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.
I wish I could help but you sound like you’re already more knowledgeable than 99% of the planet at salvaging and improving these crippled piles of industrially-locked-down prebuilt e-waste.
I’ve got a handful of these junkers picked up from auctions and surplus sales and I just use them as-is like slightly more powerful raspberry Pis. I’ve got one that manages and supervises my 3d printer, for example.
All I can say is good luck, let us know how you make out! Personally I wouldn’t be too optimistic, but you’ve already gotten much farther than I ever have (or have even attempted to) so good for you!
Aw thank you :-) But to be honest. I ain’t that good at this. All I know is mostly from reading wikis and following work already done by others.
The real beasts are the ones that actually discover that this is possibile. Eg. The console modding community. (I’m still impressed at how dumb of a way they managed to mod the switch: it literally shorts the CPU to make it skip checks) or the guys at win-raid forums. Where I think the whole research about this upgrade being possibile started in the first place.
English isn’t my first language. So I’m not sure if I managed to get my point across. But essentially I’m saying: in the sea there is always a bigger fish. And in this world you never finish learning. There will always be someone that knows more than us.
Also if you do have a lot of these machines… They really aren’t bad ones. Win 10 ltsc runs like a dream on these. And linux is right at home on them. It’s only really a bottleneck for me because I literally use my machine for fluid simulation for my studies. But even for games. An half height gpu like the RX 6400 gives you a decently stout pc. If you aren’t aiming for full res upscaled AAA games. Hell. The steam deck has shown just how much we can do with more modest specs.
Would you do this mainly because you want to figure out if you can, or mostly due to the 40€ price difference?
A little bit of both. I generally like to mess with this kind of thing. Plus if I manage to save those 40-50€. It’s money I can invest to buy a decent HDD. And move away from the WD green from 2009 I’m currently using in there.
Plus. If I do manage to find enough info. I may try to implement a rudimentary version of coffeetime. So at least the community has an open source variant to do this. Since especially with B0 chips like the one I’m trying to use. It’s not that difficult of a process and is mostly drop in hardware wise. The only hiccup I’ve found is that the software side is lacking. Barring a sketchy binary that roams around some forums.
I got no advice on coffeetime, sorry. But I’d keep a lookout for Skylake Xeons, or maybe whole motherboards with embedded CPUs.
Also, on your heating troubles, you can definitely undervolt Ampere. The cards are designed to clock up to high temperatures and stay there, but your 3060 will work better undervolted and capped at a reasonable clockspeed. I’d recommend the MSI Afterburner’s curve optimizer on Windows, and a pyNVML script on Linux.
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. This is especially nice because it cuts down on noise, and your GPU fans become “case fans.”
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.