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Hey Everyone, First off, YOU TAKE FULL RESPONSIBILITY FOR FLASHING THIS! YOU WILL NOT HOLD ME RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY PROBLEMS YOU MAY RUN IN TO BY FLASHING MY MOD! YOU WILL NOT HOLD TECHINFERNO RESPONSIBLE, EITHER! THIS IS YOUR CHOICE! Now on to the good stuff... I've officially cracked it - either by luck or persistence (I'm thinking LUCK, lol) - A11 UNLOCKED BIOS FOR m18Xr2 (UNLOCKED BY SVL7 - FULL CREDIT GOES TO HIM FOR UNLOCKING!) Here is what I've added/updated/modded/changed/etc... ADDED LEGACY SUPPORT FOR THE m18XR2 - You can now run Windows 7 with 900 series nVidia GPU's! Changed the Default GPU from PEG to IGFX - No need to tear down laptop anymore. 8-Beeps are a thing of the PAST! Updated the Intel RST Legacy to v12.9.0.2006 (Supports TRIM in RAID0 - CONFIRMED) Updated Intel RST UEFI to v12.9.0.2006 (Supports TRIM in RAID0 - CONFIRMED) Updated the ONBOARD Video Card for the HD3xxx to v2171 - FROM v2132) Updated ONBOARD Video Card for the HD4xxx to v2171 - FROM v2132) Updated the LAN Firmware & PXE Boot from 2.0.5.9 to v2.0.6.6) ADDED NvMe Support for m18xr2 ADDED M.2 support for m18xr2 Updated CPU Microcode to v29 for the 2900 CPU's Updated CPU Microcode to v1c for the 3900 CPU's Updated CPU Microcode for other supported CPU's if available! Sorry, I don't remember what version, but if it could be updated, it was!) Updated GOP Driver for Intel Sandy Bridge Updated GOP Driver for Intel Ivy Bridge Updated GOP Policy for the m18xR2 Raidriar added the "Package C-States Lock" to my bios mod - THANK YOU RAIDRIAR! YOU TAKE FULL RESPONSIBILITY FOR FLASHING THIS, AS FLASHING CUSTOM BIOS's HAS SOME RISK!! I AM IN NO WAY RESPONSIBLE FOR ANYTHING THAT HAPPENS TO YOUR PC BY FLASHING THIS MOD!! DOWNLOAD INFO: My BIOS MOD should be available in the download section of TechInferno! They have KINDLY offered to host the file, thankfully! You MUST meet the minimum requirements of T|I in order to download files from their download section! PLEASE NOTE: Do not distribute this file. Please tell others that want the file to download it from TechInferno, as the file is GUARANTEED to be clean if you get it from here. If you download it from anywhere else, there is a chance that the code will be changed, and may BRICK your laptop. Therefore, PLEASE make sure you download from here and ONLY here! I'd like to THANK the following people for testing my bios mods to make sure they are safe for the rest of you: Mr. Fox, Raidriar, Rengsey R.H. Jr! Thanks for testing, I'm grateful! RAIDRIAR, from nbr, needs an EXTRA shoutout for testing. He was UTTERLY amazing! He took risks no sane OR INSANE person would! I owe him for testing this! He deserves a LOT of credit for that! Also, I do have an UPDATE to Intel Management Firmware v8.1.64 (I think), but that is a SEPARATE package. If you are interested, you can do that upgrade, too. HOWEVER, PLEASE NOTE, if you plan on doing update you MUST do BIOS update FIRST - AGAIN, BIOS UPDATE MUST BE DONE FIRST! AFTER bios update is done, then you can do IME update. If you update the IME then BIOS, YOU WILL BRICK YOUR SYSTEM! YOU MUST DO BIOS FIRST, THEN THE Intel ME Update! If you like this mod that I've done, please donate a couple KEGS of beer to me, as I put a TON of work into this. I put more hours into this than I should have... LoL I can also confirm that this has been tested by MANY people. Mr. Fox, Raidriar, and a few others, and they had NO issues. EXCEPT that they were finally able to install Windows 7 while in legacy mode (set from within bios), and the GPU works completely. The only ting I am still working on is the throttling issue on ALL GPU's (Some worse than others). IF you use Mr. Fox's modded drivers, 355.20 I believe, the throttling issue is minimal with the 780m GPUs. Anything above those drivers seems to throttle all GPU's at a more extreme rate. I AM working on this throttling issue, but I am not sure it's fixable. But I will TRY! Again, I hope you ALL like this, and that it helps you out. Lastly, IF you flash my MOD and you decide to purchase another 900 series GPU, please make sure you use woodstackz, as he sells them at the best rates. Please let him know you are purchasing the GPU because of this mod, as it will help me out a little! I hope you like this! Swick Link To Donate: EDIT: I forgot to put fparts.txt in the rar file with all the other files. sorry about that. I'm including it here on this post! SORRY! PS. I AM working on porting ALL these mods to the m17xR4, but dont know if I can get LEGACY SUPPORT ported! I AM TRYING, but if I can't, I'll be able to port EVERYTHING else... File download link:

Imho, that is VERY expensive!

