Lenovo Y400 / Y500 - unlocked BIOS / wlan whitelist mod

[n1smo]

Yes, that would be awesome. Right now I'm underclocking the system just to ensure the system runs cool, undervolting would be an even better solution!

thanks opticeps. i will take a look. Prices look good though.

The 750M doesnt have better cooling, why would they. The difference is minimal. And plus it's more cost effective for their factory. They don't have any reason to upgrade.

n1smo, how would you like for me to make a undervolt BIOS? maybe you will be able to do SLI then without overclocking. I was going to make a undervolted one for myself anyway.

[Don315]

Same cooling. That's the reason I'm not really keen on overvolting. My overclocked SLI system is plenty fast as is and I just don't think an extra 75 MHz is worth heating up the GPU and CPU to 100C, not to mention the longevity concerns. Here in California it can get pretty hot during the summers as well so I definitely need some thermal headroom.

What I am most interested in right now is improving the laptop's cooling ability. I've already got a good cooling pad so now it's up to someone to find how to make the fans spin up like they do when the Dust Removal app is run. A physical cooling mod is beyond my abilities so that is out of the question.

How exactly can you overvolt the 650m's? Went through the whole flash/unlock and everything is running great. Would love to know how these can be overvolted.

[vito357si]

I just received my second Y500 with the 750M, first one a few weeks ago, second one on the 14th. They have both come with BIOS version 2.03 / 6BCN43WW. Here is the latest version, [ATTACH]7535[/ATTACH].

Anything new with the 2.03 bios?

[Amblin]

That is what I'm wondering.

[jester_socom]

If svl7 mods the thing I would flash it.

The BIOS v2.03 supports GT650M and GT750M

[disgruntl3d]

Anything new with the 2.03 bios?

I'm not sure since I don't have a previous version. My phone's camera is broke right now, I can post some pictures of it tomorrow night with my wife's phone.

[Amblin]

What I'm most interested in is whether or not it revises the cooling schemes, more specifically, the fan speeds it runs at. How cool does the system run when playing a game or such? Would you consider the fans loud? All subjective, I know, just looking for your impression.

[octiceps]

2.03 probably addresses the serious problem of the battery reset in Lenovo Energy Management killing the whole laptop, which was recently discovered by Lenovo engineers in China.

[jester_socom]

How exactly can you overvolt the 650m's? Went through the whole flash/unlock and everything is running great. Would love to know how these can be overvolted.

Check the other threads in this Lenovo section. I uploaded the mods to overvolt

[Uberperson]

Apparently I was herping in the comment I made above because I realized their is a different modded 2.02 bios that is not listed on the first page.

[disgruntl3d]

What I'm most interested in is whether or not it revises the cooling schemes, more specifically, the fan speeds it runs at. How cool does the system run when playing a game or such? Would you consider the fans loud? All subjective, I know, just looking for your impression.

No, the fan speed is lackluster. Cranking them up was one of the first things I looked into doing. I was hoping that speedfan would work, but as you know it doesn't. I also discovered the dust removal program and heard how fast the fans COULD work. They never got anywhere close to that while gaming, but I never noticed it getting very hot either.

[kh90123]

Just to let people know.

At max load, with CPU fully un-throttled (running at close to 56W, 53W on mine), and both GPU running at max load at 1.15V at 1250MHz, the 170W power supply DOES NOT provide enough power for the laptop.

I have problems with the battery started discharging halfway when I am running benchmark (small FFT prime95 + Uningine Heaven). Even when playing Bioshock Infinite I had this problem. Have you seen before, negative charge rate on the battery because the laptop was sucking so much power from the power supply that it started sucking power from battery.

For those who are running ThrottleStop and running full boost, without any modification to the power limit in TS or BIOS just note that the CPU is pulling close to 53-54W at full load. And if you have your GPU overvolted and overclocked, at full CPU and GPU load you will probably run into the same problem as me. Each GPU is rated at 45W, but overvolted they probably eat more than 50W. So, 56+50+50 is 156W. Assuming the PSU has 5% loss, providing about 160W of power, you will see that juice is running out fast.

