BIOS update to support Ryzen 3700x? Helios 500 question

NiteNinja · November 2019

Well if you like tinkering, the Vega 56 in this machine supports powerplay table modding. 180w works but 220w may become unstable. Happy modding

Khelgar · December 2019

NiteNinja said:

Well if you like tinkering, the Vega 56 in this machine supports powerplay table modding. 180w works but 220w may become unstable. Happy modding

I personally can't try any shenanigans since my piece doesn't have warranty due to Acer not offering global warranty

NiteNinja · December 2019

Khelgar said:

NiteNinja said:

Well if you like tinkering, the Vega 56 in this machine supports powerplay table modding. 180w works but 220w may become unstable. Happy modding

I personally can't try any shenanigans since my piece doesn't have warranty due to Acer not offering global warranty

Nah, it won't brick your machine. Worse case, you just boot into safe mode, use DDU or AMD cleanup utility and uninstall the driver, reinstall a clean driver and try again. Unlike VBIOS modding, powerplay table modding is perfectly safe. This VBiOS caps the vcore voltage to 1000mv. Heck my 2nd time modding, I didn't even bother playing with the target clocks, and just fed it more juice and it turbos up higher on its own. Net FPS gains are palpable especially in titles like Assassin's Creed Odyssey.

Undervolting works too for battery and cooling savings, bit the cooling system in this laptop is so impressive, that even pulling 220w at max load (before furmark crashed after 20 minutes), never got over 73°C.

Working with the CPU isn't very fruitful. You can slide in a 2700X, but your gains is negligible. You can have 2700X's for less than $150 now so if you can use the 2700 in something else, might be worthwhile, otherwise, not really worth the money. Without AGESA update, no 3rd gen is possible A shame. They have a 65w 12 core 24 thread that could be useful in this too.

EugeneShutov · January 2020

Thank you Acer for not updated bios.
Within 2 month i will have 8/16 cores laptop. But lighter, thinner, quieter and cheaper than subj.
I am not trolling, really appreciate it.

bobzdar · March 2020

EugeneShutov said:

Thank you Acer for not updated bios.
Within 2 month i will have 8/16 cores laptop. But lighter, thinner, quieter and cheaper than subj.
I am not trolling, really appreciate it.

Yes but... I'm still hoping for an update so I can throw a 3950x in it.

xapim · March 2020

bobzdar said:

EugeneShutov said:

Thank you Acer for not updated bios.
Within 2 month i will have 8/16 cores laptop. But lighter, thinner, quieter and cheaper than subj.
I am not trolling, really appreciate it.

Yes but... I'm still hoping for an update so I can throw a 3950x in it.

That will most probably not happen ever (if it was to happen would have ages ago) the h500 ryzen it's done maybe the next replacement (if any at all ) will support it if they manufacture a ryzen variant as the ryzen laptop market now has been the nitros 😉 they haven't done any predator/Triton again with ryzen the h500 was more of a unique experiment to see how it goes the same as the first 15 and 17 and the famous 21x predators anyway this is what I think after all this is all marketing and business and if there's no profits in a particular model why keep going any manufacturer would do exactly the same the future its on build/design even new better models not fixing/keeping the older ones it's just business 1o1

Ps: just have to say regarding the h500 either intel or ryzen are still beasts no matter what but they are staying in the past as any other previous model after all were taking about a laptop released 2 years ago reached its end of life as any others

Khelgar · March 2020

Let's agree that Ryzen h500 was a unique experiment but this experiment went really well so why not properly support it? I jumped the gun even knowing there's no global warranty and even though i ended up being happy with the base machine, but in this case my next machine won't be Acer due to lack of support. Even graphics drivers stuck on old version.

NiteNinja · March 2020

Most gaming laptop manufacturers don't even offer out the door support after they're released (looking at you Asus and MSI).

This laptop has up to date video drivers, it's a desktop Vega 56, use the desktop drivers from AMD's website. I'm currently using 20.2.2 with no issues at all.

