3 (free version)

I would like to add the 1600 xmp profile from the 4gb chips to the 2gb modules too as well as alter the 1066 profile to make it compatible on the hp motherboard.
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hellkat wrote:

Some people are only alive cos its against the law to kill them.

[CaNsA]

If I were you, but I'm not seafood, I would ask the guys over here
https://www.bios-mods.com/

Also, can you be a bit more specific about the HP 3010 model.

[prawny1]

I've read up a little on the spdtool and it is really amazing more people don't use it, it's not supported anymore so newer chipsets don't work but once you have flashed your ram you can fit them into any other board you want, I have only just found it myself so don't really know how to use it.

It allows you to flash your ram timings on the ram itself, for example if you have two ram sticks that are similar specs but from different batches they may not work perfectly together.

what spdtool lets you do is flash the timing profile of one stick to the other so they are perfectly in sync or pull all your cas latancies etc down a step to speed up your ram.

Some people have even flashed higher fsb/ clock rate jedecs onto slower clocked rams, so if you have good ram that overclocks really well but you are limited by chipset timings or you know your ram can handle an xmp profile you can flash them to support the higher speed via jedec profile (load of reports of people flashing 333 ram to 400 in older threads).
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hellkat wrote:

Some people are only alive cos its against the law to kill them.

[prawny1]

I think I am registered over there, you are probably right about asking them but tbh memory support isn't something I remember seeing done on there.

You sometimes see official bios updates with ram support updates in them but I have no idea how that side of it works.

The tower is a hp pro 3010 microtower, it came with 2gb ram a hd4650 and an e5400 Pentium dual core (wolfdale), the motherboard is a pegatron ipiel-la3 aka eureka3 revision 1.02.

I was originally looking for one with the ipiel-la (ddr2 version) for a pair of 4gb ddr2 rams I picked up for £15 but the ddr3 board looked a better prospect.
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hellkat wrote:

Some people are only alive cos its against the law to kill them.

[CaNsA]

the Xeon isnt on the list of supported CPUs.

https://h20564.www2.hp.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=emr_na-c01917308#N102C7

[prawny1]

no I used mmtool and this guide to add my own ncpucode.bin/ p6 micro code module to the bios and reflashed the bios.

I used the lga775 and 771 45nm and 65nm codes, the p4 and pd Celeron codes are pointless really there is no way I am ever going to use one of them in a build

https://www.delidded.com/how-to-update-cpu-microcode-in-ami-bios/

That and a 771 to 775 conversion sticker and a slight mod to the socket to allow for the location holes being in different places = job done.

My old board was a fujitsu g41 board from an e3521 the xeon has been running in that for months maybe close to a year (edit - since jan 2014)with no problems but that board had no ahci (trim worked though) for my ssd's and hotswap caddies and the pciex16 was limited to x8.

The e0 stepping e5450 is probably the best xeon for this mod it is 3Ghz like the q9650 but only 80w tdp so will work in most any core 2 775 board with upto 95w tdp support.

If you have a board that supports 1600fsb you can bsel mod it too and boot up at 3.6Ghz
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hellkat wrote:

Some people are only alive cos its against the law to kill them.

[Snod Blatter]

You seem to already know what you're doing, but there are a couple of things to think about. One is that flashing the SPD is loads easier if you can flash it, many sticks have the SPD memory locked in read only mode and may require you to power or ground a pin on the SPD chip itself to change it to being writeable, which is tricky.

The second is that BIOS modding tools stopped appearing quite a long time ago, and HP may well have some extra security (checksum checks, usually) to prevent this sort of thing. The microcode update works because it's a standard item from Intel, though you are lucky it hasn't broken the checks that HP may or may not have put in place.

I would go for flashing the SPD every time, it's a lot easier. Keep up the good fight
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1994 CB250, 1984 CBX250RS-E, 1989 K100RS, 1995 TRX850, 2016 Z250SL

[prawny1]

I will have to learn how to use this spdtool then, but there are no real guides on what settings can or should be copied or changed from the 1gb Samsung's profile to make the Kingston ram work in the motherboard.

I'm not even sure which epp profile matches which jedec shown in cpu-z.

It's stuff like clock cycle rates in .25% increments and drive strength levels not just cas ras tras etc, looks scary

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hellkat wrote:

Some people are only alive cos its against the law to kill them.

[Snod Blatter]

The first thing I would do is edit the manufacturer data on your new stick to HP or whatever is allowed to be used. I'd be surprised if there are more checks than that, and since HP have used a normal AMIBIOS setup I would imagine it could account for your new mix of timings and whatnot.

Reading this again I see that you're mostly doing this for memory timings and not particularly to be able to use cheaper sticks for more capacity, have you considered something like Memset? You can't change CAS or Command Rate on the fly but there are a lot of sub-timings that can be manipulated this way for easy gains.
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1994 CB250, 1984 CBX250RS-E, 1989 K100RS, 1995 TRX850, 2016 Z250SL

[prawny1]

The rams I have are fairly decent kingston hyperx ones, is just that the PC will only post with them if I use a 800fsb cpu.

The original Samsung ones will post with a 800 & 1333 fsb cpu but they are just 2x1gb modules

Setmem is no good because need to able to post with the ram before you can change anything.
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hellkat wrote:

Some people are only alive cos its against the law to kill them.

