[~$200 bounty]Dell Inspiron 1564 unlocked A10/A13 BIOS

[Aeny]

It's been a while since anyone posted here. I have now finally received my HD5450 motherboard that got lost in the mail about a year ago so I can start modding it again. From my understanding now it seems that the amount of CPU cores we can use is decided upon compilation time and cannot be changed with modding the 1564 BIOS.
However, we still have the 1558 bios we can try to 'port' to the 1564. If only I had a 1558 to play around with to see what the differences are between the machines...

Another possibility is porting coreboot to our 1564, which would also mean that the 1464, 1764, n4010 and n7010 (sorry, no n5010) could easily get support from what I can tell. I have never worked on coreboot before but I started digging through their tree and it seems that everything besides the right superio chip is already in there. After setting the GPIO stuff right it should for the most part work out fine. So anyone interested to help out or in running coreboot instead of the piece of crap bios Dell shitted out? If so I'll order a SOIC clip+cables for my raspberry pi to transform it into a hardware flasher and wait with installing my 'new' motherboard so it can be used as a testbed.

I guess that concludes the update for Q4 2014. Questions or comments? Just drop them here or shoot me a PM.
~Aeny

[bolsfan]

Hello.
In my DELL 1564 with HD5450 second HDD works well (320GB).
Please try with attached BIOS (A11 - Winphlash64 backup) and let me know.

Bolsfan.

[Stoker]

Hey there Aeny, its been awhile.
Finally fixed my GPU heat problem, it was the thermal pads thickness i used at the time as I only had 0.5mm.
Purchased some EK 0.5mm & 1.0mm strips and temps dropped by 15c.
I used 1.0mm for GPU and 0.5mm for the Chipset

[Stoker]

Any luck with Quad support?

[Aeny]

Hey there Aeny, its been awhile.
Finally fixed my GPU heat problem, it was the thermal pads thickness i used at the time as I only had 0.5mm.
Purchased some EK 0.5mm & 1.0mm strips and temps dropped by 15c.
I used 1.0mm for GPU and 0.5mm for the Chipset

That's pretty cool, thanks for giving the measurements too! Could help some other users in the future.

As for the quad support.. no.. My HD5450 board arrived dead. I don't have any suitable board to test on. But looking at schematics maybe crossflashing a 1458 bios would do the trick. It uses the same EC and generally seems to have the same layout as our 1564's except it has magic quad support. I'd love to try this but I don't have working hardware so... If anyone else wants to try it be my guest...

I initially thought that the bootblocks packed in the bios had to align to crossflash but apparently the jump to intel CPU's is always on the same address so it would be pretty hard to get a brick or get locked out of the recovery procedure. The packed bootblock seems to be a backup one used by the recovery software.

EDIT @bolsfan: Testing A11 is also on my to do list once I get working hardware again.

~Aeny

[iakoboss7]

Hello.
In my DELL 1564 with HD5450 second HDD works well (320GB).
Please try with attached BIOS (A11 - Winphlash64 backup) and let me know.

Bolsfan.

hello, anyone tried this successfully?

[iakoboss7]

Currently I'm running a 560m so I can tell you that's working. Technically support goes up to the i7 640m but I can't verify that with my own testing. Any bios version equal or higher than A10 should support it (modded and stock bioses), under A10 you should get a warning of missing microcode but it should still boot.

i am thinking of updating the cpu also! can you give me a good ebay link of one that will work 100% on our laptop? i dont want to [censored] things up!

also i am dying to know the results of the a11 from bolsfan cause if it works i am gonna buy a hdd caddy asap!

also because i dont understand... what is the difference from "stock" bios to "unlocked" one?

i am looking to buy copper shim's also! do you know what dimensions i need so i can order or cut them?


lastly thank you for all your work!!!

[iakoboss7]

i saw that the internal stock hdd is a 8mb cache one (512gb 5400rmp) so i gone ahead and bought a hdd caddy to try it! (cause i bought a samsung evo 850 120gb)

this one http://www.ebay.com/itm/SATA-2nd-HDD-SSD...416232f03c

i also ordered this cpu cause i couldnt wait! http://www.ebay.com/itm/INTEL-CORE-i5-56...7675.l2557
to replace the i3 330m!

i hope everything will be compatible!

[Aeny]

i saw that the internal stock hdd is a 8mb cache one (512gb 5400rmp) so i gone ahead and bought a hdd caddy to try it! (cause i bought a samsung evo 850 120gb)

this one http://www.ebay.com/itm/SATA-2nd-HDD-SSD...416232f03c

i also ordered this cpu cause i couldnt wait! http://www.ebay.com/itm/INTEL-CORE-i5-56...7675.l2557
to replace the i3 330m!

i hope everything will be compatible!

All the parts you ordered should work great. I have used a 560m (and a 520m) before in my 1564. Currently I'm using a 640m now and I know of someone using a 620m in one. As long as you stick to first generation core i dual core processors (Arrandale) it will work in the 1564. I still have all of these CPU's laying around doing nothing, perhaps I should throw them onto eBay or something.

Also, my 1564 is slowly getting retired so don't expect miracles anymore. A new (cheap) laptop has been bought already and I'm rebuilding it now so it hopefully will be a worthy successor to my 1564.

To answer one of your previous questions, the unlocked BIOS has a lot more options to play around with so if you like to experiment this is the BIOS for you.

~Aeny

[iakoboss7]

thank you for your answer! i will use the unlocked A13 bios then! (i hope its not the fault of newer bios that we have problems with the hdd drives), i think the laptop still has A4 or something like that!

good luck with your new laptop!