@revinary: Yeah, it's online, you can download a tool from the standard 1557 drivers page. It lets you create an ISO, a USB Stick (you have to use one that is smaller then 2GB) or a PXE boot image. I went for the CDROM, could not find a small enough stick (repartioning does not help!)

@corp769: The BIOS mod sounds interesting. I'll take a look at it.

Yeah, it's worth a shot with this type of issue. If you do stumble upon something good, let me know!

Here is a modified BIOS whith advanced options unlocked. Running it now, no problem so far. Lowered the active temp trip point to 63°C, maybe that helps a little (if it has any impact at all). I have not read the rest of the thread, but they say disabling hyperthreading helps.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/7088726-post1711.html

Awesome, I knew there was something new to try out somewhere. How do you like it so far?

not much difference, but i did not change any settings. also, there is not really much that makes sense to change... someone in the linked thread said that changing thermal trip points does not make any difference, because it is always managed by the EC. Quick test seems to confirm that, sadly.

fun things to play around with:

- enable vt-d (does the cpu support that?)
- enable c7 state (need to read up on that one)
- disable HT
- run in 1 or 2 core only mode (+ HT)
- change sata settings (port multiplier support for esata port)
- change pci-e settings
- enable azelia power management (is this azelia? why is it disabled?)

i did flash this with the winphlash64 that comes with the original bios. start the original, do not click ok. copy dir from temp to somewhere else. modify INI file so it does not auto upgrade. play with the advanced settings, you need to disable one of the checks to get it to flash. i did just asks in the other thread if it is okay to flash from windows, the all talk about the dos version.

played around a bit with speedfan 4.46 beta 4 for windows. it has new support for dell, whatever that mean. there was a GPU fan slider but it did not have any effect. after the upgrade i get an additional slider "PWM 1" which works! but unfortuantly it crashes the machine if clicked too much, guess it's a race condition somewhere. also all the readings are quite unstable, but at least you can always hear how fast the fan spins.

side note: i also pulled out the power for 5 minutes to reset the EC, maybe thats where the slider comes from, not from bios

maybe this new PWM is also visible from within linux? any idea where to look exactly? think i need to boot without thermal.off=1 again. this setting does not seem to have any effect on actual fan speed. but it may be responsible for throttling the cpu too early.

EDIT: So /sys/class/thermal/cooling_device10/cur_state sets display brightness. now i am confused.

Reporting last post as spam.....

Over and out,

Josh