I would love to put a Zen 2/3 chip in this laptop. Since its a full blown B450 motherboard topology wise, and the GPU/laptop screen/eDP is all handled by the Vega 56 itself with its own BIOS rom, I figured it’d be more similar to modifying a desktop boards bios. The bios is also insanely stripped down, any added options would be greatly appreciated. The bios is only useful for setting load order and enabling/disabling secure boot. Ill take anything I can get with this machine, Acer did the bare minimum with its bios.
Hi,
i really don´t think that would be possible. I´m a owner of an asus gl702zc laptop. I have asked the same to get newer ryzen cpu´s to work, but no one could help me at last. Only the manufacturers got all the tool´s and knowledge to build the bios. You can on only start to contact acer that they should make a new bios for it. It is very sad, because those laptops or desktop replacement systems should be become all the stability updates and new bios versions as desktop mainboards. You can only ask here that someone could do a bios mod for your laptop, to get more perfomance of it.
I think it’s only a question of updating AGESA to version 1.1.0.0 and inserting some microcodes, but the challenge is also to find a way to install a modded BIOS. In the case of AMD chipset based motherboards, this is by no means a couple of mouse clicks.
I cant find any info on other AM4 bioses aside from maybe the Asus GL702ZC that uses an Insyde bios, and I downloaded a bios XMG posted for their Clevo ODM’d laptop that had a 3900x/3950x and its a 128k .04TR3 I have no idea what to do with, the Helios 500’s is a Insyde .fd downloadable from their site I can open with varying degrees of readability with different versions of the EZE bios editor. Cant find any info on other AM4 boards that use an Insyde bios and it doesnt look like the tools will let me play with much, seems like the bios is in a different format than regular Insyde bioses or I just havent found the right editor version. Im happy to do the flashing/modding myself I just need some direction. From a week of owning this laptop and a few days of researching it, seems no one really attempted anything, all i’ve read is talk in forums. Same with the Asus GL702ZC. Cant pull the flahsed bios with software, rom is 16k and Acer’s .fd is 17, might be why none of the editors like it and it seems Acer’s installer trims the image or builds it fresh during install. All other .fds i’ve seen are the size of the rom. Im ordering stuff to pull/flash the bios physically and will report back. Hopefully it’ll be as simple as replacing the AGESA and adding microcode for Zen 3 chips. Some AM4 desktop boards didnt need an updated AGESA to run newer CPUs before they were updated for them, I wonder if just adding the microcode would be enough? I could surely try. I know the EZE bios editor supports adding/removing/editing microcodes but it said nothing about AGESA, unless that’d be under a menu some other common terminology. Ill keep this updated if I figure anything out.
Hi,
i can give some information about the gl702zc. This unit is using a 16MB Rom chip, similar to all first gen amd ryzen mainboards. The bios is from AMI. The asus laptop uses agesa 1.0.0.7 Summit PI. So, only summit ridge cpu´s are supported. I have checked this with smu checker, there you can see what cpu is supported by the bios. Changing microcode will not change anything, i already did that.
I have tested to flash a desktop bios to the laptop, but this didn´t work. The machine isn´t recognizing anything (no power on, no charging indicator, completely dead)
To get newer cpu´s to work, the agesa software must be updated or replaced and that is the problem. No one knows where the agesa is hiding in the bios. The acer laptop uses a insyde bios and it is about 17MB. I think that the predator helios is using a 32MB Rom chip for the bios, because a lot (or all?) amd mainboards with 4xx chipset using 32MB rom chips. I would be useful if you can open up yout laptop and look for the bios chip and give some informations from it.
A bios programmer is needed to make a working backup from the bios and to reprogramming the bios.
After all, you have more just an attempt to do everything right to worry about this problem. You can try at least to replace modules containing the AGESA version. But there is one more problem: for some reason I can’t find Insyde BIOS with AGESA Combo with ZEN3 support. Only Combo 1.0.0.4 (for ZEN1, ZEN2) and Cezanne 1.0.0.3c (for Ryzen 5000 APUs). Does this mean that we will have to make a choice?
Sweet Kitten,
do you have any experience with ami bios modding? Which programms do you use? I have compared the laptop bios with bios from asus mainboards but they are completely different. Do you know where to find the important modules and what have to replaced?
I have some experience of modding AMI with UEFITool.
I can only make assumptions, since I’ve never had an experience of adding support for new processors in the BIOS. I think that just "AmdVersionDxe" module needs to be replaced with a newer one to update AGESA. The module may have a different name, but this is the most common for use in new BIOS.