As for 3950X support, I would highly doubt it even if they released 3rd gen AGESA. You'd blow the VRMs on this machine because they're shared between the GPU and the CPU. I wouldn't trust anything beyond a 95w processor if you're using stock powerplay tables on the GPU.

If you're looking for a performance bump, you're better off looking up the many powerplay table editing guides for the Vega 56, it does work (to a certain degree.) I gained a nice lift simply by allowing the card to use 180w instead of it's capped 120w, so it will Turbo itself up higher. If you're really feeling frisky, I've gotten it stable with a 1526mhz boost clock at 1,000mv with a furmark burn-in.

I still feel this is one of the best desktop replacement laptops out there, but AMD's 4000 series APUs might finally catch up if rumors are correct. I am personally hoping for a 4800H and 5700XT 17 inch gaming laptop from someone someday...

xapim · March 2020

Khelgar its not lack of support its just a case of not risking to blow up a good engineered beast as @NiteNinja just stated above but no one seems to understand that any device has its limitations and the H500 its the same as any other i guess you and 99% of everyone else here in this thread probably should prefer to get it upgraded to support the 3rd gen even if you would be at the risk of blowing it up but unfortunately thats not your own decision to make its the manufacturers but of course everyones still free to express their own opinion

And @NiteNinja completely agree the H500 its still one of the best desktop replacements but amd it will be finally catching up on intel mobile cpus and hopefully in a short time they will smash them as they did on desktops

Khelgar · March 2020

But if you use a CPU with the same TDP, why should it blow up the machine? The newer 3700 or 3700x use the same TDP as stock 2700 but offer substantial single core boost no? Gains would be even better with the next gen.

NiteNinja · March 2020

Khelgar said:

But if you use a CPU with the same TDP, why should it blow up the machine? The newer 3700 or 3700x use the same TDP as stock 2700 but offer substantial single core boost no? Gains would be even better with the next gen.

The thermal design process of the 3950X is "105w".
However there's been much controversy with both AMD's and Intel's marketing when it comes to their numbers and AMD's is the most complex.

Their formula to calculate TDP includes the dissipation value of a recommended cooler. And it happens that the recommended cooler for a 3950X, is a 240mm AIO cooler. With that figured in, they're able to fudge that number to look lower than it actually is.

Source:

https://youtu.be/tL1F-qliSUk

NiteNinja · April 2020

Today I got the chance to try putting a 2700X in the Helios 500. My dad retired his for a 3900X (it's a beast).

The swap went smooth. When you install it, and reboot, you'll lose any security keys tied to your computer, so when Windows 10 reboots, you'll need to use 2-factor to gain access back into your machine. With that out of the way, I did some testing.

Cinebench R20 broke 4000 points from between 3200 and 3400 with the regular 2700 in my machine after several attempts. Machine was behaving properly, ran a few game benches, and all seemed well.

However, fired up Farcry New Dawn, and after several minutes of playing, the PCs performance became rather choppy. I had MSI afterburner graphs running in the background and the CPU and GPU were throttling down in spurts. Wasn't temperature related, so I had a hunch it was power related. For the heck of it, I rebooted and tried again.

Yep, so I kept playing through the stutters and the machine had a power shutdown. Swapped back in the 2700, ran perfectly fine.

So yes, a 2700X will work, but don't play games that both hammer the CPU and the GPU hard at the same time, it just can't handle it. So this is also why a 3rd gen CPU may not work either, how their power and TDP may be calculated differently too.

All in all, was a fun experiment at no cost to me. But I think the Helios 500 will be EOL as soon as the Ryzen 4000 APUs flood the market and they finally pair one with a GPU that's worth it, like a 5700XT/2080 Super. The 4800H is really showing some decent performance.

Nuter · April 2020

NiteNinja said:

On a somewhat unrelated note, I just got done editing the power play tables for this Vega 56. I have p7 set to 1600 megahertz at 1 volt, at +50% power allowance which allows it to use 180 Watts. I have 20% or more across-the-board performance improvement in every game and benchmark I tested it on. Silicon lottery winner? Now I kinda wish I could put a ryzen 3000 series processor in.

