Hacking an Asus N53SM beyhond recognition

[senso]

Good night, some you have might already saw my thread over NotebookReview, if anyone wants the longer read here it is:

Upgrading an N53SM the hard way(with GPU change with some luck) | NotebookReview



Long story short, I will resume/aggregate all info in a single post, so prepare for the roller coaster of insanity and bad ideas, hope you can stick with me and with some luck also provide more crazy ideas, so starting from one end, just keep reading, it will make some sense, I promise.



My first laptop was an Asustek barebones sold in Portugal under the brand-name Tsunami, it was expensive, as in 1300€ 8 years ago expensive, all I can remember is that it had an 9800GS or 9800GT, heated like a furnace and I didn't care, two years of abuse later and he died, the cause, roasted GPU, in that time I tried a reflow using an hot-air + IR machine at my university, but to no avail.



So I got an Asus N53SM for about 900€ caring very little about the specs, even then it costed around 1000€, after losing my space heater to over-heating I developed a crazy need to keep my laptop cool, 1 year and still with warranty I disassembled the laptop, applied Artic MX-4 thermal paste and drilled a grill pattern under the fan/cooler and ripped out the small grills covering the holes under the RAM's and the HDD, it helped a bit, around 5ºC cooler.



Some 6 months later my department got a free 3d printer(BeeTheFirst, made by former students) and as I had founded a robotics and electronics association had access all the time and some free spools, so I grabed Solidworks my old laptop fan, and made a case to mount the fan in the ODD bay, I also grabbed a small pcb I had made with an Attiny45 and added a button to control the fan RPM via PWM, also drilled another grille pattern under that fan, given the Asus N53xx chasis the fan shoots air right into the GPU heatsink that has some nibs, and with that I got stable 60ºC GPU temps under hours of gaming, and the CPU never went over 75ºC, I have been repasting the CPU/GPU 1 time a year and have also lost about 8h lapping the heatsinks(call me crazy), dropped 1-2ºC in the CPU, not very time effective, but I had to do it!



I don't game a lot anymore, in fact the last game that got me really hooked up was Mass Effect(1,2 and 3) and it looks pretty good in the laptop and runs fine, but I would love to have some better graphics performance, so enter the new idea, in my current workplace I have an Ersa IR650A pro reflow station, complete with pick-and place head, alignement camera, thermal probes, and reflow profiles that I have been fine tuning since January.



And my idea is the following, given that there are laptops with MXM interfaces, that with some BIOS massaging can run much newer GPU's maybe I could go up in the GT6xxM family, currently my laptop as a GT630M(N13P-GL/GL2) with 2Gb DDR3 RAM, and following the same N13 familly the best I can go maintaining the same DDR3 128-bits memory interface is the GT650M, a pretyt nice stepup from the GT630M, it as 10W more TDP, I think my motherboard can handle it, but for safety reasons the GT640M offers the same Shadders/ROP/TMU's at a lower clock(that can still be overclocked a bit, so its fine).



My big problem with this is the VBIOS...

I don't know how to grab a GT640M VBIOS and make it play nice with my original BIOS.



After playing around with MMTools/AMI BCP I have sucefully identified and extraced the VBIOS contained in my laptop BIOS, in fact there are two VBIOS inside, one for the GT630M and one for the GT555M(N12P-GT), the start of each VBIOS is here(the device ID line is my addition):

Device ID: 10DE_DE9

Uª.ëK7400éL.wÌVIDEO ....ˆ.<...IBM VGA Compatible....À.K¶09/27/[email protected]ý4ýé–*.C...ÿ#ü..D..ÿÿÿ....€M?¥òéþFé.GPMIDl.o.... .°.¸.À.3N13P-GL2 E1079 VGA BIOS ...OS....................................................Version 70.08.55.00.0D ...Copyright (C) 1996-2011 NVIDIA Corp......ÿÿ....ÿÿGF108 Board - 1079df40.............Chip Rev .........





Device ID: 10DE_DF6

Uª.ëK7400éL.wÌVIDEO ....ˆ.<...IBM VGA Compatible....ð.ïµ12/29/10..........@.Õü°üé†*.C...ÿ?ü..@..ÿÿÿ....€,?¥ûéÛFéâFPMIDl.o.... .°.¸.À.3N12P-GT E1079 VGA BIOS ...IOS....................................................Version 70.08.45.00.A6 ...Copyright (C) 1996-2010 NVIDIA Corp......ÿÿ....ÿÿGF108 Board - 1079df60.............Chip Rev ......... 

Thanks to a parent post in the NotebookReview forum I went ahead and also extracted the VBIOS from an Asus N56VZ that uses the GT640M and got totally stuck the GT640M VBIOS as a file size of 88Kb with a lot o zero padding(from 0x0AEE0 to 0x0EA00, about 15Kb of zeros) and ends with two MIIC certificates that I can't find any hint of information about:

-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----.MIIC....data....

-----END CERTIFICATE-----[FONT=Georgia]-[/FONT]

One of those ends with == so I taught it might be something encoded in base64, but no such luck.



If you are still there, any ideas on how to Frankenstein my BIOS to add support for a GT640M GPU, given that I can change the GPU with no problems and that I can trust the eBay GPU vendors..



Best regards, and thanks for just reading my ramblings, and if you don't mind, just say something, call me crazy :48_002:

[darnok44]

Couldn't You just use function "insert" and add this extra vbios to the orginal bios?

[senso]

I was getting sleepy, and I ate a couple words, my doubt/problem is that the two original VBIOS are 64Kb each, and the VBIOS for the GT640M is 88Kb, so its a bit bigger, I don't know if I can just pull both of them and put a new one, and the GT640M VBIOS that I got if for a laptop that as Hynix DDR3 VRAM's, don't know if they will play nice, because my motherboard has Samsung ram's.

