So,
After a week of searching for information, I finally got to mod my Optiplex 380 bios. Basically what I wanted was to update the microcode for 06FB xeon cpus (I have a E5335 G0).
So, quick and dirty.
Take the hdr file (
[censored].exe /writehdrfile will do it) and open it in a hex editor.
Search for the cpuid that you want to mod (I've only modded existing, not added/removed) but it could possibly work.
Pay attention to the header in the microcode file and paste it (overwrite) in the hdr : offset 30 in the microcode file .
And now the funny part, where nobody seems to care or won't say (thanks go to this guy :
http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_65bb08ce0100gt5k.html)
how you need to calculate the correct checksum.
For the dell o380, the checksum is at 1f054 (found the adress by opening it with the phoenixtool).
you can safely delete anything beyond this point. I believe there are compression headers garbage after the 2 checksums.
So, first checksum : from 54h to 1f054h - crc32 - take the value, put it in a calculator (hex) and not (operation) the result. write the resulting four bytes in reverse order.
The second checksum : entire file (including the first checksum - 00h to 1f058h) - same procedure as for the first (crc32 - not - reverse bytes)
That's it.
You can take the resulting hdr file and add/mod slic to it using phoenixtool.
One thing that keeps puzzling me - in the bios, the data for the microcode seems much bigger and I still don't have speedstep enabled with the new bios. But, i could check the correct version in the bios (BC) and I gots ssse3 on top of the default b4 ancient version in the original bios. Funny thing, for the desktop 6fb parts, the microcode is the latest.
Here's the edited file if anyone cares
[
attachment=10447]
Please share your results ... I'm gonna go f... up my 975x intel next