Could you share your powertable? Ive just tried regular rx vega 56 table, in full screen games crashing and PC taking random reboots, but fps is aroun 30%+.

bobzdar · April 2020

NiteNinja said:

Today I got the chance to try putting a 2700X in the Helios 500. My dad retired his for a 3900X (it's a beast).

The swap went smooth. When you install it, and reboot, you'll lose any security keys tied to your computer, so when Windows 10 reboots, you'll need to use 2-factor to gain access back into your machine. With that out of the way, I did some testing.

Cinebench R20 broke 4000 points from between 3200 and 3400 with the regular 2700 in my machine after several attempts. Machine was behaving properly, ran a few game benches, and all seemed well.

However, fired up Farcry New Dawn, and after several minutes of playing, the PCs performance became rather choppy. I had MSI afterburner graphs running in the background and the CPU and GPU were throttling down in spurts. Wasn't temperature related, so I had a hunch it was power related. For the heck of it, I rebooted and tried again.

Yep, so I kept playing through the stutters and the machine had a power shutdown. Swapped back in the 2700, ran perfectly fine.

So yes, a 2700X will work, but don't play games that both hammer the CPU and the GPU hard at the same time, it just can't handle it. So this is also why a 3rd gen CPU may not work either, how their power and TDP may be calculated differently too.

All in all, was a fun experiment at no cost to me. But I think the Helios 500 will be EOL as soon as the Ryzen 4000 APUs flood the market and they finally pair one with a GPU that's worth it, like a 5700XT/2080 Super. The 4800H is really showing some decent performance.

Good info - but there should be a fairy easy fix for that. Enable PBO in Ryzen Master - I know it sounds a bit counterintuitive, but what this will do is override the default cpu settings and use the board limits for current. This may reduce boost a little on the 2700X, but should prevent any power limit issues. You can also set custom lower limits if you need to to control power and temps, but if it's running for a while before hitting issues it's likely not power limits but temp limits it's hitting. If it were power limits it'd shut down as soon as it hit full load.

In my case, I had my 2700 at 4ghz with 1.325V and it ran well for about a year, but recently started shutting off after a while under load, so I lowered it to 3.85ghz @ 1.3V and have had no issues. I think it's time for a re-paste if I want to push it that high as I think the temps are getting too high (kryonaut apparently needs refreshing after a year or so), but honestly if I pull it that far apart I'll probably drop a 2700X in and experiment with PBO. I have the GPU pulling around 150W and the CPU probably around 120W, so it's got to be close to it's limits as-is. I think it could run even a 3950X, just at slightly reduced PBO current limits (which X cpus should enable use of) via Ryzen Master. Most of the gains in gaming are on the GPU side anyway, and I have mine set to 1429/900 with power limit +60%, though it only uses about 30% more power at those clocks. I think there's more headroom there if I bump voltages slightly, but honestly at 1080p it's over 100fps in most games anyway so there's not a lot of reason to push it that high.

I'm looking hard at the Asus G14, I'd stay with this if they update bios but having similar power in a laptop that's 1/3 the size/weight is tempting....

kingmetal · April 2020

bobzdar said:

In my case, I had my 2700 at 4ghz with 1.325V and it ran well for about a year, but recently started shutting off after a while under load, so I lowered it to 3.85ghz @ 1.3V and have had no issues.

Just out of curiosity - are you just applying the OC via Ryzen Master after every reboot? Started going down this route and then realized that reboots / hibernation cycles reset the OC, which I guess is expected with Ryzen Master. Memory timings seem to "stick" but I got spooked when I realized that memory timings don't reset to "factory" when you click the master reset button in Ryzen Master. Luckily I had a profile with the default values still in it.

