this post was submitted on 22 May 2025
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How is the 4910MQ temperature-wise; did you have to do a heatsink mod?
I'd love to do a BIOS mod on my T540p to get rid of the WIFI whitelist but I can't for the life of me take the thing apart without damaging the keyboard; it's such a bad design.
with a mild undervolt (~ -50mV core, cache, GPU), i hit ~85 C on sustained loads (~3GHz on battery), though i've seen it in the high 90s when closed on sustained loads. i actually cooked my speakers that way, need to buy a new set, lmao. at least they can be swapped easily
i don't have the dGPU heatsink, if that's what you're asking. stock heatsink, repasted + an undervolt seems to be sufficient to tame the beast.
i highly recommend the BIOS mod if you can swing it. i run a custom coreboot build (seabios + grub), so it shows my logo on boot, has a custom BIOS password routine (rolled it myself!), and i have full disk encryption (even /boot!) for debian, with the grub in flash handling LUKS2.
my only complaint is boot times, GRUB can take nearly a minute to unlock the disk, due to non-existent SSE code. if that was taken care of, it could probably unlock in a couple seconds. (note to self, summer project!)
Is there an easier way to mod the BIOS that doesn't require taking the whole thing apart? AFAIK there was an IvyRain-esque mod in the works
if already flashed, one can use
flashprog -p internal. on the stock bios, at most you may be able to hack together a method to flash coreboot, but you can't neuter the ME, nor recover the megabytes of flash the ME firmware uses.not sure about the t540p, but the t440p isn't too hard to externally flash. two screws to get inside, then the various internal screws (most of which are identical), remove the keyboard & trackpad, the VGA port screws, and then your flash chips are exposed. hook up an SOIC8 clip (on ebay for ~$5) to a pi pico, flash pico-serprog, and then use flashprog on another machine to flash the chips.
once successfully flashed, you can easily update coreboot from within the OS. however, if you flash a broken build, -- whether it's a lack of vendor blobs, like for the (neutered) ME, or simply a BIOS that can't get you to your OS (or a rescue USB) -- you will need to reflash externally before the machine will be usable again.
You pretty much have to fully take apart the T540p and flip the mainboard over to get to the BIOS chip. Same for CPU upgrades.
i didn't believe you, so i looked it up that is so fucking moronic LMAO
Right? Especially considering how easy it is to get to the CPU on the T440p...