BIOS update to support Ryzen 3700x? Helios 500 question

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Answers

  • NiteNinja
    NiteNinja Member Posts: 50 Devotee WiFi Icon
    Helios 700 is out, no AMD 3rd-gen variant. Hopes are dimming. They "improved" the Helios 700 to help with the Intel variant of the 500's cooling drawbacks, but it's fans are louder than ever before. Asus had the first AMD desktop-in-a-laptop, Acer had the second, maybe MSI will have the next one...
  • Nottheseapples
    Nottheseapples Member Posts: 6

    Tinkerer

    Some folks tried flashing the bios here, long thread.
    good reads
    http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/acer-predator-vega-56-ryzen-2-helios-500.817796/page-65
  • BurnsXL
    BurnsXL Member Posts: 35 Devotee WiFi Icon
    update - going to do this tonight, the first boot kit I got was damaged in transit I believe (FedEx just threw it over my fence and it was in the yard for like a week, got wet). 
  • Krazyatom
    Krazyatom Member Posts: 3 New User
    Great, keep us posted. 
  • NiteNinja
    NiteNinja Member Posts: 50 Devotee WiFi Icon
    edited August 2019
    Also when reassembling your computer after swapping the CPU (or in my case, swapping thermal paste), be sure to apply liberal amounts of paste to the GPU die. As you can see in the picture, the coldplate only made contact with half the GPU's die. The stock paste, well... putty, is much thicker than Arctic Silver. I went to do a post repaste benchmark and the GPU instantly throttled. The heatsink screw layout is less than optimal as well. The CPU has 4, but the GPU technically has 3, which the bottom left isn't perfectly lined up on mine.
  • bobzdar
    bobzdar Member Posts: 42 Devotee WiFi Icon
    BurnsXL said:
    update - going to do this tonight, the first boot kit I got was damaged in transit I believe (FedEx just threw it over my fence and it was in the yard for like a week, got wet). 
    Any update? It's been a couple of weeks. 
  • JeffTechMedia
    JeffTechMedia Member Posts: 1 New User
    Alright boys I'm here for you. Was dissapointed to hit the end of this without any resolution. So I have the sexy little Helios 500 and I have a 3900X. Let's go all out.
    I'm willing to break them both to make this work. Will also be posting a youtube video of the teardown and attempts. May God be with my laptop. 
  • bobzdar
    bobzdar Member Posts: 42 Devotee WiFi Icon
    Let us know how it goes - I have a 3700X and can't decide which system to put it in, but if you can get a working bios it'd be a no-brainer to put it in the Helios.
  • NiteNinja
    NiteNinja Member Posts: 50 Devotee WiFi Icon
    I tried logging into my Bios-mods forum account but there seems to be an issue with my login information via mobile, so I'll have to check later. They have a whole section dedicated for CPU upgrade support and microcode updating, would be the best plan of action.

    Regardless, there will not be a easy software solution to get a 3rd Gen Ryzen to work on this machine, you'll need flashing tools to do it if a custom BIOS is obtained. When I had my computer open, I tried looking for the bugger, but I think it's on the flip side of the board as most of the chips on the visible side seemed to be power management chips, but to be fair I don't know exactly where to look anyway. Just kept googling every chip I could read. I did find a curious little button, which you can reach just above the m.2 trays, mostly covered by the chassis, my best guess it's a CMOS reset button, which would make sense as it's in near proximity to the backup battery. Speaking of that, this computer has a rechargable BIOS backup battery! Something I've never seen before. 

    Anyway if anyone else hasn't made a post in Bios-mods, I'll probably get something up soon. 
  • fleaplus
    fleaplus Member Posts: 2 New User
    NiteNinja said:
    I tried logging into my Bios-mods forum account but there seems to be an issue with my login information via mobile, so I'll have to check later. They have a whole section dedicated for CPU upgrade support and microcode updating, would be the best plan of action.

    Regardless, there will not be a easy software solution to get a 3rd Gen Ryzen to work on this machine, you'll need flashing tools to do it if a custom BIOS is obtained. When I had my computer open, I tried looking for the bugger, but I think it's on the flip side of the board as most of the chips on the visible side seemed to be power management chips, but to be fair I don't know exactly where to look anyway. Just kept googling every chip I could read. I did find a curious little button, which you can reach just above the m.2 trays, mostly covered by the chassis, my best guess it's a CMOS reset button, which would make sense as it's in near proximity to the backup battery. Speaking of that, this computer has a rechargable BIOS backup battery! Something I've never seen before. 