I'm concerned about getting the memory timing into an unstable state and having no reset path, given that we don't have BIOS level controls on this machine. The internet says "resetting the CMOS usually gets things back to normal" but its' unclear to me if the little reset pin on the bottom of the laptop actually does that on this machine. I welcome anyone else's experience / wisdom here.

I've also been curious about replacing the stock RAM. I have some G.Skill SODIMMS with a 2666mhz JEDEC profile in the east to access slots, but I haven't found a reliable disassembly guide to give me a sense of how complicated accessing the top two slots are. The timings are a little looser on the G.Skill kits (althought I'm able to run them at "stock" timing), but I'd love to get all-same RAM running at 2666mhz and then experiment with timing from there.

Overall though, this machine still kicks ***** after 2 years. Nothing beats having a desktop CPU, even if it's "only" sustaining 3.4ghz all core out of the box - that's still incredible. The Vega 56 in this machine is undervolted within an inch of it's life, but Vega does well with an undervolt and I suspect the performance delta between our V56 and stock is less than 15% - and you can probably narrow that gap with VRAM overclocks + power limit target increases. I haven't experimented too heavily with the GPU clocks, but don't see mine go much over 1350 sustained if I push them.

NiteNinja · April 2020

Since this BIOS is locked out, any tweaks to the CPU clocks and enabling Precision Boost Overdrive won't stick after a reboot. You have to enable PBO at the BIOS level for it to apply.
I've recently built a desktop out of the 2700X that I tried in the Helios earlier, and with a ASRock X470, I had to find PBO buried in a long hierarchy of advanced user garbage. With a 360mm radiator I finally broke 4100 in Cinebench R20.

Getting to the memory on the backside is a royal pain in the keister. I've repeatedly stripped it down to do repaste and CPU swaps, but to take out the actual motherboard requires even more screw removal. Thankfully they all use the same size screw in this machine. Once you have it down to the bare CPU and GPU. You'll need to remove the remaining screws and ribbon cables attached to the board then gently pry it out.

bobzdar · April 2020

kingmetal said:

bobzdar said:

In my case, I had my 2700 at 4ghz with 1.325V and it ran well for about a year, but recently started shutting off after a while under load, so I lowered it to 3.85ghz @ 1.3V and have had no issues.
Just out of curiosity - are you just applying the OC via Ryzen Master after every reboot? Started going down this route and then realized that reboots / hibernation cycles reset the OC, which I guess is expected with Ryzen Master. Memory timings seem to "stick" but I got spooked when I realized that memory timings don't reset to "factory" when you click the master reset button in Ryzen Master. Luckily I had a profile with the default values still in it.

I'm concerned about getting the memory timing into an unstable state and having no reset path, given that we don't have BIOS level controls on this machine. The internet says "resetting the CMOS usually gets things back to normal" but its' unclear to me if the little reset pin on the bottom of the laptop actually does that on this machine. I welcome anyone else's experience / wisdom here.

I've also been curious about replacing the stock RAM. I have some G.Skill SODIMMS with a 2666mhz JEDEC profile in the east to access slots, but I haven't found a reliable disassembly guide to give me a sense of how complicated accessing the top two slots are. The timings are a little looser on the G.Skill kits (althought I'm able to run them at "stock" timing), but I'd love to get all-same RAM running at 2666mhz and then experiment with timing from there.

Overall though, this machine still kicks ***** after 2 years. Nothing beats having a desktop CPU, even if it's "only" sustaining 3.4ghz all core out of the box - that's still incredible. The Vega 56 in this machine is undervolted within an inch of it's life, but Vega does well with an undervolt and I suspect the performance delta between our V56 and stock is less than 15% - and you can probably narrow that gap with VRAM overclocks + power limit target increases. I haven't experimented too heavily with the GPU clocks, but don't see mine go much over 1350 sustained if I push them.

