T3600 bios conversion to t3610

I’ve done a little bit of googling and image comparing between a t3600 and a t3610 and hardware wise they appear to be identical. i recently purchased a t3600 on craigslist for the sum total of 145 dollars. i was under the impression that the c602 chipset on board could use both sandy bridge and ivy bridge chips. while this is generally true you need intel me version 8 and dell refuses to update the system to that because the t3610 exists. i was wondering whether either load n bios or anyone else could help me with either a bios mod or instructions on how to flash the me region to version 8 so i can use ivy bridge cpus. i have already found the service mode pins that allowed me to flash a new me firmware to enable amt. i also have a ch341a based programmer and a soic8 chip clip. i am willing to do whatever is deemed necessary to make this mod a reality. thanks for any help provided and have a nice day.

@lowrck - You cannot update to ME8, that is something they have to do because many other files also need modified. What you can do since you have programmer is dump your BIOS, swap ME and BIOS regions, and then you’ll be on T36100 BIOS.
Doing that straight would loose your NVRAM and UUID, Serial etc though, but this is probably something you don’t need to care too much about.

Dump your BIOS and send me a copy, and then also link to the T3600 and T3610 BIOS download pages. I don’t even know what brand we’re talking here

the two machines are both dell precision machines. the bios files in question are available through dell although as far as i can find they are available as exe files which might need to be extracted.

t3600: https://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/…precision-t3600
t3610: https://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/…610-workstation

the bios file is also added below, it was split by 7zip automatically. to extract it just remove the .zip extension and you should have a .001 and .002 file which 7zip should understand.

biosdump.zip.001.zip (5 MB)

biosdump.zip.002.zip (274 KB)

biosdump.001_2.zip (5 MB)

biosdump.002_2.zip (274 KB)

Thanks, now I know what we’re talking about Yes, I can get BIOS from Dell, but thanks for grabbing the links for me.
Split files do not properly work with this forum software usually, so I’m not going to waste my time and bandwidth on attempting that (sorry)
Please upload as a single archive to a free file host, this is a good one I usually use - http://tinyupload.com/

Ahh! Sorry, I forgot the HDR only contains stock ME FW region We need to find proper full dump from T3610, if you have a link please post, if not I’ll try to find
* edit - I found someone’s dump that needed help with bricked BIOS / no display, should be usable for what I needed

** Edit 2 - no dice, that is very old dump (2013 microcodes), 4MB BIOS region dump only and no ME Region, so no good… still looking

Are you friends with, or know anyone on a forum with T3610? If yes, ask them to put on ME jumper and dump BIOS with FPT, or if they have programmer have them dump the 8MB chip
This, and other paid ones, is only place I can find complete 3610 BIOS files - https://www.bios-downloads.com/product/d…ion-t3610-bios/

I found some users here with these machines, lets see if we can get one of them to reply with some dumps for us
@gloobox @Jolynexu @hackish @MixManSC @pustekuchencake - can any of you guys send us a programmer or FPT Dump of T3610 BIOS (Need either 8MB chip dump, FPT Dump with ME Jumper on, or ME region FPT dump w/ jumper on as well)
Thanks

unfortunately i don’t know anyone with a t3610 to get a dump from. i hope one of those people you linked don’t mind doing a real quick upload of their bios chips. i don’t have a lot of money but i could try to purchase a license to one of the sites you talked about and we could see if the bios from there helps. i uploaded my bios in full to tinyupload the link is below. thanks again for everything. its so dumb that instead of just providing a easy software upgrade to t3600 owners dell decided to release a second model with the same main board but a slightly different bios just to enable ivy bridge e cpus.

http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?fil…787243306958697

I’ve never even looked into purchasing BIOS, but there may be cheaper places, Vinafix is another I know that sells dumps like this, so if that is something you actually consider check prices of both places before you buy anything (Some places I’ve seen BIOS dumps for $2-3, others $8-10)

Thanks for full dump link, hopefully one of those guys I tagged stops in to help, lets give them a few days at least before you consider purchasing a BIOS dump. I know one of them is here a lot (gloobox), and he always helps with BIOS mod too, so if he still has T3610 I’m sure he’ll send us a dump

i hope so too. realistically i don’t know if it would be worth waiting for the bios or just to pay the 40 dollars to buy a t3610 motherboard and swap it into the existing case. its only like 40 dollars for the motherboard, the more pressing issue is the effort to get the motherboard out and then shove the new one in.

i don’t know how the forum software here works but i’ll call out @gloobox @Jolynexu @hackish @MixManSC @pustekuchencake again to see if any of them would be generous enough to dump their bios and provide it here so we can test this. for science… you monsters :wink:

ps 10 internet points if you get the reference.

