Engineering Sample Replacement Zephyrus G15 Board

[ScottishTapWater]

So, I fried my GA503QS motherboard, not sure if it was the vbios mods or some errant liquid metal that did it but it was dead, dead.

 

I bought a replacement board off eBay from a fell-off-the-back-of-a-conveyor-belt Chinese factory, expecting it to be surplus parts. Cost me far less than what ASUS wanted for the repair.

 

However, what I've got shows up as having a CPU of `AMD Eng Sample (16) @ 3.100GHz ` rather than a R9 5900HS.

 

It does, however, seem to work, so I'm not too mad. I've just got a few questions I want answering before I decide if I will return it:

 

- What tests can I run that would check it's stable and performing as one would expect of a non-eng sample?

- What risks are there with running an eng sample?

- Is there any way to change the identifier of the CPU so that it's not recognised as an engineering sample?

- Can I update the BIOS normally or are there other considerations?

[Levent]

14 minutes ago, ScottishTapWater said:

What tests can I run that would check it's stable and performing as one would expect of a non-eng sample?

3dmark, cinebench, cpuz benchmark for performance validation and first two for stability testing.

15 minutes ago, ScottishTapWater said:

What risks are there with running an eng sample?

Some features might be fused off, or simply it might be the final test unit before production began. It depends on what chip it is. 

16 minutes ago, ScottishTapWater said:

Is there any way to change the identifier of the CPU so that it's not recognised as an engineering sample?

Other swapping the chip? Nope.

17 minutes ago, ScottishTapWater said:

Can I update the BIOS normally or are there other considerations?

Probably BUT if you have no means to recover it (aka eeprom programmer) then i wouldn’t.

[ScottishTapWater]

16 minutes ago, Levent said:

3dmark, cinebench, cpuz benchmark for performance validation and first two for stability testing.

Some features might be fused off, or simply it might be the final test unit before production began. It depends on what chip it is. 

Other swapping the chip? Nope.

Probably BUT if you have no means to recover it (aka eeprom programmer) then i wouldn’t.

 

Alright, I was wondering if there was anything specific worth checking beyond the standard for checking if an OC is stable. I can't use the ones you've listed because I'm on Arch, but I know alternatives.

 

Is there any way to discover/check what features are/aren't enabled?

 

The full designator seems to be `AMD Eng Sample: HS00-000000300-40_Y` if that's of any help.

I've got an EEPROM flasher, no worries there.

 

 

[ScottishTapWater]

Geekbench scores look within the margin of error of someone else's scores.

 

So at least there's that.

 

Got a stress test running now for stability, then I'll have to run Unigene to check the GPU.