[Snod Blatter]

Okay, I think I follow you. You have mentioned a BSEL mod already, so you know what this is about - How about BSEL modding your CPU to a speed where it will POST, and then using Clockgen or similar to increase the frequency to where you want it? Does the board have a normal PLL? I know you may be limited by the lower/tighter "strap" that the memory controller will end up running, but you could loosen off many troublesome subtimings with Memset.

It's a bit brute force but I'd prefer it to modding the SPD chips (if you have to) or modifying the BIOS, which is a very risky affair without some JTAG kit or a BIOS Savior or whatever as a backup.

If the chips or even the PCB of your Kingston sticks are different to that on the HP sticks then do not match the drive strengths and whatever else, these can be chip specific and it's not always a good thing to change them.

I suppose I should add a disclaimer that last time I did anything like this was many years ago, so all my knowledge could be woefully outdated or plain wrong!
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1994 CB250, 1984 CBX250RS-E, 1989 K100RS, 1995 TRX850, 2016 Z250SL

[prawny1]

Funnily enough I was just hunting for reverse bsel mods to downclock the xeon to get it up and running with my Kingston ram

I've got a battery powered parallel bios recovery cable that goes on the mobo headers and the spipgm dos utilities if the bios takes a shit,(batteries 2xaa power the rom chip up),

I had to use it on the last pegatron board I had (impel-prc) whilst I was messing about flashing custom splash screens so recovering that way isn't a new thing to me.

I am not entirely sure if the original Samsung ram is stable at 1333fsb now though.

I made all my tests to see if the Kingston ram worked with the original win7 on the hdd that came with the pc, it did so I used that drive in something else and started modding ready to fit my own drives later.

Long story short with the xeon in and the Kingston ram I get nothing, no post nada, but with the Samsung ram in I get bios post and everything seems to work no lag in bios all devices get recognised the lot.

So I decided to try test install windows again to see if I could make any headway inside an os,

I could not for the life of me get any version of windows to load up win 7 and vista freeze at the splash screen and xp freezes at the 34 minute mark (installing devices), the only way I could get windows to install was to hit f8 on the first part of the setup process and do it in safe mode and then when it reboots hit f8 again and go into cmd (shift f10) and use the compmgmtlauncher to get device manager up and disable the smbus controller (why it works I don't know I was just trying each thing in turn)

After windows finally installed it was still dog slow so for the hell of it I put the e5400 back in and it booted up in normal fashion as if nothing was wrong which makes me wonder if the Samsung ram is struggling too cpu-z puts it at 7 7 7 20 at 532-3 which is what the jedec says it should support but I just don't know what to think.

I am currently in the middle of reinstalling windows with the e5400 and the 12gb of Kingston ram to see if it will then boot with the xeon back in but I doubt it.

I can't see why the xeon would cause the lagginess cpu-z shows all the functions as available sse1 sse2 sse3 sse4 vtx etc, I don't have any other ddr3 ram I can try knocking about so I might pop out to cex or somewhere and pick up a couple of £2-3 1gb dims tomorrow

There is a newer bios available for the rev1.03 mother board if I knew which module to extract I would try the memory timing table from that.

I'll keep you posted how the install goes, I am thinking a hardware issue tbh now either ram or mobo (weak vrm's?) there is a rev 1.03 board on ebay for £15 I might order that and give it a try, the 1.02 is rock solid stale with an 800fsb cpu.
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hellkat wrote:

Some people are only alive cos its against the law to kill them.

[Snod Blatter]

It did strike me that you are asking a lot from the board with so much memory, but you seemed to have done your research and concluded it was a BIOS issue.. But the board also seems to only officially support 1066MHz memory anyway? And a maximum of 2GB a stick, at that. I feel like I'm looking at completely the wrong specs
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1994 CB250, 1984 CBX250RS-E, 1989 K100RS, 1995 TRX850, 2016 Z250SL

[prawny1]

i decided to try just my 2x2gb ram set and to my surprise the pc booted up with the xeon all be it at a geriatric snails pace.

I have come to the conclusion it really doesn't like the xeon and that it will only support 8gb with anything over a n 800fsb cpu the g43/45 chipset officially supports 16gb ddr2 or 8gb ddr3 but 16gb ddr3 works fine only at pc3-6400 speeds.


I forced a flash with spipgm to the rev 1.03 bios (5.17 to 6.09) the ordinary flasher won't allow a bump major revision number, the rev 1.03 bios still said 1.02 in the strings shown by amibcp

all went well after i pulled the wp# pin high (+3.3v) by tracing from one pin to another over the back of the bios chip with a circuit paint pen.

It flashed fine and posted ok but i had lost the hp boot time diagnostic, the splash screen logo and most annoyingly the slic table, I re-added the slicand re-flashed using the windows flasher that i extracted through from the hp bios update.

that stage went well and on reboot the window not genuine message buggered off again. but the motherboard serial number and stuff had been wiped to, amidmi and dmi250u said it was write protected (dmi wasn'tbefore) so i decided to write them back into the rom itself and reflash.

I made the mistake of trusting the hp update, i renamed the new rom back to the hp format and ran the full utility BIG MISTAKE the board is now dead and won't even accept an spipgm flash.

SOO can anyone think of a ddr3 lga775 board that will take 16gb ddr3, has ahci and supports q9650 and above cpu's?

TL;DR

killed it stone dead
____________________
hellkat wrote:

Some people are only alive cos its against the law to kill them.

[CaNsA]

[Kniteman77]