Concerning the throttles, we've been doing some digging and I want to drop this here, we've looking for the cause and this seems to resolve it, Kudos go to Infinaris over at Notebookreview for finding this and of course Swick we couldn't of got this far without ya! The throttle for whatever reason only seems to be occuring from a cold boot. I just turned my laptop on again and checked and it was throttling. Restarted the computer accessed the bios switched to igfx and rebooted and accessed the bios again immediately and reset to peg.... No throttling on reboot. From where I'm sitting it looks like toggling the gfx fixes the issue at least until you switch the machine off and then it throttles again so it looks like whatever causes the throttling is a bad setting somewhere. Might be worth seeing if someone were to shut their machine down and switch to igfx before switching off their machine. Could be possible that the toggle sets the system up to work properly but its a bug from cold boot. Regardless I've rebooted the machine several times and everytime I toggle the gfx to igfx and back to peg it gets rid of the throttling for that session. If I restart the machine there doesnt seem to be any throttling either it seems to be an issue with a cold boot off of peg at least so far as from what i can see. The question here tho is why does it throttle if booted directly on peg on cold boot but a simple gfx toggle seems to fix the issue?

UPDATE And based on the scores I have in my own tests and those found from others, 800 MiB/s is the max you can get out of TB1 with CUDA on an eGPU. So to 'unlock' some of the potential of the 980Ti rendering with Resolve, it really needs to be a TB2 connection.

This whole thing wouldn't be a problem if he'd just say: "Hey look, this is a Akitio Thunder2 PCIe box, this is a Dell DA-2 and together they provide you an external gpu solution for your Mac Sadly the box has to be modded a bit so it can run out of the box and that's where I come in. You could do it on your own but if you want I'll gather the stuff and do the modifications for you. I'll charge you the cost of the stuff and a bit for my modification work." Maybe he could even mention that the information are taken from an eGPU community site. But no, he simply takes the stuff, makes an ugly cut, DA-2 connector at the front and puts his logo on the front... I guess I'd be simply too honest for such business. It's just sad for the unknowing customers.

It's finally working!!! Another succesfull experience of upgrading Alienware M17x R3 with 8970m 2gb MSI version to share in this thread. For readers who also bought the MSI 2 gb version, this is what I went through and solved: 1. It came with the original MSI 176K vbios (version 015.033.000.000.044392) which wasn't working at all in my system: Black screen and motherboard beeps. Starting from internal graphics, gpu-z only saw some very basic information like active clocks 0 mhz, default clocks 950 and 1250 mhz, and 2 Gb of vram, with almost all other boxes empty. 2. I tried flashing vbios version 015.032.000.004.044450 downloaded from an old post of svl7, coming from a Clevo P570WM according atiflash information. Starting from the 8970m, screen stays black and motherboard beeps, even after many tries, not a chance! Booting from internal graphics, gpu-z shows all boxes filled out with information, with the 8970m pretending to be a 4 gb version instead of the 2 gb in reality. 3. I continued searching the forum, and found an old post with a Dell Alienware branded vbios version 015.041.000.000.044964. Starting with this Dell vbios, the screen stays black and motherboard beeps again, again, and again... The card also still pretends to have 4 gb of vram when I check with gpu-z, booting from the internal graphics. 4. After hours of unsuccesfull searching for a vbios with 2 gb, I noticed a 4 gb vbios which had the same brand of vram (Samsung) as my MSI 2gb version. I found this vbios on the top of the list on Techpowerup Video Bios Collection, coming from a Clevo P370SM with version 015.036.000.005.044618. My system booted from the 8970m! (internal graphics disabled) 5. I got into windows and succesfully installed the latest normal AMD Catalyst drivers 14.9. Checking gpu-z, i saw the card was still reporting 4 gb, and was stuck in idle clocks 300 mhz core and 150 mhz memory. On high loads, I could only get the card to 450 mhz core, but doing so resulted in artifacts (black lines quickly coming and disappearing) and system crashes. I tried overclocking the card to its normal clocks of 900 and 1250 using MSI afterburner, but it only changed the high-power-state, which I wasn't able to get in, because I was stuck in the idle-state... Also disabling the ULPS (Ultra Low Power State) using afterburner didn't help. 6. Desperately hoping it was a software problem, I re-installed windows and tried another fresh install of AMD Catalyst 14.9, which was succesfull. The card still idles at 300 mhz, but now easily jumps to 900/1250 mhz as soon as I run any benchmark or game. There are no artifacts anymore, and Skyrim runs smoother then I've ever seen on Ultra High. The temperatures are 54 degrees celsius in idle, and max 77 under full load. The fanspeeds are automatic and adjust perfectly between silent and 4000 RPM. 7. Windows starts with the low brightness bug, unable to adjust it to its full brightness. I use the Hardware Info tool (version hw64_396) to get around the bug. Just starting the sensor monitoring part is enough to instantly restore full brightness to your screen. You can let it start automatically with windows in the configure section. Everything seems to be as it should be now, except for the videocard still thinking it's a 4gb version. But I'm not going to say him loud he has only 2 gb... don't want to disturb his new ego now things are working so well