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March 6th, 2023 14:00

Area-51 R4 and R5 "rom" bios is identical

Out of curiosity and after reading how a user here tried unsuccessfully to get a 9980xe CPU to work, I did the following.

C:\Users\josep\Downloads\dell>Alienware_Area_51_R4_2.0.7.exe  /writeromfile
C:\Users\josep\Downloads\dell>Alienware_Area_51_R5_2.0.7.exe  /writeromfile

C:\Users\josep\Downloads\dell>dir
 Volume in drive C has no label.
 Volume Serial Number is 08B6-834E

 Directory of C:\Users\josep\Downloads\dell

03/06/2023  12:37 PM              .
03/06/2023  12:37 PM              ..
11/02/2022  11:20 AM         8,576,920 Alienware_Area_51_R4_2.0.7.exe
03/06/2023  12:37 PM        16,777,216 alienware_area_51_r4_2.0.7.rom
11/05/2022  07:56 AM         8,576,920 Alienware_Area_51_R5_2.0.7.exe
03/06/2023  12:37 PM        16,777,216 alienware_area_51_r5_2.0.7.rom
03/06/2023  12:37 PM            17,896 amifldrv64.sys
               5 File(s)     50,726,168 bytes
               2 Dir(s)  379,784,540,160 bytes free

C:\Users\josep\Downloads\dell>fc /b alienware_area_51_r4_2.0.7.rom alienware_area_51_r5_2.0.7.rom
Comparing files alienware_area_51_r4_2.0.7.rom and ALIENWARE_AREA_51_R5_2.0.7.ROM
FC: no differences encountered

Since the "rom" is identical there must be something in the installation procedure that add "r5" instead of "r4".  Just guessing.

I then compared my R4 bios to the most recent MSI x299 PRO bios and found one identical intel microcode.  While the motherboards have the same x299 chipset there are big differences of course.

JosephStateson_1-1678139693341.png

Note that CPUID 0652 microcode has the same date and size on both the MSI bios and the Dell bios.  It is probably identical to both systems since it is Intel microcode.

Although I do not recommend it nor would I try (on my own working R4 system) possibly a newer microcode could be extracted from the MSI bios and inserted into the Dell rom.  My I9-7900x has the 0654 CPU ID which can be found using wmic.  I do not know how to lookup up the other Dell or MSI cpu id's to find the cpu model.  

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