How to pinmod and further overclock the M11x R1 (SLG= Hardmod only)

[whitrzac]

Has anyone done a Vmod with an ICS PLL?

[ajslay]

the trick to cutting pin 2 on an SLG is using a needle... do not dig. you have to "pick" at the pin very carefully, and make sure you don't leave a huge divot in your motherboard. use a magnifying glass to see if your pin is fully disconnected, and if it isnt, keep picking at it. and make sure you use compressed air and blow it on and around the pll chip, this will insure there is no residue left over.. iv done this pin mod over 10 times now. and never bricked a board.

[zero410]

Hey guys!
New here and just wanted to say I was able to successfully able to do the cut pin2 mode and am sitting at the 1.73 ghz.

Just waiting for a friend to get access to a solder iron and will attempt the next part!

and for all to wonder (and its obviously stated many times over and over), THESE PIN ARE REALLY REALLY REALLY SMALL!!!!

The method I used involved using a round blade from my swiss arm knife, pressing on the pin with a slow wiggle. Literally pushing into and the prying the pins apart. I then used a needle to make sure none of the residue bridged any of the other pins.
I dont know if anyone mentioned it, but for me, the best way to cut was to go directly down from the chip onto the pin. You could use the chip as sort of a guide to (dare i say) gullitoine the pin.

And dont forget to turn off overclock afterwards to enable it!

I've read this thread from start to finish and I gotta say, some_guy, you got a LOT of patience with folks that do not read the thread and keep asking you the same question over and over and over again. Kudos to you!

[zero410]

Hey guys,
So I've gone and attempted the 2.0 ghz mod with the slg chip.
Sad to say, i'm not exactly sure what's going on.
I had previously did the 1.73 ghz mod, and turned overclock back on before attempting the next mod. My graphics was still set to "switchable".

I got some friends to go and solder the chip for me since they had all the equipment they needed. They used a meter of sorts to check that the connections between the resistor and the power source is good.
I also went ahead and did the vidmod too (though instead of cutting the pin, they cut the trace to the pin. I was told by them that this is essentially the same thing...)

I'm running on 8gb corsair memory sticks.

So after the operation, I turned on the computer and load and behold, it ran and attempted to start up windows. Thats when the problems started. Windows failed to start, and I wasnt sure exactly why... Im curious if its due to the graphics driver? After that, I turned it off, and attempted to turn it on again... and then I get the blank screen and 7 beeps.
Opened up the board again and looked at the pins and they appear to be clear and clean. Closed it back up, restarted it, and windows ran again and again it failed to load.

So, basically the situation above repeats after that. I can either start up the system and watch windows fail, or the system will basically not start up and beep 7 times.
There was one time while running windows recover, I get a bluescreen.

Am I doing something wrong here? Was I suppose to have the graphics settings at something specific like "discrete"?

I'll be attempting to only use one stick of ram at a time next.... am I attempting to debug this correctly by doing this? or am I SOL already?

Thanks for any advice!

[some guy]

I've read this thread from start to finish and I gotta say, some_guy, you got a LOT of patience with folks that do not read the thread and keep asking you the same question over and over and over again. Kudos to you!

thank you!

and congrats on getting 1.73ghz!

sounds like you did everything right. the first thing i would do is try out different RAM (or just one stick at a time, etc). normally we are hitting RAM limits before anything else. i have personally have tried several different brands/speeds/density's including highend expensive RAM and i actually had the best luck with the stock RAM and the basic GSkills i have now. go figure?

it is possible that your north bridge may just not be up to snuff. we have seen the same north bridge running all the way up to 1600mhz in a different laptop but no one has mentioned what voltage it was running to maintain that speed. and there currently is no volt mod for the north bridge on the M11x R1...

i doubt its your CPU tho. if you could run 1.73 on the stock Vcore then i see no reason that you could run a tad higher on more Vcore.

[zero410]

Hey!

So I'll try out different RAM's first then. I was going to get my electrical engineer friend to recheck the cut on the vidmod part, to make sure it was a clean cut on the trace.

A couple of new things have happened since. First off, the system was able to boot up and load windows consistently now (but only after leaving it alone for a while). When I get it to boot up on windows, it would eventually lock up (screen freezes, no more mouse movement, but NOT bsod). I was able to get cpuz running a few times when this occurs and it shows i am clocked at 2.0ghz! However, it seems now to be a stability issue.