Well, if we wait and get a copy of the BIOS, possibly you can do this for free. They got a PM once I tagged them, and now another from you tagging them all
I’m sure at least gloobox will reply, he’s here often and helps with BIOS when he can, so if he still has the systems I’m sure he’ll send us a dump soon as he gets a chance

I had to look that up, so no points for me I have heard of Portal game though, so maybe 1-2 points at least

I got the tag…

I actually happen to have one of the T3610 machines sitting right now not in use or setup for anything. I’ll plug it up and see what bios version it is and see if I can figure out how to dump it. Been a while since I looked it any of this on these. Would also be nice to be able to insert true NVMe support. These are fully capable of it, it is just not in the bios.

Sorry, can’t help you. Don’t have those machines anymore.

hey @MixManSC

it should be pretty easy, short the header pins above the far left sata port together and it should unlock the me region. then you should be able to dump the bios with intel’s me system tools v8. available to download from here: Intel Management Engine: Drivers, Firmware & System Tools.

then just upload to tinyupload.com and post the url here. best recommendation is to unshort the header after your done as this puts the system into service mode while its in this state.

Backed up all of the different files and named each as its own bin and zipped them. Off a T3610 - this one is labelled inside as 3 which means the ME is factory disabled. I’d also like to be able to enable that on these (I have 4 of these T3610 machines).

http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?fil…888151731867435

@MixManSC i was able to enable me on mine using a fix for the t3600. i’d be willing to bet if anyone can figure out how to fix it @Lost_N_BIOS can.

@lowrck @Lost_N_BIOS
Sorry,I don’t have this machine now.I will backup all the bios of machine I meet from now on!!!

Well @Lost_N_BIOS balls in your court. Think you can figure this conundrum out?

Any changes @Lost_N_BIOS

Thanks @MixManSC & @pustekuchencake
& @gloobox - I’m surprised you didn’t still have gloobox, but thanks for reply anyway! And yes, please, always dump BIOS of systems you have if you remember, you never know when it will come in handy

@MixManSC - yes, I can enable ME for you and do the NVME Mod, but I need to look at what you uploaded first, your comment of “all the different files” confused me since we only need one file here. * I see now, you meant all regions separately
But once all sorted, I’ll fix a BIOS for you * Edit - I checked the files you sent, ME is enabled (permanently) as is AMT, at least on the ME FW side, looks to be in BIOS too but I did not check NVRAM yet since I see all this enabled I wanted to have you double check in BIOS/MEBx first.
KVM is disabled, that’s all, except “Service advertisement and discovery” is also disabled, unsure if that matters or not but the rest I know to check and enable for these systems is already enabled and ME FW is latest version too.

@lowrck - sorry, I was offline for a bit and this thread got buried on me. Please wait, checking all this out now and will edit in reply for you both soon
What CPU do you have, the non-Ivy? So I can be sure to leave it’s ucode in there (I’ll update them all)

I was checking your dump, and it looks possibly corrupted, and also incorrect flashed at some point (Someone flashed in stock BIOS using programmer or FPT, missing NVRAM Volume)
Anyway, your NVRAM that remains looks corrupted. Can you please dump again using a few other software versions, and let me know which version you used previously too. What is the chip ID? If there is two, give me ID of both

I have a e5 1620 v1 in right now.

Thanks, please see my edits above, and refresh again now if you already refreshed previously
For my reference, current CPUID - 206D7

It’s possible someone flashed something in the past, the dump was done with Intel me toolkit v8 and the machine was purchased second hand from an ewaste recycler. I can try another dump but I have no idea if that will help

Would it help if I wiped the nvram using the stock method and/or used toolkit v7instead @Lost_N_BIOS