    Anyway if anyone else hasn't made a post in Bios-mods, I'll probably get something up soon. 
    The system bios is along the edge of the GPU heatsink side, near the center of the motherboard. I posted details and photos of it in the NBR forum thread. A modded bios is possible (unlocked RAM timings, etc..) but getting an AGESA update would be complicated because its an Insyde bios instead of Aptio which is far more common for desktop AMD boards.
  • Krazyatom
    Krazyatom Member Posts: 3 New User
    BurnsXL said:
    update - going to do this tonight, the first boot kit I got was damaged in transit I believe (FedEx just threw it over my fence and it was in the yard for like a week, got wet). 
    Any luck? 
  • Nottheseapples
    Nottheseapples Member Posts: 6

    Tinkerer

    yaaaa lets here it?
  • WarFreak131
    WarFreak131 Member Posts: 12

    Tinkerer

    Throwing my hat into the ring to figure out what the results of these tests are.
  • bobzdar
    bobzdar Member Posts: 42 Devotee WiFi Icon
    Time for my bi-weekly check of this thread, looks like no progress so far.  Might be time to take back my SFF, drop in the 3700X, add a 5700XT and give my daughter the Acer instead.
  • Poor_Bear
    Poor_Bear Member Posts: 23 Troubleshooter
    I want to tap in to the force of this forum. I recently bought the 1tb 970 evo plus for the second available slot in my helios 500 (2700) and it isn't being detected. Is there any other steps I need to do in order to activate the additional m.2 slot?
  • kingmetal
    kingmetal Member Posts: 17 Troubleshooter
    Poor_Bear said:
    I want to tap in to the force of this forum. I recently bought the 1tb 970 evo plus for the second available slot in my helios 500 (2700) and it isn't being detected. Is there any other steps I need to do in order to activate the additional m.2 slot?
    It's off topic for this thread but the second m.2. slots on these machines are SATA only so the NVMe drive you purchased won't work in that slot. Either replace the main SSD with your 970 Evo or return it and get an m.2. SATA drive.
  • xapim
    xapim ACE Posts: 7,257 Pathfinder
    edited September 2019
    Poor_Bear as kingmetal stated above and very well you only have those 2 options either bin/sell the stock nvme and replace it for the evo or return the evo and get a wd blue 2tb 3d nand as i have for ex only the intel variant has 2 nvme slots the ryzen has 1 nvme other sata


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  • WarFreak131
    WarFreak131 Member Posts: 12

    Tinkerer

    Poor_Bear said:
    I want to tap in to the force of this forum. I recently bought the 1tb 970 evo plus for the second available slot in my helios 500 (2700) and it isn't being detected. Is there any other steps I need to do in order to activate the additional m.2 slot?
    Have you tried initializing the drive?
  • kingmetal
    kingmetal Member Posts: 17 Troubleshooter
    Poor_Bear said:
    I want to tap in to the force of this forum. I recently bought the 1tb 970 evo plus for the second available slot in my helios 500 (2700) and it isn't being detected. Is there any other steps I need to do in order to activate the additional m.2 slot?
    Have you tried initializing the drive?

    It will not work, as I said before the second slot is not NVMe compatible. The 970 EVO (to my knowledge) is an NVMe-only part so it is completely incompatible with that slot and will not work at all.
  • NiteNinja
    NiteNinja Member Posts: 50 Devotee WiFi Icon
    I bought a cheapo 128gb M.2 SATA drive to confirm that the slot behaves like that. Even on the Intel model, the second M 2 slot is ideally configured to handle a Optane module. 

    You can have either 2x M.2 SATA drives (RAID or no RAID), or 1 of each M.2 NVME and M.2 SATA. WD and Samsung seem to have the only 2TB M.2 SATA drives on the market, and they're well north of $230 USD. 

    This seems to be a chipset or BIOS limitation as we know the Ryzen 2000 series has enough PCI-E lanes to run the GPU, and dual NVMe drives at 8x,4x,4x respectively with the 4 remaining to communicate with the chipset. But I'm getting into the weeds here for the scope of this forum thread.