The licence part also leaves me a bit worried.

[darnok44]

It would be much safer to use vbios for the card with Samsung ram. Quick search, actually not that quick, and it looks like there are some laptops which use gt640m with samsung ram -lenovo z580, toshiba satellite p855, Dell 3450, 7420, L521X ass well. But You would have to check and make sure for 100% yourself. All of them are 88Kb and with certificates at the end. The best way in my opinion would be extracting vbios for 640m and simply inserting it into the main bios, not replacing any existing vbios Option ROM modules. Apparently You can do this, look here:BIOS Modding Guides and Problems » [Guide] Manual AMI UEFI BIOS Modding. That will allow You to check, still with old graphic card if inserting new vbios was successfull and if main bios is working correctly. And if something would be wrong You could recover bad bios much easier. Soldering new gpu and inserting new vbios at same time seems as much more risky move because You would not know what is exactly wrong if something would went wrong, I mean with vbios or physically with gpu chip.

[senso]

Darnok44, thanks for all the time you have been spending helping me.

You hit the nail in your reply, I will look around for BIOS dumps for those models, if you have one, can you attach it here?

My doubt is if I there is free space to put the extra VBIOS, I can remove the VBIOS for the GT555M, and thats what I wanted to do, add the new VBIOS and test it before changing the GPU so I know the laptopt still works.

What I don't understand is if the BIOS tools alter the entry point to load a new module/VBIOS or if it must be done manually.

[senso]

Finally found the BoardView for the N53SM, and well, screw all this

The specific GPU model is N13P-GL2 that as a different footprint from the GT640M GPU, the footprint that is equal is the N13P-GL1, damm..

Now it makes sense the N13P-GL2 is the GF108(Fermi)model with 96 shadders, while the N13P-GL1 is the GF106/GF116 model with 144 shadders..

My last hope is that maybe the Fermi variant of the GT640M LE uses the same footprint, but yeah, not so confident now, a bit sad

Edit:

Can't really find the Fermi flavour of the GT640M LE anywhere to see the footprint, and the GT635M is supposed to have codename N13E-GE2 but I can't also find any chip with that name, only with N13E-GE and that also uses the Kepler style of footprint.

[Khenglish]

What version of the 630m do you currently have? Do you have 96 shaders or 144 shaders? Also the 96 shader version comes in 28nm and 40nm versions.

If you have the 40nm 96 shader version, switching it out for the 144 version should yield a decent performance improvement. The original BIOS may run it fine as well since they are both fermi cores.

Trying to go from fermi to kepler seems very difficult and I don't think the BIOS mod would be as simple as rip the 630m vBIOS and drop in a 650m vBIOS. While the vBIOS would match the GPU core, you would also need matching VRMs and other circuitry for the new core to work with the new vBIOS, which I highly doubt will match.

Ebay is a good source of BGA shots to see if they are compatible. I was thinking of switching out the 40nm 96 shader core in my latitude for a 28nm core. They do appear to be compatible.

[senso]

Its the 40nm version, what I find strange is that GPU-Z reports 16 ROP's and 16 TMU's while their site says that the GT630M only has 4 ROP's.

I think I can now attach images:

What is the 144 shadders version, by version I mean codename to search for images of the chip to check the footprint.

I know, but the whole Fermi/Kepler thing just didn't ring a bell until now, damm Asus for gimping their laptops lol.

[Khenglish]

Its the 40nm version, what I find strange is that GPU-Z reports 16 ROP's and 16 TMU's while their site says that the GT630M only has 4 ROP's.

I think I can now attach images:

[ATTACH=CONFIG]15205[/ATTACH]

What is the 144 shadders version, by version I mean codename to search for images of the chip to check the footprint.

I know, but the whole Fermi/Kepler thing just didn't ring a bell until now, damm Asus for gimping their laptops lol.

OK so you can't get the 28nm GF117 because you have a 128 bit bus. The GF117 was built for a 64 bit GDDR5 bus, so if it even worked you would cut your memory bandwidth in half.

The only card I know of that had a 144 shader fermi chip is the 555m. To complicate things though there are FIVE different chips that went on the 555m, so they likely will all have the N12E-GE-B codename. The best one seems to be the 555m in the Medion Akoya P6812 (whatever that is). It was based on GF116 instead of GF106, so it will clock higher. You want to avoid the Dell version because it had a 192 bit memory interface, as well as the lenovo version because it used a GF108 core with only 96 shaders.

[darnok44]

it looks like Your gpu is just renamed gt540m based on GF108 core. It's even clocked like reference 540m 672MHz. It really hard to find bga layout for GF108, but using phase N12P which is codename for this family bring some results and GF108 and GFf106/116(it seems that both 106 and 166 core use that same layout) look nothing alike. They are completely different.

[senso]

Spent all morning pulling GPU's from dead laptops, two of them said they had a GT635M, the codenames are N13P-GLR-A1, and the other was an N14P-GE-OP-A1, all share the same footprint, that is different from the gt630M, I'm almost sure that the GF108 series uses an older footprint(its the same as the GT425M) and so there are no newer/better chips that can be soldered on.

The GT555M is a huge chip with a footprint different from all other as far as I can tell.

The only way to upgrade the GPU would be a full out crazyness, remove the GPU and use thin enameled wires and jumper all the PCIExpress signals to an MXM socket, I have space in the ODD drive, but its way to much work, I will epoxy some extra heatpipes and an extra bit of heatsink and OC this as much as I can and will continue saving for a new laptop, its a shame that there is no way to upgrade this GPU.