I just wanted to reconfirm that the following could be attributed to RAM issues and not a bad vidmod cut (but I understand that it could also be both!).
So, on a boot up after about 5-10 or more minutes of it being off, I can get to windows and it would run for about... 3 or 4 minutes before it would lock up. Afterwards, the following could occur:
a. I reboot and it loads windows again
b. I reboot and it fails to load windows
c. I reboot and it gets to the alienware login with option to get to the bios and locks.
d. I reboot and the screen remains black.
e. I reboot and get the 7 beeps.
f. I reboot and the screen turns on, then off.

I just want to confirm that the above could all be due to a bad ram stick? Or could it be a flaky vid mod cut leaving residual power in ram or something cause the following issues? So far, if i leave it alone for a few minutes and then power on, it would make it to the windows boot up. After that however, it just does the random errors.


On a side note, I did play around with using only 1 stick of ram or another, but the results were just inconsistent but leaving it alone for a while and then booting up seems to get to windows with the most success (before it locks up again).

thanks for the help!

[vladichimescu]

@zero410 ... well, I'm not as patience as some guy is )
however:
you should've test the ram, using Overclock Disabled when 1.73Ghz [266mhz] meaning your ram is 1066 at CL6

I've posted my results:
2x4GB Corsair 1333Mhz
using only one ram was stable anytime
using both rams was stable everytime unless the situation just described [overclock disabled - 266*4] when BSOD 7/10

my original Alienware M11x ram was Samsung 1066Mhz and was stable in any situation

now:
pin mod and voltage mod, OverClock Enabled, 333Mhz, Graphics Discrete [so I don't need to use y Dell old drivers], 8GB Corsair 1333Mhz, 120GB Corsair SSD sata3- running on triple boot

your problem: you did the SLG pin mod to 333Mhz, but how about the voltage regulator - pin 32 to enable higher voltage to cpu

info: when you were running 1.73, you got higher voltage [overclock disabled] than you get when overclock disabled, so ya... you need to voltmod by cutting pin 32 on voltage regulator

[zero410]

Hi,
Yeah I've gone through the RAM i had, using one stick at a time, but the behavior seems consistent with my problems listed above.
It just keeps freezing up and locking up after the first boot (which makes it all the way to windows) and then it refuses to boot up properly again unless I wait it out.

I'm pretty sure I mentioned it above, but I did cut pin 32 (albeit done by cutting the trace... not the actual pin, which my engineering friends pointed out should be the way its done). I just wish I knew if the pin was actually cut or not... and annoyingly my system doesnt stay on long enough for me to get software on there to find this out. CPUZ reads its still a 0.9v, but it seems thats correct as a few successful moders show the same thing.

Was there any way to check if the volt pin was completely removed?
On a side note, anyone else notice that it would turn on, and die, but each subsequent boot would result in less progress? I'm really curious if I may just not have applied the thermal paste correctly onto the processors and its just overheating (with the rest of the mod done correctly).

I also went out and got some cheaper RAM as someguy seems to have success with this, but as it shows, the different RAM is behaving exactly the same as my corsairs 1333mhz (I went and tried kingston value ram at 1066MHZ, but like i said, exact same behavior).

Any thoughts? I'll be taking it to a friend tomorrow to check if the pin was cut correctly... but these start up and shuts downs just seem very suspicious to me that I maybe having heating issues instead possibly...

Thanks for any help!

[some guy]

sadly i dont know of any other way to test for the VID mod othe than temp monitoring (CPU-Z does not report the Actual Vcore brcause it reads off the value sent not the actual Vcore recived by the CPU). i was noticing a raise in temps with the VID mod and so i assumed DaveGT & Nando were correct in how/why the VID mod worked. later i used the ViD mod on a M11x than wasnt stable with the 2.0ghz mod. and it became stable after so this double confirmed it worked.

[zero410]

Well, I'm really sad by this now.

I'll have a look at the pin and make sure its really disconnected. I have no idea if it is or not right now so will need to wait for a friend to take a look at it with a microscope or something.

However, does the low volt or bad ram explain the odd behavior I'm having?
To be honest, I just took it apart again and found that my cpu fan wasnt plugged in... which would probably explain the problem on why it would work for a bit and then lock up. I've plugged that back in, confirmed the fan is running, but the problem now seems to persist.
i'll let to really cool down for a bit now and retry.

I do have another question though, when I was taking the head sink apart, I saw 3 chips... 2 of them had thermal paste on it, while the last one had... a sponge thing on it? Is that correct? would accidentally putting thermal paste on the sponge one mess it up?

Aside from that, I still cant confirm if my ram is stable... but i'll let the whole thing cool down, pray that i didnt burn anything, and boot it up again...