LED'S ON A 9300? YES INDEED! Plus many more mods I did over the summer <56k beware>

[ozzlo]

LED'S ON A 9300? YES INDEED! Plus many more mods I did over the summer <56k beware>

That's right... 11 led's in a i9300.


Just a little "about the author info"
I have been on theese forums since MARCH 02... I origionally started out as a member of the seti team. I was introduced to theese forums through my best freind Jigpu. After lurking the seti team for a month I joined the forums and started posting. It wasn't long before I began to wonder into other parts of the forums and learn about the great joys of overclocking. Now allmost 900 posts later here I am with not just a fun hobby but an all out addiction. driven by a passion to oc everything in sight (including my calculator) I quickly found desktop systems way too easy and no longer a challenge. I found the need to undertake greater challenges. I turned to laptops as an outlet and I started asking the mods for a laptop forum. they quickly turned my request down but eventually other members also requested some sort of mobile computing forum and they where born. I then chose the insprion 9300 as the perfect desktop replacement system after about 3 months of research at www.notebookforums.com I finally snatched one for allmost half price thanks to a spectacular dell cupon. below is a combination of hundreds of hours of work in research and modding to create the final product. I have pretty much made this area of the overclocker forum's my home away from home.




THE LED MOD
This mod was origionally inspired by a modder by the name of Spike on the notebook forums which I give full credit for most the ideas and designs of the led mods. http://www.notebookforums.com/showthread.php?t=18160

If you look closelly you can see that I have tapped into the usb port up top(circled in PURPLE) and then the main cable which has a 15 ohm resistor (which you can't see cause it's all taped up) goes into a bus line where all the led's plug into. This allowed me to do all the soldering away from the motherboard and make it easy to switch the wires around if the led's where backwards. There are about 15 wires run to several loctions in the laptop which power 11 led's inside the laptop (CIRCLED IN BLUE) all controlled by a on off on switch(far right side of pic circled in YELLOW). The extra on state of the switch is for a mod (circled in WHITE) that I have attempted but ended up in failure... I shall re attempt this mod in the future again when I have time... when I get it working it will allow the led's to pulse to the music.

the area with all the wires and the green tape is where the pcmcia slot used to be until I removed it to make way for all the wiring. The areas Circled in RED are areas which I have added DYNAMAT to reduce sound and vibration of various components within...

here is another pic but closer up of my mods to the subwoofer...



The Origional dell logo was cut out of the back of the LCD with a dremel and the edges sanded into a nice looking circle.

I then took a circular peice of 1/8" acrillic which I frosted with 600 grit sandpaper over the hole to protect the back of the LCD. I then took the dell logo design to a stanless steel workshop and had the logo cut out with a lazer. I then ordered a carbon fiber quicksnap cover and cut the logo out of that and placed it over the acrillic. I then glued the stainless steel logo onto the acrillic and there was just enougf space aound the edge to create a nice blue ring around the logo which really added to the coolness factor. The logo is lit by 3 micro blue led's which tap into the led circuit I created for the 6 led's in the base of the laptop for a grand total of 9 led's. I then placed a peice of reflective tape over the back of the led's to make them appear twice as bright and have more even lighting and also prevent "BLUE LIGHT LEAKAGE INTO THE LCD". Here is a photo with the carbon fiber cover and the logo in normal light (my camera sucks at capturing the led light)

Here are various shots in a dark room so the camera can capute the led light effects better. A special note that I forgot to press the front buttons so they light up too but I haven't figured out a way to force them to stay on yet (yet another mod for the future) but they are also blue led's behind the front buttons... just look at the last pic and tell me it woulden't be cool to have the front buttons on all the time...

I would like to give extera special thanks to Jigpu for helping me out with the soldering and fixing the anmonous short that was causing the usb to shoot sparks all over the place. and again I would like to thank Spike for the guides.



also just in case anybody likes my wallpaper... I am posting it just because I like it and I think other people will like it too. The wallpaper I actually don't know who origionally made it but I have modified it and added stars and made it larger than it was for higher resolution. the image is made for widescreen so I don't know how it would look on fullscreen...

