bufulo

Where is a good place to look for how to choose value for all the many settings in Maxwell BIOS Tweaker? How did you decide what to change and what not to change?

Thanks so much for all the useful information! I have zero experience with laptops other than swapping a mechanical drive for SSD for a friend. My HP is a desktop - sort of. It uses mostly laptop type hardware - it's an oddball. I originally built it up to play with stuff like this and learn a few things along the way. It became my only computer mostly by accident and won't be for much longer. The MXM card I have been using in it is a DELL Quadro M2200. It's worked just fine for the most part for a few years now but was mistreated a bit early on while I found a proper heatsink/cooling solution. It appears the memory is suffering in some way (outright or maybe just solder issues but also can't completely rule out GPU memory controller either) as a result. I started playing with nvflash as part of diagnosing and just out of curiosity. I've played with Linux a bit over the years and its nice enough when using a GUI. The system level stuff can be really frustrating at times though. For me a computer is mostly just an appliance but I have just enough background and interest in the inner workings to do dumb things occasionally.

So there really is no way to brick the video card because nvflash can always re-write the entire VBIOS? If that's the case, why can't I edit the Device ID, Vendor ID, Subsystem ID, or even the VBIOS version? Those have to be in the VBIOS unless there is other non-volatile storage on the cards (which seems unlikely simply due to cost and complexity). There would be no need for a hardware programmer unless some portion of the VBIOS is used for this information and accessible to nvflash. I don't get it. Are there secret commands for nvflash not listed in the built-in help? What commands did you use to "get things back in working order"? I'm doing this on an old HP EliteDesk 800 G1 USDT running Windows with integrated graphics (Intel i7-4790S) and an MXM slot for the DELL-branded Quadro M2200. I'm trying to figure out the difference, if any, between the DELL-branded Quadro M2200 and HP-branded before possibly purchasing a new card (DELL are much less expensive and more readily available). My card is likely suffering a hardware failure that won't be worth repairing. I've really had no trouble with nvflash so far and have managed to make the card useless a few times along the way. Why Linux?

Wasn't the vBIOS on the card already signed? Are you saying that NVFlash overwrite the ENTIRE vBIOS? That surprises me because that would make it very easy to render the card unuseable, if, for example, a bad vBIOS were written that destroyed the portion that is responsible for the writing to the flash. Unless maybe the flash is entirely open to the PCIe (MXM) bus so NVFlash can indeed wipe and rewrite the entire vBIOS?... hmmm... So hard finding details on this MXM stuff! Do you have any documentation or links that may help? Also, is there a guide for using the Maxwell II BIOS Tweaker? I'm finding it pretty confusing. For example, changes don't seem to stick unless you immediately save after changing each clock setting for example. It's odd.

Thanks for sharing the vBIOS! Do you know if it was a direct copy of the vBIOS from another HP card or was this created for you? I ask because when I open your vBIOS file in the Maxwell II BIOS Tweaker, every single value exactly matches those from my DELL branded Quadro M2200. Also, can you please also share the modified vBIOS?