Trying to unlock and overclock my HP 45L PC, however, many of the power settings are being locked/limited by HP. Is there a way to get around this?

[maxmoo12]

Hi,

So the title says it all pretty much. I have an HP Omen 45L with an RTX 3080 and AMD Ryzen 7 5800x. As I was looking into overclocking the PC, I saw that many power control settings were either disabled, blocked, or limited. I want to gain full control of the PC and I'm pretty sure the fact that the motherboards BIOS is locked is the problem. I'm very inexperienced with all of this so it may be another issue but I'm hoping someone here can help me out. It would be greatly appreciated!

 

[Kenrou]

Some HP bios have an advanced page, but apparently it changes accordingly to the model and most are locked, so trial and error I suppose.

1. Boot up your computer. When you see the startup logo screen, press CTRL+F10 and then CTRL+F11 to get into the BIOS. (It only works for some computer, and you may need to try it for a few times until you get in).
2. Boot up your computer and then press the F8, F9, F10 or Del key to get in to BIOS. Then quickly press the A key to show the Advanced settings.
3. In the BIOS, press Fn+Tab for 3 times.

Also know that at some point there were modded bios specifically for HP, but honestly have no idea if they are still being written

 

[Johan45]

It would likely be easier to get a new motherboard for the PC; last Gen AMD is much more affordable at present. Can you take some pictures of the board and power supply? Specifically the connectors for the motherboard power and any identifying marks/numbers on the power supply itself.. Not sure if they still do it, but HP, like many vendors, had their own specific parts, which sometimes made it hard to put mainstream parts into them.

The exact model number of that PC would be helpful as well. They typically come in AMD and Intel variants with many options.
Looking online it "appears" that the Omen is using standard connectors but some good pics wouldn't hurt.

 

[Zerileous]

I definitely understand wanting to tweak / OC, but you also have to consider cost vs benefit. If you are mostly gaming / using lightly threaded workloads (in other words not loading up all 8 cores at once), these limits probably are not interfering with performance by much. Often times a stock Ryzen is faster than an overclocked ones at single threaded workloads.

Can you OC the GPU freely?

Is XMP enabled / are you able to run the memory above the stock speed (ideally 3600 MTs or 1800MHz)?

What is limited and what are they set at, OEM/Stock or less than?

Also you should evaluate the cooling of the system, both in terms of case airflow and the CPU cooler. HP may have locked them down because they built the system (CPU cooler and case airflow) with poor cooling capacity. You can download a program such as Ryzen Master or HWiNFO64 to measure temperature under load (consider gaming load as well as an all core load such as cinebench or aida64).

Where/how are you attempting to adjust the settings? Have you tried Ryzen Master?

As Johan45 indicated, it may be possible to upgrade these things and get around it, specifically if the motherboard mounting standoffs and PSU connectors adhere to the ATX standard.

It also may be possible that someone has created and released an unlocked BIOS, but of course that carries risk as you are trusting your motherboard not dying to a stranger on the internet's unsupported coding.