New to this forum but have some experience on bios mods. I would like some advice on how or even if I should try a microcode upgrade.
Dell released upgrade to 435T to allow gulftown and westmere CPUs (newer i7 and xeon) but they didn’t bother updating the smaller 435mt. I was able to extract the 1.1.4 rom image from the 435mt bios and access the 106A4 and A5 microcode (i7-920 type) but was unable to do the same for the A15 bios which has the newer microcode whose cpus run faster and are cooler as well as really cheap.
The 1.1.4 rom was obtained from my local\temp directory as the dell install left it there but the A15 bios seems to have checked my computer (MSI motherboard, not dell) and failed to leave a copy of the rom anywhere I could find it.
I assume I can eventually get a copy of the rom and was looking for any help for doing the upgrade.
I can open the 435rom using mmtool 3.22 but I noticed that (v)5 mmtool will not open this rom. It appears the new version is not backwards compatible.
thanks for looking!
[EDIT] I managed to get the binary by executing “XPS435T-A16.exe /forcetype” which put up a message that the bios was not for my system: but it left the contents of the .exe in my local\temp where I could find it.
C:AFUWIN.exe
C:GLM7x.dll
C:gzip.exe
C:NTGLM7X.SYS
C:NTGLM7X64.sys
C:Ucoredll.dll
C:Ucoresys.sys
C:Ucorevxd.vxd
C:Ucorew64.sys
C:v-a16.bin
C:Wipeall.exe
I will take a look for the missing microcode in v-a16.bin but this project may not get anywhere.
[EDIT 2]
Made some progress but have a question or two.
First I was able to extract the microcode for the Xeon ID “206c2” from the dell 435t bios. That microcode is dated 2010/04/02. Poking about this forum, I found a list of intel & amd microcodes and extracted
60. cpu000206C2_plat03_ver0000000F_date#18-06-2010.bin extracted. Size is 0x1C00. Offset 0x43E00
which is a newer version. However, the mmtool did not recognize that module. (I took it out of the rar file posted in another thread). Why was this module not in a format recognizable by mmtool?
MMtool did recognize the module I extracted from the 435t bios.
I deleted the CPU ID 06A4 which does not match my existing i7-920 cpu using mmtool. I assume this is OK.
I left in the CPU ID 06A5 which does match my i7-920
Finally, I added the CPU ID 06c2 which matches my Xeon x5675.
There were only 2 CPU IDs in the 435mt bios.
The 435t had 10 CPU IDs.
Can I assume I do not need any of the other IDs?
The 43tmt bios is 1mbit and the 435t is 4mbit so I cannot add a lot of stuff to it as it may not flash.
Currently, the new 435mt bios is the same size as the old one so I should be good to go.
The Xeon has not arrived yet so I got some time to think about what could go wrong before I flash.
thanks for looking. If this is not the correct forum, please suggest a better one.