Hi,
I am trying to mod the bios of my GA-Z270P-D3 motherboard. I am using the newest F8 as a base. I keep getting the error "invalid bios file" when I try to use the modded file in Q-Flash. I am on the current version of UBU 1.78.2. In the past with old versions of UBU that only used mmtool the modded bios was always accepted by my board. Does someone know what the problem could be? I have the modded mmtool 5.2.0.24 named mmtool_a5.exe in the folder with UBU.bat.
Cheers
@TheOne320 - You may need to do this - [OFFER] Gigabyte GA-Z370-Aorus Gaming 7 BIOS mod (6)
BUT, that should also have to have been applied to any previous BIOS you edited for this exact motherboard and tried to Qflash as well, otherwise there is some problem with this mod BIOS (ie bad mod) and this is why it’s not accepting it.
Unless previous BIOS has 00 already set at that location, you’ll have to check and see, if for example F4 BIOS has 00 set there, but F8 has 01, then mod BIOS may be OK and this is just due to new BIOS needs this bit set to 00 and older BIOS already had it set to 00
@SoniX
ASUS Rampage VI Extreme (X299) Encore Bios v0603
UEFI BIOS Updater v1.79 RC 1 - OROM replace UBU in GUID 365C62BA-05EF-4B2E-A7F7-92C1781AF4F9
Intel OROM Raid for SATA 6.2.0.1034 > v7.0.0.2008
Before & After file attached for your inspection
mmtool_a4 v5.0.0.7
mmtool_a5 v5.2.0.24
Many Thanks,
Biozzz
Results.rar (204 KB)
@Lost_N_BIOS
Thanks that worked. Maybe I was being dumb and I did the hex edit before or I was using a different mainboard.
Is UBU the tool I need to use to fix this problem, and which settings do I need to look for?
I have a an i7-8700, base speed 3.2 GHz, turbo boost 4.3 GHz (all cores; I think it is supposed to do 4.6 on a single core, but I’m not worried about that).
If I restart the machine, then run CPUID, it tells me the CPU is boosting to 4.3 GHz, as expected, and North Bridge is running at 4.0 GHz. If I watch it and do nothing, it goes down the 3.2 GHz. If I wait longer, it goes down to 0.8 GHz. Then if I open another program, it shoots right back to 4.3 GHz. Just like it is supposed to.
However, if I put the machine to sleep and then wake it up, it refuses to go into boost. Just stubbornly sits at 3.2 GHz, with north bridge at 2.9 GHz. Won’t shift down 0.8 GHz, either. (But the iGPU does shift between 450 MHz and 1200 MHz.)
It also refuses to go to boost if I turn it off completely, and start it from a totally cold state. Every time. But if I restart then, it goes right into boost again.
The RAM runs at 2666 MHz in all situations.
My internet searches bring up many old pages (back to 2013, up through 2019) that say “You have a problem with your BIOS.” Specifically, Intel CPUs often fail to go into boost after they’ve been in Sleep mode; it has something to do with SpeedShift technology, but it depends on the board. Some boards, boost always works after Sleep; every manufacturer has some boards that do not work right. The BIOS has to set a flag for the operating system to know what to do when the CPU is at each step (S0, S1, S2, S3,…).
I think that means it is really a Windows problem, as everyone who wrote about it seemed to be on Windows, as I am.
Anyway, I poked around in Device Settings in Windows, and I found the CPU Power Management settings. Those said:
S0 = D0
S1 = unspecified
S2 = unspecified
S3 = D3
S4 = D3
S5 = D3
That looks promising; I think D0 is the power state for base speed, and D3 is for boost speed. Maybe my CPU is waking up into an “unspecified” power state, so it never changes.
Maybe Windows is picking up those values from the BIOS. But the thing is, S1 and S2 are unspecified in all cases, even after I restart and I can see that the CPU has gone into boost.
So maybe Windows is also asking the BIOS “When I wake this CPU, what speedshift state is it in?” The BIOS answers S0 when it’s “warm” (after a restart), but S1 or S2 when it’s “cold” (after sleep or being off overnight). That puts the CPU into “unspecified” after every “cold” start, so it can’t shift anymore.
That’s my theory.
