Around six months ago (and luckily before the whole ram shortage) I managed to scrounge up enough money to build this monstrosity of a machine, based on what I thought was a lenovo thinkcentre m700… More on that further down.

The whole mod works wonderfully. But the problem i’m facing is that the poor i5-6500 it came with just cannot keep up with what i’m doing with it and bottlenecks the whole machine.

Without any mods. The Best CPU i can put into it is an i7-6700. Which is still a 6th gen CPU… But it’s still about 70€ where I live. While for some reason I can find a lot of i3-9100. For 20-30€. Which from what I understand are B0 stepping chips and don’t require pin modding to be used. And should still be a good upgrade.

The last problem was the BIOS. The bios on this machine is not meant to support such a new chip. But I remember reading people having success with a program called “coffeetime” to shoehorn the microcode to use newer cpus.

When I went to sanity check what the machine’s bios said. I found out it’s a actually an m800. Not an m700. This raises a problem. Since it’s chipset is a q150. That has the problem of having a stricter/ more in depth Intel ME. That from what I managed to find requires somekind of bypass.

Do you think this is still feasible to do? And do you know if there is any safe source for coffeetime / some guide to do this mod by hand? Since having a random software that I can’t read the source of modify the bios of my machine feels a bit iffy.

  • brokenlcd@feddit.itOPEnglish
    1·
    3 days ago

    I’d recommend the MSI Afterburner’s curve optimizer on Windows, and a pyNVML script on Linux.

    In the end I managed to half ass a solution using LACT to make the fans stay off for most of the thermal excursion. And fire at max as soon as 65°C is reached. It’s a dumb and loud way to do it. But it currently. Works.

    I’m not sure if pyNVML is what is used inside of LACT. But from what I remember undervolting on linux is a bit messy. Since you have to set a maximum clock and then shift it upwards with nvmlDeviceSetGpcClkVfOffset. I’ve yet to do that though since exams started hammering me. Plus I was a bit hesitant to mess with clocks because of the card’s warranty. I don’t know if it could affect it.

    On the thermal side there was also the problem of my desk suffocating the card. So I’ve cut a pair of holes in the desk and added two pwm controlled fans. And i’m currently building a PCB with a pi pico to allow the pc to make them spin faster when the card is under load. Through a fancontrol module. (I’ll have to polish it up and share the code eventually. I bet there is another madman that’ll find such a custom fan controller useful)

    May I recommend a duct too? I have my 3090 “sealed” against the edge of the case with weather sealing strip foam, and it pulls in ambient air from a different spot where everything is exhausted.

    Yeah. Unfortunately that isn’t really applicable to my case. Right now the card pulls fresh air from the top of the case. That is refreshed by the desk fans. And it exhausts to the back and front of the case. I can’t really make a proper forced path since the panel is fragile and the back is fully open. Though i’m planning to put an extra fan in that gap between the psu and GPU to force it to pull more air from the top. While exhausting the hot air towards the desk fans. (Sorry if I made no sense. My English isn’t that good unfortunately)

    Hopefully when i’m free enough I can try to get an under lock going though.