T61/X61 SATA II 1.5 Gb/s cap - willing to pay for a solution

[zelauto]

Give a shout when you can receive donations again.
I flashed the bios long ago, but didn't actually use it untill I installed a T8100 in my T61 today and thus I would like to honour my word and offer you my monetary thanks
On that note, I'd like to hear from anyone who can help me determine if the strange crashes that I am seeing after installing the T8100 can be related to this bios and the penryn/merom compatibility or if I simply bought a defective CPU (or if something entirely else has gone wrong)
I posted a detailed description of the crashes at This Link

Yeah, I'd also be happy to make a donation to Middleton for giving my T61 a new lease of life.

[SonDa5]

Thanks for the help. I did the BIOS upgrade and now have Sata 2 that I wanted for a new Seagate Momentus XT hybrid storage drive.

I do have some problems though.

Since updating the bios my hotkeys are not working properly. Apears to effect some of the drivers.


Do I need to reinstall Windows 7 with the new BIOS?

[ThinkLover]

SATA III mod is *NOT* possible. This is SATA II mod, btw.
BIOS is OS independent, you don't need to reinstall it.

[middleton]

Have flashed my x61 with the ctrl + fn swap...

All fine, except that it's not swapped the keys...

Just looked in the rar file - both ISO filles (the one with the swap, and the one without...) are named the same and have identical contents...

Any chance of a link to version 2.21 with the ctrl+fn swapped keys version?

Cheers

John

I've updated all BIOS packages to solve this issue. Now flashing CTRL-FN swap (using ISO CD-image) should be correct. Read "READ_ME!!!.txt" inside the package for further instructions.

To all who need dual-IDA support: You can now test a beta BIOS.

[SonDa5]

SATA III mod is *NOT* possible. This is SATA II mod, btw.
BIOS is OS independent, you don't need to reinstall it.

That is what I meant. Thanks for the correction.

I went ahead and did another clean install. I want to make sure I get this right.

I'm going to follow Lenovo's guide lines for doing clean install.

Lenovo Support - Windows 7 Clean Installation - ThinkPad

I'm going to use the ThinkVantage System Update 4.0. method which Lenovo says is the most simple to do.

[User Retired 2]

To all who need dual-IDA support: You can now test a beta BIOS.

xmas has come earlier for these Lenovo system owners: a dual-IDA overclock will provide an extra multiplier gaining you 200Mhz extra CPU performance. More details here.

[mike5065]

...

To all who need dual-IDA support: You can now test a beta BIOS.

Thanks for this. Just tested the dual-IDA on my X61 Tablet.

Prior to flash, I spent some time in CPUZ with different loads to see how it was behaving, and my 1.6 L7500 was stuck on 1.6 with 800Mhz FSB. ThrottleStop (TS) was similar, and EIST was pre-selected and grayed out, as expected.

I then:
-flashed BIOS (wet fine)
-disabled EIST in BIOS
-ran CPUZ and noticed multiplier locked at 6 (versus normal 8)
-ran TS, created config, added the dual-IDA config entry, restarted

After this:
-noticed TS has EIST un-checked, and greyed out (i found that odd)
-set TS "Turn On", noticed TS still has EIST un-checked, and greyed
-setting multiplier to 9 (turned TS Off and On a bunch of times)
-CPUZ and TS both still reporting multiplier 6

So then I:
-restarted
-re-enabled EIST in BIOS
-ran CPUZ and noticed multiplier ranging between 8 and 9. (it wasn't doing this before...ever..it never exceed 8)
-watched the multipler in CPUZ a bunch of time while loading macine with variety of tasks, P95

I would say, given the dependancy for the enabled EIST checkmark in TS, that I either did something wrong / out of sequence, or TS is not recognizing what I did to my X61 Tablet.

But I would also say that I have never before seen my multipler reach 9, and now it appears to do it on demand. This is both with and without TS running. I cannot conclusively say whether both cores were running in these informal tests, which is the point.

For me, this is an improvement. Probably not a great as the SATAII and whitelist (I am enjoying both), but I will leave it.

Thanks for all your work.

[User Retired 2]

But I would also say that I have never before seen my multipler reach 9, and now it appears to do it on demand. This is both with and without TS running. I cannot conclusively say whether both cores were running in these informal tests, which is the point.

For me, this is an improvement. Probably not a great as the SATAII and whitelist (I am enjoying both), but I will leave it.

If you right-click in TS white-space, is there a "Start dual-IDA" option? All that does is uncheck EIST with the highest multiplier set. dual-IDA won't oscillate when setup correctly. It would be fixed 200x9 on your L7500. EIST must be available to be checked/unchecked in TS. That can only occur if the EIST-lock bit hasn't been set by the BIOS which is the whole idea of a dual-IDA modded bios.

Sounds like you are running single-IDA which would have been available prior to flashing this bios. Can confirm single-IDA operation by running something like wprime32 with 2 threads active which would see both cores running at 200x8. In which case perhaps provide feedback to middleton about this condition?

[middleton]

mike5065 and nando4, I've just found why EIST option is greyed in ThrottleStop.
It's always useful not to turn off your brain when you use any guide (even perfect one). kizwan haven't described the code pattern which I met in ThinkPad BIOS.

Guys, please don't install the current versions of dual-IDA BIOS - it's useless, they simply won't let you activate dual-IDA support. I'll inform you when fixed versions are available.

[User Retired 2]

Guys, please don't install the current versions of dual-IDA BIOS - it's useless, they simply won't let you activate dual-IDA support. I'll inform you when fixed versions are available.

If all the dual-IDA bios require a revision then have you considered replace the dual-IDA bios links here with TBA?