Asus X55A - 30 minutes

[ralphstafford]

Hello, I am new to bios modding and I have encountered few problems concerning CPU support/BIOS changing.

First things first, the laptop is Asus X55A, it has HM70 chipset but the used CPU is Intel Pentium B970 that is not oficially supported. But for some reason it is the only CPU that works without crashing. I have tried few others including i5-2410M, i3-3110M, i7-3610QM - all of them worked fine, everything seemed normal except that with each of them the laptop shuts down cold precisely 30 minutes since powering on. It is as if someone just pulled power supply and battery at one moment, once the time reaches 1800th second the laptop shuts down and looks as if it wasn't on just a second ago. It is not caused by the OS, same happens in Win7, Win10, Ubuntu and BIOS. Overheating is out of question because of the time precision. Motherboard is not broken because with B970 the crashes do not emerge. I think it is some kind of failsafe in BIOS or something like that?

Second thing is that I tried to edit BIOS file downloaded from Asus Support site (BIOS based on Aptio 4 by Am. Megatrends). I used MMTool v4.50 to remove old CPU microcode and add few newer, but once I saved the file and tried to flash BIOS with Asustek Easy Flash Utility, the program displayed error that the file was invalid and refused to proceed with flashing. What did I do wrong?

I would really really really like to know how to get rid of the stupid 30 minutes shutdown rule that is poisoning my upgrade efforts, any help appreciated. Thanks.

[pxo]

Hi,

what should i say ... you are not alone. Got the same problem with my SONY VAIO with InsydeH2O Bios.

Because of missing VT-d support of the pre-installed B970 CPU I decided to upgrade to an I5-2410M. From that time I've got the same result as you described. In my opinion an update/change of the Microcode won't help, because, as far as I know, B970 and I5-2410M share the same CPUID(206A7) and use the same code.

I'll do some researches on that and will update my results if there are any news.

By now I have to apologize that I could't help you. ... so ... stay tuned and don't give up.

[DeathBringer]

Your notebook has HM70 chipset. HM70 has well known problem and can't run i3/i5/i7 more then 30 minutes.
Only hub(HM70) replacing will help. Or you can replace whole motherboard to new one with HM75, HM76 or HM77.
Another solution: put your laptop to sleep state every 25-29 min. This reset a timer. You can use Task Scheduler to do it.

[pxo]

Your notebook has HM70 chipset. HM70 has well known problem and can't run i3/i5/i7 more then 30 minutes.
Only hub(HM70) replacing will help. Or you can replace whole motherboard to new one with HM75, HM76 or HM77.
Another solution: put your laptop to sleep state every 25-29 min. This reset a timer. You can use Task Scheduler to do it.

1. Thx for your reply
2. Nice approach with the "Sleep-Function"
 
Mybe you know the timer which is responsible for the shutdown and provide me with a hint. Then, a program, running in Ring 0, should be able to reset the timer directly. Simulating a "Going to Sleep" signal, i think, is not possible.

Again thx for your hints.