X58 luddite : Hot rodded Dell 730x owners, looking for the A11b bios! Reward offered.

So ALL of the sites I've seen with this bios are GONE. For those that aren't in the know, it's a cross flash of the Alienware bios for a Dell board (same board, two feature sets from Dell, classy). The bios includes the microcode for increasing ram from 6-24gb and allowing the use of Xeons and the 990X.

This is a beautiful machine that really deserves a 990X and at least 12gb of ram. This is the first time I've ever run into something being straight scrubbed from the internet like this.

I can dig around for some useless to me hardware for anyone that can take the time to find the bios if you had a 730x. Or I could edeepthroat you, whatever. It took me a year to wait for one of these to pop up on fleabay.

Otherwise I'll explore doing the microcode modifications myself, but I'm REALLY worried that's going to turn out terrible.

With some recent work on getting Voodoo 5500s into Windows 7, this having a PCI slot and being X58, this thing could be a swiss army knife of late 90s FPS glory. A3d, glide, respectable passmarks and all in Dell's swan song. This thing truly is a glorious machine, not the Dell we know today.

TLDR: OP is offering a blowjob if you find the BIOS.

Ocellaris said:

TLDR: OP is offering a blowjob if you find the BIOS.

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Technically just to edeepthroat. So you get your epeen out, and I'll go all the way down. Once. Up to you to edge yourself before hand. But again, bios also required, won't take payment after.

What was the corresponding alienware model?

Edit: I don't think it matters. I see it was a modded bios and the chances of it still being around are slim. I didn't want the edeepthroat anyway .

kirbyrj said:

What was the corresponding alienware model?

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The Area 51 ALX, bios A11.

Basically so far as I understand it's that bios, swapping the alienhead at boot with an XPS logo and then swapping back to Dell's 1.0.0.6 in the portion for power control management, since the Area 51 had a custom power button routine to let it "pulse" when in standby, which is also misinterpreted by the power switch when off. So instead of staying off, it just blinks where the Alienware would pulse (since these are actual hardware differences).

Could learn how to update the CPU and memory micro code, swap in the logo, but I think the power function code is more in the realm of someone that has some significant time in bios modding.

Basically all the sites that were discussing this have went dark, and all that remains are remnants of discussion that have been picked up and garbled in automated advertising algorithms. Never would have thought I'd end up understanding what a digital archaeologist is.

X58 boards aren't too hard to come by now a days. There's a guy with an eVGA board in the FS section for $100. I got 2 Sabertooths for just under $100 a piece.

kirbyrj said:

X58 boards aren't too hard to come by now a days. There's a guy with an eVGA board in the FS section for $100. I got 2 Sabertooths for just under $100 a piece.

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It's a romantic thing. Otherwise I'd just go with something a lot more stout and VFIO since its atx. Which reminds me I should probably post this on Vogons as well. Way too new for most of those guys, but a lot of hard core hardware guys.