 

[ozzlo]

OTHER MODS I'VE DONE

Artic silver on cpu and gpu core

at first when I applied as5 to my cpu and gpu core I noticed no difference in temperature but after a month now the temps have dropped a couple of degrees on bolth cpu and gpu core. I have also put AS5 into the gap in the heatpipe with the sides of the heatsync... I haven't noticed any temp drops for the cpu but the gpu seems to be 1c cooler afterwards.

The 533mhz PIN MOD
*some of the information in here may have come from other posts I have made and I may have copied and pasted straight in a few times cause I'm so lazy but i'm only copying stuff in my posts.

http://www.notebookforums.com/showthread.php?t=80879
I basically followed the steps in this guide... I mean It's not llike I could come up with my own variation... OR COULD I?

THE first attempt at the pinmod resulted in a non functioning computer because the mod was rotated 90 degrees the wrong way... after my heart attack stopped I figured it out and oriented the mod the correct way but still no boot... Now i was really worried After fifteen minuites of looking it over and worring I figured out that I forgot to tighten the socket locking screw. After that it booted and I had an instant boost from 1.7ghz to 2.26ghz. but it failed prime 95 in just 10 minuites which led me to do the next mod...


of course that required a 400mhz processor purchased from ebay. I got really confused whith the whole 479/478 pin thing so I followed this proven method.

HERE'S a proven method which will gaurentee that the processor you are getting is compatable. follow theese simple steps...

1. open up your lappie
2. FIND THE sSPEC alpla neumeric number which is 5 digits long on your current processor.
3. open up this intel spec sheet... http://processorfinder.intel.com/scripts/list.asp
4. look down the left colum of sSPEC#'s to find your processor
5. once you found it look all the way to the right of the sheet to find out how many pins it has.
6. Decide on a speed that you want to get (remember after the pin mod it will be 33% faster)
7. find the processor with the speed you want that has the same number of pins as your current processor.
8. write down that sSPEC #
9. shop for pentium-m's that only have the sSPEC # that you wrote down



VOLT MODDING THE BEAST!

I have a real problem with this mod... it's not the mod it's self, it's all the guides about this mod which are making people run their chips at 1.6v which cooks their chips at a nice 65-70c and kills battery life much faster than needed. I feel that people should be completelly familiar with this mod and understand how it works in every way before they just start blindly following a random guide which may not relate to their situation. Every chip is different and I think the mod guides should reflect that.

instead of modifying VID 4(like the guides tell you too) I modified VID 2 which gave me a perfect .064v boost which made my 2.26 stable @ 1.404v

modding vid 0 =.016v boost
modding vid 1 =.032v boost
modding vid 2 =.064v boost
modding vid 3 =.128v boost (modding vid 3 won't do anything cause it's allready grounded by default when the processor is at max voltage).
modding vid 4 =.256v boost
modding vid 5 =.512v boost (modding vid 5 won't do anything cause it's allready grounded by default when the processor is a t max voltage).



I also make use of centrino hardware control to lower my voltage... then I compared the voltages I set with the voltages on this table and imagined my pinmod had taken effect to see what the actual voltage is compared to what centrino hardware control reports it to be.

YOU see if you drop your voltage in centrino hardware control to 1.324v instead of 1.34v then vid 3 is no longer grounded and you can then mod vid 3 to kick up the voltage to 1.452v. It's kinda interesting that you lower your voltage by .016v to increase in voltage by .128v but that's how it works. in the table a value of 0 means that it is grounded and a value of 1 means it is logic high. you can even ground multiple pins for even more combinations.

TO make sense of this very confusing mod, Look at the very bottom right hand corrner of the table which says .700v

in the same row as the .700v you will see a series of 6 "1" 's which represent logic high value of 6 Vid's {WHICH REPRESENTS THE HIGH VOLTAGE STATE ON 6 CORROSPONDING "VOLTAGE REQUEST" PINS ON THE PROCESSOR}. Now look at the next row up (.716).

Notice in the .716 row that the furthest right "1" has changed to a zero. If you go to the top of the colum you will see that this column(the one the 1 changed to a zero) is represented by Vid 0. In my list that I made above the table I posted I have Vid 0 listed as = .016v now if you compare the 2 rows (the .7v row and the .716 row) and you take the difference of the two rows that you will end up with a voltage difference of .016v. Well what do you know... is that a concidence or what?


So the processor has a base voltage of .7v (that's the lowest that the voltage can go) any 1's that are changed to zero's will request more voltage from the motherboard. so If Vid 2 is set to zero then the processor will request .7v + the voltage value of vid 2 which is .064v.