The 3630qm only lets me drop the power to 36W at its lowest though. With full load, 36W lets the CPU runs at 2.6GHz. At 45W, full load the CPU runs at 2.9GHz. At about 53W, the CPU boost fully up to 3.2GHz.

I bought this Amazon.com: Dell Extra Slim 19.5V 12.3A 240W Replacement AC Adapter For Dell Alienware M17x, M17x10-1847DSB laptop, Dell Alienware M18x, AM18X-6732BAA: Computers & Accessories, the Alienware 240W power adapter, which has 7.4mm x 5.08mm tip. To convert to 5.5mm x 2.5mm which is what we have on the Y500, I bought this cable X75 Power Connector - 7.4 x 5.08mm Female Jack to 5.5 x 2.5mm Male Plug. One could also cut the cable and replace the connector, but when there's close to 10A of current flowing through it I don't trust my soldering.

[Amblin]

Yeah, I have ThrottleStop running along with the GPUs at 1250/2500 and I saw my battery start to discharge. So even if we could effectively cool the system we'll then have to deal with the additional power load.

[octiceps]

@kh90123 your claims about the 3630QM sustaining >50W at full load are impossible because these are not XM models with unlocked and potentially unlimited power limits. The QM models cannot go over 45W for longer than the amount of time set by Long Duration PWR Limit in the BIOS, which is 28 seconds by default on the Y500. You can verify this yourself by running Prime95 and you'll see that the CPU will stay at 3.2 GHz and pull >50W for a minute or two before dropping back down to ~3 GHz to stay under 45W.

[kh90123]

@kh90123 your claims about the 3630QM sustaining >50W at full load are impossible because these are not XM models with unlocked and potentially unlimited power limits. The QM models cannot go over 45W for longer than the amount of time set by Long Duration PWR Limit in the BIOS, which is 28 seconds by default on the Y500. You can verify this yourself by running Prime95 and you'll see that the CPU will stay at 3.2 GHz and pull >50W for a minute or two before dropping back down to ~3 GHz to stay under 45W.

I know this fully, but what I saw is that after a while if the temp drops the CPU will starts boosting to 3.2GHz and pulling >50W again. Mind you I have an extra heatpipe in there which you don't.

Actually you're not totally correct. What I have done is override the long duration power limit (either in BIOS or in TS), to 56W, and you will see the CPU maintaining 3.2GHz in Prime95 for as long as it doesn't not overheat. My CPU stays below 90C (no gpu load) in p95 running at 53W.

To override the power limits using TS, you have to disable the setting in BIOS which locks the power limit. It's a few lines above the long/short duration power limits in BIOS.

[octiceps]

I know this fully, but what I saw is that after a while if the temp drops the CPU will starts boosting to 3.2GHz and pulling >50W again. Mind you I have an extra heatpipe in there which you don't.

Actually you're not totally correct. What I have done is override the long duration power limit (either in BIOS or in TS), to 56W, and you will see the CPU maintaining 3.2GHz in Prime95 for as long as it doesn't not overheat. My CPU stays below 90C (no gpu load) in p95 running at 53W.

To override the power limits using TS, you have to disable the setting in BIOS which locks the power limit. It's a few lines above the long/short duration power limits in BIOS.

Mind taking a picture of exactly which setting you changed? I don't recall ever seeing a working setting that allowed you to increase the TDP of the CPU. The Long Duration PWR Limit and Short Duration PWR Limit settings don't work. The only thing I could change was the Long Duration TimeWindow setting which corresponds to this in ThrottleStop. It's controls the amount of time the CPU is allowed to exceed TDP and go as high as 56W before throttling back. Default is 28 seconds and range is 0 to 56.

Limit #1 and limit #2 for Package Power Limit (W), which correspond to Long Duration Power Limit and Short Duration Power Limit in the BIOS, are both grayed out in ThrottleStop and nonfunctional in the BIOS. I'm on the unlocked 2.02 BIOS.

[disgruntl3d]

Anything new with the 2.03 bios?

Here are some pictures to compare for any superficial differences.

