question about BIOS

[yofhas]

Hello, I have a question, I have this motherboard, and I would like to use it for games and things like that because I have all the other components, processor, ram, graphics, etc. The question is, the bios of this motherboard is a very basic bios that does not allow the cpu fan speed to vary, and no third party PC program seems to work, there are some "unlocked" bios out there but I don't know how safe they are. they are and what they allow to be done and what they don't. Does anyone know about these bios, the motherboard is an HP PRO 3500 H61 DDR3 696234-001 701413-001, if anyone knows, please, thank you.

 

[Magsor]

This post almost feels like trolling hence why no-one has bothered to answer. There are A LOT of very knowledgeable people on these forums...

Anyhow if what your trying to attempt is working then you should try it. This motherboard is very cheap and old and it's not recommended for gaming so no fan trickery needed...

For gaming in 2023 and the future, you will look for something that will be compatible with Vulcan; which can be possible with your setup but the CPU will probably be dragging down any kind of decent GPU.

 

[FAST6191]

It had only been a few hours when you made that reply. Not really time enough to dismiss things as such.



Anyway don't know about this specific board. Flashing the BIOS has two main avenues of security concern
1) You are trusting whoever made the alterations with basically the heart of the computer.
2) Mess it up and it is bricked.

For 2) then do check but by this point in time many had options to revert, swap back or otherwise return to original. It is also not the hardest to flash most things of this vintage manually if it comes to it.

For 1) then this is an embedded/OEM locked DDR3 board. Chances are your credit card details are never going to be entered into it, it does not run the nuclear centrifuges and is no good for bitcoin mining. Nobody good enough to do a hacked BIOS is going to bother with it.

Likewise in the spirit of "it is fucked anyway/can't break it any more" then why not? If lack of fan control is a dealbreaker for you then it is useless to you and probably not worth a lot of money (I have not checked but for the sake of not having a "wow I am old" moment I am going to assume we have a few more years before it hits retro prices, not to mention most DDR3 era single core performance is not going to beat P4 or nice core2 and also not be enough to do the later/modern stuff too well whilst dodging pitfalls that see people build out P4 boxes for games of their vintage).
If it is only this that is the problem* then you do also have the option to take a more old school approach -- there are things that will do their own fan control (take power from elsewhere, stick probe in suitable location probably in heatsink, it then reads that and does PWM control or whatever, you might have to disable warnings in the BIOS or dummy load the onboard fan power header) or you might even be able to go a bit more cowboy.


*my worst story with locked BIOS. Friend had an otherwise lovely little laptop truly locked down that decided to flick the USB from 2.0 to 1.1 (2.0 is only 30 megabytes a second on a good day, this is a fraction of that and external drives were hitting the hundred gigs range at this point) and not have an option to change it back.

 

[Ryccardo]

And this is why you don't buy HP "products" post 2011

Anyway - if it's a premade firmware on a competent website (like the ex win-raid, biosmods, etc) it will presumably have been tested at least to boot on defaults? And a SPI programmer with clip is quite affordable nowadays, if you want to make a backup (given this is an Intel chipset there's also the software-based service mode and FPT approach, one of which may well be required to flash the modified rom in the first place depending on how much anti-fun has been put into the current one)

For the case of EFI there's also the universal IFR extractor + setup_var approach (the table that holds all the options, what makes them appear, and what they change is somewhat standardized, so it's possible to get a list of all settings, even hidden ones, then change them with a 3rd party setup utility instead of flashing something that may not even exist) but why would anyone want to do that if the more proper solution exists!

 

[yofhas]

This post almost feels like trolling hence why no-one has bothered to answer. There are A LOT of very knowledgeable people on these forums...

Anyhow if what your trying to attempt is working then you should try it. This motherboard is very cheap and old and it's not recommended for gaming so no fan trickery needed...

For gaming in 2023 and the future, you will look for something that will be compatible with Vulcan; which can be possible with your setup but the CPU will probably be dragging down any kind of decent GPU.

These responses in forums that promote mods and retro are a bit strong, don't you think?
But I still tell you that gaming is not playing the most current thing on the market, obviously it is not a gaming motherboard, but you can put it to use, and if experimenting on it is more viable than experimenting on a 700, 800 motherboard, don't you think? ?

Post automatically merged: Sep 25, 2023

It had only been a few hours when you made that reply. Not really time enough to dismiss things as such.



Anyway don't know about this specific board. Flashing the BIOS has two main avenues of security concern
1) You are trusting whoever made the alterations with basically the heart of the computer.
2) Mess it up and it is bricked.

For 2) then do check but by this point in time many had options to revert, swap back or otherwise return to original. It is also not the hardest to flash most things of this vintage manually if it comes to it.

For 1) then this is an embedded/OEM locked DDR3 board. Chances are your credit card details are never going to be entered into it, it does not run the nuclear centrifuges and is no good for bitcoin mining. Nobody good enough to do a hacked BIOS is going to bother with it.

Likewise in the spirit of "it is fucked anyway/can't break it any more" then why not? If lack of fan control is a dealbreaker for you then it is useless to you and probably not worth a lot of money (I have not checked but for the sake of not having a "wow I am old" moment I am going to assume we have a few more years before it hits retro prices, not to mention most DDR3 era single core performance is not going to beat P4 or nice core2 and also not be enough to do the later/modern stuff too well whilst dodging pitfalls that see people build out P4 boxes for games of their vintage).
If it is only this that is the problem* then you do also have the option to take a more old school approach -- there are things that will do their own fan control (take power from elsewhere, stick probe in suitable location probably in heatsink, it then reads that and does PWM control or whatever, you might have to disable warnings in the BIOS or dummy load the onboard fan power header) or you might even be able to go a bit more cowboy.


*my worst story with locked BIOS. Friend had an otherwise lovely little laptop truly locked down that decided to flick the USB from 2.0 to 1.1 (2.0 is only 30 megabytes a second on a good day, this is a fraction of that and external drives were hitting the hundred gigs range at this point) and not have an option to change it back.

Ok, that's why these are good to try, they run 3rd generation i7, the 3770, for example, takes 16 gigabytes of 1600 ram, and they also have Chinese graphics, (which are cheap and are ideal for playing retro and not so retro things)

For example, it runs Resident Evil 4 remake, at medium graphics and at a good speed of 40-50 fps, that's just the CPU temperature being 60-65 and I was looking for perhaps lower values, I'll try better ventilation, not liquid.

And not for the record, it's not mining at all, it's just home experiments