Your processor normally requests 1.340v which means that it normally requests Vid 5 and Vid 3 as logic low so thus .7v base voltage + .512v +.128v = 1.340v


now if you want to manually request more voltage than what the processor normally requests you can pin mod Vid 4, Vid 2, Vid 1, OR Vid 0 or any combination of the 4. I modded Vid 2 which set the "1" in the Vid 2 column of the table above from a "1" to a "0" which then requests an extera .064v from the motherboard on top of the 1.340v allready requested by the processor.



The whole Vid0- Vid5 corosponds to certian pins on the processor. after you figure out which pin you need to set to 0 all you need to do is put a very tiny wire (less than 3/8" long) and approx 32 gauge wire or a single strand of speaker wire and short the Vid of your choice to VSS

DYNAMAT IS THY FREIND

Ok the cd rom drive in this laptop was driving me crazy... so i finally decided to do something about it by putting dynamat on the cd rom drive which killed resonance that the drive was creating. now the drive seems like a whisper of wind rather than an earthquake. I also Decided to dynamat the built in 1" subwoofer so I could finally crank the sub to FULL volume without it distorting. Sorry but I don't have any pics of this but it's kindof self explanatory



my mod for launching media player with the play button
http://www.notebookforums.com/showthread.php?t=100621&highlight=media+player




TO BE DONE NEXT SUMMER LIST...

PAINT THE WHITE TRIM OF THE LAPTOP (i can't decide on a color)
Volt mod the graphics card (FAILED... at least the card diden't die)
make the front pannell button lights stay on all the time instead of just 5 seconds after you press them. (also Failed...)
make the led's pulse to the music (Also Failed... But I want to take another shot at this someday...)

 

[ozzlo]

Modding the Graphics driver and BENCHMARK(s) other than 05 I don't really know what people use for benchmarks anymore (it's been about 2 years since I've owned a benchmark worthy machine ... you can request a benchmark if you want and I will see what this thing can do..

Any overclocking of the graphics card whatsoever requires NON STOCK DRIVERS THAT AREN'T supported by dell.

For a good explaniation of the Graphics Driver modification process you should turn to this thread in the notebook forums
http://www.notebookforums.com/showthread.php?t=80268&highlight=overclocking

also this website was a great recource
http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/forum/index.php

After the driver modifications my laptop peforms very closely to an inspiron XPS2.


ok so now that all the mods are complete that have to do with the speed of the laptop... let's see what we can come up with benchmarkwise...

as soon as I figure out how to voltmod my graphics card (yet another mod I have to do ) I will get 5000 ez.

NOT bad for a $1500 laptop huh?



ok now that I've shown you some pretty pics you gotta advise me on a color to paint my laptop... so far I want to go with a varrfiant of metallic turquoise which will match the paint job on the logitec G7 mouse which is about to be released. the only other color i could think of was chamealeon the multicolored paint which changes color based upon what angle you are looking at the laptop. any other painting ideas are greatly appreciated.

 

[Slackfumasta]

Dude, that's pretty cool...but I think you need to work on getting a camera that can focus

 

[whoever]

yeah awsome job; but um, i thougth that 400fsb chips could run with the 533 pin mod without any additional cooling or voltage; am I wrong? Cause if so I'll go buy my Turion book right now.

 

[jonlewis_3]

that laptop looks the dogs bo**ocks

 

[ozzlo]

I haven't heard any reports of requireing the 1.6 chip to have any extera voltage... If you pin mod a 1.6ghz chip to 2.1ghz there is a 99% sucuess rate as long as you don't short the wrong two pins on the cpu... My 1.7ghz chip was stable at 2.26ghz in windows... but when I ran prime 95 it failed within 10 minuites... by adding a mere .064v the chip is 100% rock solid and 24hour prime stable.

lots of other people have had much better luck than I... even being able to undervolt the chip at 2.26ghz and be rock solid.

about 85% of the 1.7ghz chips overclocked are prime stable without adding any addational voltage.

the 1.8ghz chips on the other hand pin modded to 2.4ghz about 50% of them need a slight voltage modification.


I just diden't get very lucky with my chip but I was totally prepared for the volt mod when I did the pin mod and it only took me an extra 5 min to do the volt mod. The temps from a .064v increase went up about 1c.


