Bypass 1.5v dimm limit on ASRock Z370 Fatal1ty ITX

[GtiJason]

Have had this board sitting in it's box for 9-10 months now, ever since I saw the 1.5 dram voltage limit.
I would love to actually use the board for benching but this limit makes a solid (by hardware standards) board pretty much useless for Overclocking.
After doing a decent amount of research I have found that the hardware used is 99.9% identical to the Z390 Phantom ITX that has a true XOC bios.
Would my best bet be to try and flash the Z390 board to my Z370, and if so would I need to mod the bios for the Chipset/PCH.
I'll probably flash the chip using the on board SPI header and Flashrom via RaspPi

Or maybe there is an easier way such as hard mod to unlock the new security features on the ASRock Z370 chipset boards

Or skip the bios altogether and do a VR mod to the dram VRM ?

Any help or suggestions on quickest, easiest or safest way would be greatly appreciated
I'd like to keep this board, but if this becomes too much of a risk for the reward situation I'll just sell the board (since it is still unused other than the basically bios browsing)
and put the money toward something else such as Z390 Dark, Gene or Apex

 

[marco.is.not.80]

4 hours ago, GtiJason said:

VR mod to the dram VRM

I think out of all the options that's the one I'd go for if it was me. Of course, if you can access the SPI header on the board and have an interface to flash from then nothing should stop you from at least trying a straight flash from the z390 board since you don't need to worry about borking things up and can easily flash back the original.

Whatever the case may be - when you are finally successful and push out a few scores it's always the ones which required cool modifications like these that feel oh so good. ?

[sabishiihito]

Where is this XOC bios for the Z390 board?

[mllrkllr88]

3 hours ago, sabishiihito said:

Where is this XOC bios for the Z390 board?

There is no secret sauce bios, everything is public. All of the bios's I have tested give you full control of the cold volts and everything you need for 4133c12 memory and full pot LN2 CPU's.

https://www.asrock.com/MB/Intel/Z390 Phantom Gaming-ITXac/index.asp#BIOS

Edited March 31, 2019 by mllrkllr88

[GtiJason]

Imgur Album

 

 

Edited April 4, 2019 by GtiJason

[Guest]

Did it work?

[ksateaaa23]

i have z370 gaming k6. max ram voltage of 1.8v. board does fairly well on memory oc can do 4000 13-13-13-28-1t or 4133 13-14-14-28-1t with galax 4000 kit. but if i can get the voltage upto 1.9-2.0 v probably should do 4000 12-12-12-28-1t.

have a raspberry pi as well. like to know if that process worked.

have a bit of working knowledge of linux.

[GtiJason]

I can flash any bios I want (plus more through spi header) so  that's kinda cool. So far I've been unsuccessful at getting Z390 bios to run properly on Z370 board. The board powers on, cpu starts warming up but i never get a pic on the monitor. Pretty sure the It will not work since Z390 is a 14nm chipset, so there are complications such as can't run downgraded versions of ME and so on. The only reason Z370, Z270, Z170, H310C, and B365 to name a few work is because they still use the 22nm process and that can be downgraded to the right ME.