[kh90123]

Mind taking a picture of exactly which setting you changed? I don't recall ever seeing a working setting that allowed you to increase the TDP of the CPU. The Long Duration PWR Limit and Short Duration PWR Limit settings don't work. The only thing I could change was the Long Duration TimeWindow setting which corresponds to this in ThrottleStop. It's controls the amount of time the CPU is allowed to exceed TDP and go as high as 56W before throttling back. Default is 28 seconds and range is 0 to 56.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]7566[/ATTACH]

Limit #1 and limit #2 for Package Power Limit (W), which correspond to Long Duration Power Limit and Short Duration Power Limit in the BIOS, are both grayed out in ThrottleStop and nonfunctional in the BIOS. I'm on the unlocked 2.02 BIOS.

Disable this.

As you can see I can keep the CPU at so called short duration boost all the time. Give it 68W and it will take about 53W.

As I reduce the power, the CPU power drops and the speed drops slightly.

As I have said, you will need to provide at least 53W to the cpu to maintain 3.2GHz boost.

If you look at the temp, they don't really vary much. And I also also observed that at times the temp delta between CPU and master GPU is almost 15C. Which points to me a problem. The flaw is most likely the heat transfer rate from the die to the copper plate/pipe. It's not fast enough. Intel Ivybridge has rather high thermal density, and it will only get worse as Haswell comes out. I expect quadcore mobile Haswell and desktop Haswell to run as hot, if not hotter. Only the ULV range CPU will see lower temp. But since the fiasco with the low grade TIM between the die and the heat spreader in their Ivybridge CPU some time ago, I hope Intel will step up somewhat.

[zone]

After flashing the unlocked bios does the intel centrino ultimate-n 6300 work without issues? I did notice in the this thread that one user was experiencing issues where he had to disable / re-enable in the bios after shutting down his OS and hoping that this was user error rather than some imcompatibility. Can someone confirm the n-6300 is working for them?

thanks in advance!

[octiceps]

OK I see what you did there. Seeing as my laptop is not modded like yours I will definitely not be increasing the power limits as that is a recipe for thermal disaster. My CPU is already close to 100C when gaming and the temperature delta between my CPU and GPU is more than 20 degrees. Plus I don't ever go over 45W because I don't do CPU burn tests so I am always running at least 3.2 GHz.

With the CPU unthrottled, are you able to run a simultaneous GPU and CPU burn test indefinitely without the CPU reaching thermal shutdown? My CPU exceeds 100C within a minute and shuts down soon after. If you can do so then it means your cooling mod is helping out A LOT.

[kh90123]

OK I see what you did there. Seeing as my laptop is not modded like yours I will definitely not be increasing the power limits as that is a recipe for thermal disaster. My CPU is already close to 100C when gaming and the temperature delta between my CPU and GPU is more than 20 degrees. Plus I don't ever go over 45W because I don't do CPU burn tests so I am always running at least 3.2 GHz.

With the CPU unthrottled, are you able to run a simultaneous GPU and CPU burn test indefinitely without the CPU reaching thermal shutdown? My CPU exceeds 100C within a minute and shuts down soon after. If you can do so then it means your cooling mod is helping out A LOT.

Yes I can run Prime95 and Unigine, and the CPU reached 105C at max, running at 53W. So the heatpipe helps but I still think that 3630QM needs two heatpipes at least. Also because it didn't fit nicely, the extra heatpipe is touching the GPU heatpipe rather than the CPU heatpipe. I could run a few passes of Unigine without problem, but as for running both tests indefinitely, I think if the ambient temp goes over 35C (95F) the CPU will overheat.

But, if I limit the power to 36W, making the CPU run at 2.6GHz, then I could run both tests indefinitely.

The Y500 doesn't shut down when running both CPU and GPU torture test, but as I mentioned before, it started discharging the battery after a while. Occasionally same thing happens when I game. It didn't do it immediately, so me and my friend thinks that it's the PSU that's running hot, and as a result of that, the efficiency dropped, so the power supplied to the laptop dropped. Either that or the over current protection kicked in.

Since this is wasting the battery charge cycle, I bought the 240W Alienware slim PSU. Let's hope that it's smaller, I know for a fact that it's half the thickness. That PSU is the cheapest high power PSU I could find online.

Apart from being a backup PSU, if the 240W PSU makes less electronic noise (noise from the high power switching circuitry inside, and I have real sensitive hearing) I'll be rather happy.

