Good machine hobbled by poor documentation.

Metanis

I have the GTR5 GR9 AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX.

It's a good little machine and high value for the money.

However, it has an amazingly complex BIOS that is not documented.

I've had several issues (see my post on UMA_Game_Optimized memory allocation) and most recently a RAM upgrade has been defeated by the lack of BIOS documentation. Here's the story behind that: I bought 64GB of quality Mushkin RAM which is rated for 3200MHz at 1.35v. (At 1.2v it only runs at 2667MHz!)

The current 1.24 BIOS defaults to 1.2v rather than 1.35v. But my RAM needs 1.35! I figured out how to change that setting in the BIOS but the RAM would still only run at the lower 1.2v speeds. Now I've seen this before on AMD products where they just ignore the XMP timing profiles in RAM. Usually you then have to modify the default timing parameter along with the default voltage in the BIOS.

But...

The moment I try to adjust the RAM speed in the BIOS the computer will no longer POST or BOOT. I sent an email to the Beelink PC Support email address along with pictures of everything related and so far they have not responded to my issue.

I tried numerous RAM speed related adjustments but nothing works. Of course after every attempt a person needs to disconnect the device power and press the CMOS Reset button for 30 seconds. So every attempt at a solution requires several minutes to go back into the BIOS, restore known good settings, then try an adjustment to the RAM speed.

The device has an incredible complexity of settings and I'm good at knowing what doesn't pertain, but I'm missing something that needs to be toggled so that my timing changes will work correctly. I'm missing something that would probably be included in good documentation about how the BIOS options work together.

Now I know the support techs at Bee-Link didn't create the BIOS and I also know they're not BIOS engineers so they probably don't have a much better understanding of the BIOS options than I do. But somebody at Bee-link contracted to some software firm to write this BIOS and that somebody needs to ensure that documentation is part of the package before they pay for it. I'm expecting it's already too late for this particular hardware evolution.

/rant off

rmarion59

I share your frustration. I tried to get my hand on an AMI User Guide or an AMI's command line tool to extract the BIOS data but only PDF are available... AMI would only talk to their business partners. In a basic AMI mobo utility, they say;

Overview
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MotherboardID Utility (MBID) attempts to display the manufacturer of your computer motherboard.  This indicates who you should contact for BIOS support.

Note that the AMI bios is usually licensed by system manufacturers and configured for their needs. As such, there is no guarantee that your platform's bios contains the necessary support for this tool to retrieve the motherboard manufacturer.

Features
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The utility requests DMI data from the bios to let you to verify following:

* System manufacturer
* Baseboard manufacturer

//////////

On my Beelink GTR5 5900HX, the utility returns;

<Motherboard Properties>
System manufacturer: AZW (Shenzhen AZW Technology Co., Ltd. -- BEELINK)
Baseboard manufacturer: AMI Aptio 5.19; UEFI 2.7; PI 1.6
Product: GTR

...in my little Google searches, I came across an interesting tool, DRAM Calculator for Ryzen. Furthermore, watched that video on How to Manually Tune Your DDR4 Memory For Ryzen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOqhyVNPhaM

This video along with those tools may perhaps help you find all the values you may have to change to solve the issue.

I hope it helps!

Metanis

Thank you for the response. I watched the Youtube video and thought I'd follow along. It got complicated quickly and then the Thaipoon Burner software may have a virus in the latest software. I think I'll leave it there and just return my 64GB modules for a refund.

rmarion59

Metanis replied at 2022-10-26 01:05
Thank you for the response. I watched the Youtube video and thought I'd follow along. It got complic ...

Too bad!  ...You have very good memory chips!!!

ESET Internet Security doesn't flag Thaiphoon Burner as a virus but the win32 program is not "signed" but the program is known and used since 2008. Anyway, I understand enough is enough!

I'm using Timetec chips... probably not top of the line but very stable and speed respecting specs... it works very well on the GTR5 5900HX.

Take care!

nighthawk

I have to agree with you. I have never ever seen a BIOS with so much settings. I would like a manual too!

Support-03

Hello,
About the bios,you can contact us with :support-pc@bee-link.com , and we will provide the bios file if you need.

Metanis

Support-03 replied at 2022-10-27 18:31
Hello,
About the bios,you can contact us with :support-pc@bee-link.com , and we will provide the bio ...

I followed your instructions, and you directed me to the same BIOS I already had! Which of course didn't help me in the least.

At this point I don't care because I re-sold both Beelink boxes I had purchased to test.

I am however on the early order list for an HX6900. I hope you have a solid BIOS in that machine!

Simon69

I agree, some documentation relating to the system bios would be handy.