As for the cooling modifications... I did them because I could and all the cooling modifications combined might have made 1-2c difference and that's it. so instead of full load being at 52c it would be 54c which I can totally live with. I've owned desktop systems that had half the performance of this laptop and where running 60c+

the idle temp is a very nice pleasent 35c today with no fans running... I could turn the fan on full blast and make the laptop idle at 28c if I was really that anal about temps.

and I aplogize for the camera not focousing very well but it's kind of hard to get it to focous in the dark when there are 2 lazer led's shooting right at it.

 

[jnev_89]

wow, that's one of the nicest laptops i've seen yet. awesome work on that thing.

 

[blitzkrieg1110]

wow, that's one of the nicest laptops i've seen yet. awesome work on that thing.

yes awesome job! i didnt know the front cover of the 9300 looked so cool!

 

[DDR-PIII]

Dude, that's pretty cool...but I think you need to work on getting a camera that can focus

i think its probably a decent camera, he just didnt use the flash, so it had a slow shutter speed thus the blurryness

 

[Xenocide]

so much for battery life...

 

[whoever]

so much for battery life...

LEDs shouldn't draw to much power; think obout how much larger and brighter the LCD screen is?

 

[ozzlo]

i think its probably a decent camera, he just didnt use the flash, so it had a slow shutter speed thus the blurryness

ya it's a cybershot p10 i think... i diden't realize it until afterwards but shutter was set to really slow. plus the pics where 5megapixels and I had to photochop them down with paint so I could stick em on my limited webspace.

The LED'S consume at total of .9w which results in about 10 minuites less battery life.... But I have a switch installed on the side so I can turn the lights off if I want to save power...

Plus using centrino hardware controll I can have the processor run at any speed/voltage I want, which means I can still get the full battery life out of this thing as I did before the cpu mod.

I named my laptop Vindicator which stands for "clear'er of accusation, blame, suspicion, or doubt with supporting arguments or proof" because most people think that a big powerful overclocked laptop would have suckey battery life and put out a ton of heat and this is proof that that statement is'nt true.


lol I love it when I have a sentence with That That in it there's some other way to type that but I can't remember... (runs and hides from grammar nazi's)

 

[tricknasty]

good job, looks good and u saved a ton getting a 9300 over the xps2.

 

[icyicy]

Nice LOGO, why not put a Apple or like Apple-Dell.

 

[dualAthlon]

Could you please take a picture of applied dynamat on the subwoofer ?
My sub speaker is distort like yours.

 

[ozzlo]

.... o man I would have to take this thing apart

Basically I went to a freind which had some left over from a carstereo project and he diden't have any problem letting me borrow a 1" diamater circle of the stuff. The subwoofer is the black thing that is next to the CD drive in the first pic of post #1 (I did the dynamat after this pic). The subwoofer is actually 2 parts that are connected together... there is a bass tube that goes from the subwoofer under the cddrive that usually dosent cause the problem. I put the round peice of dynamat on the round part of the subwoofer inside the computer(makes sense)... I had to thin down the peice of dynamat a bit because it was causing the palmrest to bulge just very slightly.

Before this 9300 I had owned a previous 9300 that had many major defects which I made dell replace for the one I have currently... with that one somehow I had managed to get some tiny metal shavings sucked up into the subwoofer vent (don't set your laptop on your project bench after cutting steel...) this caused the subwoofer to buzz even on the lowest volume level...

I am planning on taking my lappy apart again... whenever I have an entire day's worth of spare time. I am working on a way to get the led's to pulse to the music. I can take a pic then but I have no Idea when I plan on taking on such a mod... this laptop is now a pain to take apart and put back together because I have to cut a pair of wires to get the palm rest off...

 

[Bal`thzar]

Oz when you take it back apart again can you get some new Pic that are a bit more clear. PLEASE

 

[Mr.Guvernment]

very nice - i was going to add some LED's to my 9100 but got lazy

 

[ozzlo]

Well it looks like I will be doing rennovations this weekend... I'm upgrading from 9 led's to 12 led's and i'm adding in a microrelay which will splice an input signal out of my subwoofer (only will take 2ma from the sub) and the LED's Will pulse to the music... I will make a video and show it off if sucuessful...

What song should I have the LED's PULSE to in the video?