Is UBU the tool that would help me change those settings in the BIOS? Does anyone know which modules or settings I should change?
Thank you!
PBS is hidden in the main body of the firmware image, extract the main body with UBU, search "PBS", change the value associated with it so its enabled/visible, insert the main body again, and thats about it from what I recall. Most things from PBS are brought forward in to the main UEFI region now anyway I doubt you will find much of interest there its only in the X370 days exposing the PBS options proved useful as most manufacturers back then did not include any of the options in the main UEFI region.
@TheOne320 - Nice to see you got it now! Yes, probably different board, or if same then they didn’t have this set in older BIOS but do now.
@Dnatwork - This is a BIOS/ME FW bug, or your ME FW is messed up, check to be sure you can see ME FW version in BIOS or with HWFINO64. If you see proper version #, not 0.0.0.0 or N/A then it’s likely OK and just BIOS or ME FW version bug, sleep/resume bugs are notorious.
@ket - We took that to another thread here - [REQUEST] ASUS STRIX X570-E - AMD PBS Menu for Zen/Zen+ Gens
I already know where PBS is located, x2 in this BIOS, but no luck using any known methods as of yet.
He wanted bifurcation in there, that is not same as what’s offered in main BIOS, but towards end I noticed what he wanted wouldn’t work anyway due to slot design/limitations, so kind moot point, but it would still be nice to enable.
This isn’t new, you couldn’t unlock PBS even on some X370 boards for unknown reasons, it could be PBS is also tied to the detected CPU microcode of the currently installed CPU, wouldn’t be that hard to program and iwould be a 100% crack/mod proofed solution. Either way when buying Asus people should know not to buy their lower tier stuff as its all junk 
(and by lower tier, I mean even their upper end but lower tier in that stack is still garbage)
@Lost_N_BIOS Thanks! My ME FW shows up as 11.6.0.1126. So, I guess that means there is no setting or module I can change to fix this problem.
Also, that means it’s not the BIOS but the firmware, which is written by intel, which explains why it has never been fixed and affects all manufacturers but not all boards. It must be that sometimes a board maker changes the code or settings slightly For some other reason, and they fix this thing by accident.
@ket - In this case, it’s not the board, it’s the CPU type, Zen2 can see PBS on this board, but not other lesser/older CPU<br />The BIOS is split into two sections per CPU type too, so it may be exactly as you mentioned, or it may be something differs in the other BIOS image for the lesser CPU’s, and that is what I was trying to sort to enable but no luck.
@Dnatwork - This can be any number of things, even drivers. Test a clean windows install on another drive with no drivers installed and see if it works then or still an issue. If it’s still an issue there, best you can do is try older BIOS or ask Manufacturer to look into current BIOS bug.
You can also try newer ME FW, but then you can’t easily go back. You didn’t say what board you have, but if you are using Coffee mod BIOS, you can’t use 11.8 ME FW, but you can use 11.7.0.1229. If you are not using coffee mod BIOS, best to update ME FW to latest 11.8 version.
Nothing mentioned here yet means it’s the BIOS, or the ME FW, or neither of those, it can be any number of things that you may figure out eventually, you may never be able to confirm what the issue is.
Sometimes it’s even a driver, you cannot tell yet without lots more testing in various directions. This does not affect all boards or manufacturers etc, just sometimes there is issues with certain BIOS, or certain ME FW (when it is one of these)
You should also google around about your exact model and Sleep/resume issues, this may be common complaint for your model.
Also, we only checked extreme basic method to see if your ME FW was corrupted or not, if you want to see if there is some issue with the ME FW you need to download ME System tools package V11 (here in section “C”) and run these two command from MEINFO folder
>> MEINFOwin.exe -verbose
>> MEINFOwin.exe -fwsts
And then show the output of both of those to plutomaniac, probably best to make a new thread specific to this and ask in Title >> plutomaniac please check.
@Lost_N_BIOS
Thanks again!
I have an ASRock H110M-STX with the coffee lake mod. I had to downgrade the ME from 11.8 to 11.6 two years ago to make the i7-8700 work. It’s their DeskMini model, very small and very uncommon. I can’t even find many posts about it on the ASRock forums. They apparently selected parts from existing boards based on whether they would fit on a tiny board. It seems that most people who bought this model were not interested in high performance; they tend to put In Pentium chips that barely even need a CPU cooler so they can have a silent machine.
