Question How do I extract an image of my laptop BIOS?

[Budgeteer_262]

I discovered that the bios on my Acer Nitro 5 an515-43 BIOS assigns 2GB of the 8GB installed for the Vega 8 iGPU to use as its VRAM. Because of this, the laptop never uses more than about 5.5GB of RAM while gaming on the GTX 1650M. My computer already suffers from sudden frame drops accross any games with half decent textures so the ram being effectivly reduced to 6GB is certanly not helping.

I purchased the acer nitro 5 to be a self sufficient and economical machine, so I'm not keen on buying a 16gb ram kit for this laptop. This is especially the case because it would have to replace both the 4GB sticks with 8GB sticks, and because even then, I would only have 14GB ram anyway.

Because of this, I intend to create a bios image of my Insyde H20 bios and ask someone to modify it on the Bios Mods forums to fix the 2gb issue and unlock the advanced bios menu for these laptops to use XMP overclocking and so on. Given that game developers optimize their games around standardised RAM sizes like 8GB or 4GB, recovering the last 2GB may get rid of the chronic stuttering in games. Maybe leaving 100mb of RAM for the iGPU.

I'm posting here because I don't know how to crate a bios dump for my InsydeH20 bios despite trying really hard to find out online. I also fear that my bios may be write protected, making the whole effort pointless.

Could someone either confirm that this is the case or show me how to acquire a bios dump for my Nitro 5? I am quite sure that I want to proceed to try this. Spending money to buy a whole new ram kit feels like a victory for the "genius" who assigned 2gb of ram for the iGPU in the first place.

Thanks

 

[Colif]

I am quite sure that I want to proceed to try this.

curious, I wonder if the acer uses the igpu for desktop and only uses the Nvidia GPU for gaming. If so, disabling it in BIOS might not be a good idea. Using both like this is common in laptops.. saves power.

Right click start
choose run...
type dxdiag and hit enter

what shows under the Nvidia card on Display tab? if it shows as Full Display Device it can be used as the main GPU. Otherwise Laptop uses it in GPU intensive programs

Do you trust these people to get BIOS right? I mean, get it wrong and laptop won't work at all.

Ram, although expensive, might be cheaper than a dead laptop.
You wouldn't get all ram back, the Nvidia card would use some ram... 55mb or so. not a lot but no one gets all 8gb.

here is one way to extract it - https://superuser.com/questions/157...-data-from-uefi-bios-mac-address-sn-uuid-msdm

 

[TerryLaze]

I discovered that the bios on my Acer Nitro 5 an515-43 BIOS assigns 2GB of the 8GB installed for the Vega 8 iGPU to use as its VRAM. Because of this, the laptop never uses more than about 5.5GB of RAM while gaming on the GTX 1650M. My computer already suffers from sudden frame drops accross any games with half decent textures so the ram being effectivly reduced to 6GB is certanly not helping.

Are you sure it uses the ram for the iGPU, it could just as well be using it for the 1650.
You should check what the 1650m is set up for.
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000020962/graphics.html
Even desktop discreet GPUs will use shared ram as colifs pic shows, the 2070 in that example has 8Gb and uses another 16Gb from the system.

 

[SkyNetRising]

Could someone either confirm that this is the case or show me how to acquire a bios dump for my Nitro 5?

You can get BIOS from laptop manufacturer support site.
https://www.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/support-product/8033?b=1

Keep in mind - failed BIOS flash or flashing wrong BIOS or corrupted BIOS will result in a bricked laptop.

 

[Colif]

DXDiag might show him which GPU is sharing the ram.

This is normal on Nitro - the amount of RAM set aside on the max amount of RAM dedicated to your integrated GPU. On my Nitro 5 (AN515-42), it reserves 1GB of RAM as dedicated VRAM to my internal GPU. My laptop shipped with 8 GB, so the max RAM i could see was 7 GB. I added another 8 GB to it and now I see 15 GB (instead of actual 16 GB).

processor has the vega8 iGPU which takes 2GB of RAM space to independently work as a low power graphics card. This helps it to do its work wihtout worrying about the original RAM usage of system. However, I agree that it can be an issue when you try to open more apps consuming more ram space. So if you want to really get the potential of the system, you have to install another ram in the empty DIMM slot. YOU HAVE TO DO TIS THROUGH SERVICE CENTRE, OTHERWISE YOU WILL VOID YOUR WARRATNY. I have isntalled another 8GB of ram previous month and now the system has 14GB of free ram for system usage and 2GB for Vega8. This will solve your problem permenantly.

https://community.acer.com/en/discu...o-be-used-when-8gb-installed-nitro-5-an515-43

I still feel new ram is probably cheaper than a potentially bricked laptop.

How much ram is hardware reserved?

 

[hotaru.hino]

The only way to dump a BIOS image is to find the chip that has it (it's probably some SPI flash chip), desolder it, and take it to something that can read its contents. The storage chip probably isn't that sophisticated enough to have any fancy write protection schemes on it.

However, that's not the least of your problems when it comes to modifying BIOS. The list of things I'm going through in my head are:

• Is the BIOS encrypted?
• Does the BIOS have to be digitally signed?
  • My guess is... yes. Most laptops made in the past 3-4 years have Secure Boot enabled. Meaning unless you use a valid digital signature for the BIOS, the system's going to refuse to boot.
• What integrity check is it using?
  • I'm sure the UEFI standard specifies this, but I don't have a copy on hand and I'm sure you have to pay for it
• And of course: what value do you even poke at?

So agree with @Colif, better to just buy a RAM kit than to potentially brick the laptop or spend time, energy, and resources to figure this out.

 

[Budgeteer_262]

2.1GB is hardware reserved. I believe 2gb is assigned to Vega 8 iGPU, based on forum comments and that 2g is the max amount of ram which the manifacturer (AMD) says you can assign to vega 8 as vram.

Regarding bios mods, I was hoping to ask someone on Bios Mods -The Best BIOS Update and Modification Source (bios-mods.com) to mod the bios for me. I'm not sure about all the digital signage requirements but there are a wide variety of working cracked BIOS mods. But if laptops from the last few years are all bios locked, I guess that's the same here. I partially posted this to ask for confirmation about someone on a different forum saying that all nitro 5 bioses are locked and unmoddable. I guess they're probably right.

That being said, I was able to trick the Insyde flash utility into flashing back to an older (unmodded) bios version by changing values on the config file it unzipped with. It would have otherwise prevented rolling back to an older version. I was only able to do that with forum guidance but it makes me wonder if all I need to do is find and change a few more values on the config file and the utility would flash any bios I give it? (aside from extracting my bios image and getting it modded first).

Regarding extracting the bios, I thought that you could use software to extract the bios image. I guess the only way on this model is to remove the bios chip.

on DXdiag it says: (all approx)

5.7GB total memory

3.9GB display memory

1.7GB shared memory

I don't really know what that means but if the GPU is using the 2gb ram when the igpu is not then all is well I guess.

I certainly won't risk a bios flash without proper information, and it's not even an option yet because a bios dump is probably not possible very easily.

My laptop also has slightly bigger problems right now (my latest thread) so I am not going to work on this until that is resolved. Probably for the best as you pointed out.

Thanks for the advice