[octiceps]

Yes I can run Prime95 and Unigine, and the CPU reached 105C at max, running at 53W. So the heatpipe helps but I still think that 3630QM needs two heatpipes at least. Also because it didn't fit nicely, the extra heatpipe is touching the GPU heatpipe rather than the CPU heatpipe. I could run a few passes of Unigine without problem, but as for running both tests indefinitely, I think if the ambient temp goes over 35C (95F) the CPU will overheat.

But, if I limit the power to 36W, making the CPU run at 2.6GHz, then I could run both tests indefinitely.

The Y500 doesn't shut down when running both CPU and GPU torture test, but as I mentioned before, it started discharging the battery after a while. Occasionally same thing happens when I game. It didn't do it immediately, so me and my friend thinks that it's the PSU that's running hot, and as a result of that, the efficiency dropped, so the power supplied to the laptop dropped. Either that or the over current protection kicked in.

Since this is wasting the battery charge cycle, I bought the 240W Alienware slim PSU. Let's hope that it's smaller, I know for a fact that it's half the thickness. That PSU is the cheapest high power PSU I could find online.

Apart from being a backup PSU, if the 240W PSU makes less electronic noise (noise from the high power switching circuitry inside, and I have real sensitive hearing) I'll be rather happy.

Your system doesn't shut down when the CPU reaches 105C? It's supposed to.

My Y500 just bricked and I'm getting a 750M SLI system as a replacement. I may have to look into the 240W Alienware power brick you bought since I plan to run the CPU at full speed and overclock the GPU. I take it the conversion cable plugs into the Dell connector on one end and into the Lenovo laptop on the other?

[kh90123]

Your system doesn't shut down when the CPU reaches 105C? It's supposed to.

My Y500 just bricked and I'm getting a 750M SLI system as a replacement. I may have to look into the 240W Alienware power brick you bought since I plan to run the CPU at full speed and overclock the GPU. I take it the conversion cable plugs into the Dell connector on one end and into the Lenovo laptop on the other?

I have disabled BD Prochot and any form of thermal throttling. The computer will shut down at 115C. From what I read the 3630qm's thermal shutdown temp is 10C higher than the max operating temp, 10+105 so it's 115C.

Yes cable will connect to adapter on one end and the laptop on the other. Dell adapter has 7.5mm x 5mm size, while Lenovo uses the more standard 5.5mm x 2.5mm. It's really easy to find a 5.5mm x 2.5mm to 7.5mm x 5mm adapter, but not the other way around.

And what happened to your laptop? How did you brick it?

[jester_socom]

The i5 3210m and overvolted sli uses about 120w. Measured it from the wall. I had peaks of 150W...

[octiceps]

I have disabled BD Prochot and any form of thermal throttling. The computer will shut down at 115C. From what I read the 3630qm's thermal shutdown temp is 10C higher than the max operating temp, 10+105 so it's 115C.

Yes cable will connect to adapter on one end and the laptop on the other. Dell adapter has 7.5mm x 5mm size, while Lenovo uses the more standard 5.5mm x 2.5mm. It's really easy to find a 5.5mm x 2.5mm to 7.5mm x 5mm adapter, but not the other way around.

And what happened to your laptop? How did you brick it?

Huh, that's really strange. It seems that your machine's thermal characteristics are different than mine. Maybe you increased the threshold through a BIOS setting? Intel specifies Ivy Bridge to throttle at 105C and shut down at 130C, but Lenovo went ahead and set a premature shut down at 105C with no throttling beforehand. At least that's the way it is for me. I've made my laptop shutdown a few times and confirmed that this is the case. The BD PROCHOT setting in the BIOS and in ThrottleStop don't do anything as this machine does not use this throttling mechanism.

I was gaming over the weekend when my screen went black and the speakers went on full blast, AKA the screech of death, even though I had headphones plugged in. Happened without warning and I had to do a hard shut down. Ever since then I get this same ear-shattering crash within a minutes of firing up a game and Windows Explorer is constantly freezing and reloading itself as well. Reverting my GPU to stock clocks didn't help, and neither did a reinstall of Windows. I believe it's probably a hardware malfunction of some sort. I've used this machine for less than 3 weeks and never opened it up and modded anything like you have, only overclocked (not overvolted) the GPU.