I will look at the options you mentioned, but clearly there’s no guarantee I will ever be able to fix it. I will have to treat this as something that I poke at rather than a crash project. I need this PC for work every day, so I can change settings here and there and swap OS drives, but I can’t leave it disassembled.
In any case, the problem is just annoying (locked at 3.2 GHz is not terrible), and I know how to get around it if I really need turbo boost for some reason (reboot and don’t let it sleep).
Thank you!
Does someone know how to get the newest ME Firmware for my bios into the bios file or prevent the bios file from overwriting my ME firmware when I flash my modded bios? I flashed my ME firmware and then loaded my modded bios with updated microcode and it reset my ME firmware again :-(.
@TheOne320 :
You obviously have flashed the Intel ME Firmware and the modded BIOS by using the wrong order.
My tip: Reflash the desired Intel ME Firmware.
By the way - your request has nothing to do with the UBU tool and the topic of this thread.
@TheOne320 :
The “Uefi BIOS Updater” (= UBU) can only update the modules of the BIOS Region. The Intel ME Region is another part of your mainboard’s SPI chip.
PBS is hidden in the main body of the firmware image, extract the main body with UBU, search "PBS", change the value associated with it so its enabled/visible, insert the main body again, and thats about it from what I recall. Most things from PBS are brought forward in to the main UEFI region now anyway I doubt you will find much of interest there its only in the X370 days exposing the PBS options proved useful as most manufacturers back then did not include any of the options in the main UEFI region.
@Lost_N_BIOS So if I want to learn to edit the CBS and PBS sections myself to add them, basically I 00/FF them out?
I want to learn how, but don’t want to bother the guy that did it for me. He’s quite busy moving and would like to try myself.
I’m not certain but as far as I’ve ever checked there is only one place to enable PBS, AFAIK the firmware is only partitioned on 32MB ROMs as Zen/Zen+ can’t address more than 16MB on a ROM at a time so all the important stuff is put in to the first partition and the second partition on larger ROMs is used for the Zen2 CPU microcodes and possibly for overflow such as more fancy UI images for use with the CPUs capable of fully utilising larger ROMs.
Greetings to all. Sorry to interrupt your discussion. I just want to draw Your attention to this point. Here you write that PBS can only see Zen2. However, it seems to me that this is not quite true. For example, the UEFI BIOS for Asus Prime B 450 MA 0604 (AGESA 1.0.0.6) also has a PBS block. However, Zen2 was still six months away at that time. Why, then, did Asus add PBS to it? I’m not an expert, I just want to understand it.
@KedarWolf - I was only referring to, in some older AMD BIOS, there was a string in AMITSE PE32 that you removed (FF/00) to enable visibility of PBS/CBS, this does not apply to the few latest AMD BIOS I’ve looked into
Those string are >>
59 B9 63 B8 C6 0E 33 40 99 C1 8F D8 9F 04 02 22 - AMD PBS
E3 35 45 B0 04 30 46 49 9E B7 14 94 28 98 30 53 - AMD CBS
As for what you quoted from Ket, I’m not sure what he meant. But in the individual PBC/CBS modules in the BIOS, you may have to unsuppress certain settings via normal setup type unsupress edits (hex/IFR) that you’re probably familiar with already, if not let me know and I will link to you to some examples.
If you have latest Gen AMD, making PBS/CBS visible I’ve not yet figured out, and it seems some BIOS only have those visible by default for certain CPU families.
@ket - Show me this “place to enable CBS/PBS” 
Yes, those 32MB BIOS are the ones I was talking about, and at least in the few I looked at it’s complete BIOS image at top and second at bottom, not just microcodes and little overflow.
@Gesaly - I am not familiar with AMD, so have no clue what CPU is what type etc, and I was only speaking in general about one particular BIOS (X570-E-GAMING), pay no attention to what I mentioned it’s not meant as a general AMD BIOS thing, and I have very limited knowledge on the subject of AMD/CBS/PBS
UBU 1.78.2 and 1.79 RC2 contain an error, when saving, in the form of a CAP file. File structure is broken.