I got stuck in the memory bootloop with 4 sticks of ram, had to remove 2 sticks to get it to boot and then relax timings in ryzen master. There was no other way to reset them that I could find, so be careful and only drop timings one step at a time. I didn't see the reset button, didn't try that but you can make a small ram timing change and see if it resets. Would be good info if it does as then you could push timings without worry. I had tried to see if I could create a jedec profile using taiphoon burner but could not figure out how to do it - but that might be an option.

I use Ryzen Master and rarely reboot, just hibernate with ryzen master already open so it's just a matter of hitting apply. NBD to me.

Getting to the back ram slots isn't too bad, I did it when I re-pasted the cpu and gpu. I put in 3000mhz ram but it didn't have a jedec profile so was still stuck at 2400mhz. I put the stock stuff back in and tightened timings to cl14 and called it good.

As you said, performance is still very good, but I just ordered a G14. it'll be nice to have similar performance but at ~1/3 the weight and size when factoring in the power brick.

bobzdar · April 2020

NiteNinja said:

Since this BIOS is locked out, any tweaks to the CPU clocks and enabling Precision Boost Overdrive won't stick after a reboot. You have to enable PBO at the BIOS level for it to apply.
I've recently built a desktop out of the 2700X that I tried in the Helios earlier, and with a ASRock X470, I had to find PBO buried in a long hierarchy of advanced user garbage. With a 360mm radiator I finally broke 4100 in Cinebench R20.

Getting to the memory on the backside is a royal pain in the keister. I've repeatedly stripped it down to do repaste and CPU swaps, but to take out the actual motherboard requires even more screw removal. Thankfully they all use the same size screw in this machine. Once you have it down to the bare CPU and GPU. You'll need to remove the remaining screws and ribbon cables attached to the board then gently pry it out.

I don't mind having to use Ryzen Master every boot as I don't actually reboot often. Getting to the factory memory is a pain, so if you go in, re-paste as well. I wouldn't bother unless you have some high speed ram with a jedec profile, iirc there's one 3000mhz kit out there that does. Even then, I don't know anyone that has actually done it to verify it works, I just know there's no XMP setting. Maybe with an unlocked bios some of that stuff could be enabled? Acer built some great hardware but kind of gimped it software/bios wise. It could be even better if they fixed that stuff up. I've lost hope of that at this point, though.

Estafiy · May 2020

Good afternoon friends. Recently I bought the Helios 500 Ryzen 2600. I did not find anywhere else information about overclocking the GPU.
1.I am wondering if there will ever be an update to ZEN 2? Or can I not wait?
2. I read on the forum that gpu is accelerated to 1400MHZ, but how ??? please give a video instruction.
3.If I buy 3200MHZ memory, will it work? I will not be able to overclock the native memory through ryzen master.cpu-z does not show which memory is in which slots.
Sorry for my English, I use a translator. Thank you very much for the answers.

bobzdar · May 2020

Estafiy said:

Good afternoon friends. Recently I bought the Helios 500 Ryzen 2600. I did not find anywhere else information about overclocking the GPU.
1.I am wondering if there will ever be an update to ZEN 2? Or can I not wait?
2. I read on the forum that gpu is accelerated to 1400MHZ, but how ??? please give a video instruction.
3.If I buy 3200MHZ memory, will it work? I will not be able to overclock the native memory through ryzen master.cpu-z does not show which memory is in which slots.
Sorry for my English, I use a translator. Thank you very much for the answers.

1: Probably not.
2: Install latest AMD drivers from their website and reboot. Download MSI afterburner, install, in settings check unlock AMD overclocking limits and reboot. Then go into the Tuning section of Radeon settings. If you want to clock much higher than stock, you'll have to unlock power limits which is more involved.
3: Only if it has a JEDEC profile, which I'm not aware of any that do. The highest I've seen is 3000mhz. XMP profiles will not work.

BIOS update to support Ryzen 3700x? Helios 500 question

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BIOS update to support Ryzen 3700x? Helios 500 question

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Assistance by Acer

Swift Series Intel® Evo™

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Acer Corner

Gaming on Chromebook

Swift Series Intel^® Evo™