BIOS Updates

[mubs]

I built a new system in 2021; Asus ROG Strix X570-F Gaming + Ryzen 9 5900z, etc.

Last updated the BIOS in early second half of 2021. Asus released some crappy BIOS updates after that that bricked motherboards, so I haven't done any updates since. System is fine and stable, and I didn't want to mess things up.

Anybody have any idea if Asus has their act together now?

 

[ddrueding]

While there are plenty of complaints about ASUS, I haven't heard of that issue in years.

Also, considering the market share ASUS enjoys, a larger number of complaints wouldn't necessarily imply a lower quality product. (Though their warranty handling issues of last year are concerning).

 

[Mercutio]

I don't know. Asus has in my experience an amazing ability to fuck up motherboards with terrible firmware. Like not offering user control over thermal warnings and shutdowns or not being able to choose which SATA port to boot from for just no reason. I know they're well regarded, but I won't buy Asus motherboards unless I don't have a choice. I'll take Biostar before I touch Asus (I actually went out of my way to get a Biostar Valkyrie x670e board; my partner's dancer name was Valkyrie. AFAIK Biostar doesn't retail in the US. I had to get one off Ebay that came from Great Britain.)

Obviously, I'm not buying the $600+ high end boards, but if Asus can't be trusted to make an acceptable $150 vanilla product, they're defintely not getting anything MORE than that from me. B650 shouldn't be that hard, guys.

And I have NEVER, EVER had the experience of Asus completing an RMA. I send things in, they do not come back. Their service has always been terrible. They most recently kept a 10th gen i7 Zenbook Pro that was BIOS locked. All they had to do was give me the unlock code and they demanded I ship it in (Asus boards where the User or Supervisor passwords are cleared in CMOS default to a non-blank password). I sent in in 2022 and I haven't seen it since. And I PAID for that repair.

They do make nice monitor and generally good laptops though.

 

[sedrosken]

Typically my preferred vendor is ASRock, their stuff is a little quirky but it's always been dependable and excellent value for money. I'll take ASUS next, they're usually a bit spendier than I want, but sometimes it's worth it -- my home server got migrated from a Gigabyte x470 board with my old Ryzen 5500 to a Maximus VIII Hero (Z170) with modded UEFI running an Intel QTJ1 (essentially, an ES for an i9-9900K) back in January. It's hard to argue with 8 cores for 60 bucks off AliEx even when the board still cost me 90 bucks, though, it at least came with a free i7-6700K. The M8H is the one main Z170 board that's known to have beefy enough VRMs that it can reliably run Coffee Lake with the modded firmware.

The ones I avoid if I'm able are Gigabyte and MSI. To be fair, I'd probably give Gigabyte another shot in the right circumstances with the right discounts, but every time I've used an MSI board in the last 15 or so years I've been building PCs, I've regretted it for one reason or another.

 

[sedrosken]

I miss FIC and Abit. Soltek, even. AOpen?

 

[mubs]

Thanks guys. I'll leave well enough alone. If it ain't broke...

 

[Newtun]

Semi-on-topic, after my 3/29 CPU-cooler upgrade, I noticed last week that the RAM clock was backed down to the default 2666MHz, from the 3600MHz that those DIMMs support.

So I had to go into the BIOS to correct that - I assume that sync-ing with the CPU clock speed it a good thing. (Interestingly, that also seems to have brought down the CPU temp by about 5° C.)

But I also noticed that the BIOS version was quite early, and there were more modern versions available, including at least one that was "strongly encouraged". But I couldn't get the newest version to load - maybe the flash drive has to be connected to the right USB port or has to use the right filesystem. And as Mubs says just above, ... don't fix it.

That MB is a Gigabyte B550M DS3H; I'd had good luck with Gigabyte boards, and they (used to) have a good reputation. But IIRC (always a big IF), I've had FIC and Abit MBs in the past. I named the Abit PC "AbitUbuntu" .

 

[sedrosken]

In general, if there's a BIOS upgrade available and I don't have a specific reason for remaining behind, I'll flash it, but that has burnt me once or twice. Thankfully it was on a board with flashback capability where IIRC it kept a copy of the old firmware on another EEPROM that it could boot from when the main one wasn't working. And of course on 10th gen Intel where upgrading your UEFI literally can remove functionality (undervolting).

More recently in my vintage travels I find I'm using a BIOS patcher to fix stuff on old boards like adding 48-bit LBA support or microcode for newer CPUs than originally supported, and I flash with a TL866II+ and myriad adapters for the ZIF socket. Most recently that's how I flashed the CoffeeTime BIOS to the teeny little 8-pin DIP that housed the firmware for the Maximus VIII Hero running that QTJ1 chip. That's not very vintage, though.

 

[Newtun]

I reviewed the Gigabyte list of BIOSes again, and this warning was strong enough that I thought I'd try to update it again:

• Major vulnerabilities updates, customers are strongly encouraged to update to this release at the earliest.​

Credits to "Assaf Carlsbad and Itai Liba from SentinelOne"​

• Introduce capsule BIOS support starting this version.​

As it happened, I was right on both my counts just above. Reading the "fine print" in the manual, I saw that I had to connect the flash drive with the BIOS file to one specific USB port. But that still didn't work; the drive was formatted in Linux, so I copied the file to a FAT32 drive, and that worked. (No reference to that aspect in the manual.)

 

[sedrosken]

That's... supposed to be a given. UEFI typically only functions on FAT32 volumes. It's why your ESP where your bootloaders get stuffed is in FAT32. There's nothing stopping anyone from writing an ext4, xfs, btrfs, zfs, NTFS, exFAT, or even HPFS filesystem driver for it, but it's just... not done, usually.

 

[Newtun]

Yeah, I'm just a rank amateur ; I think the last time I did a BIOS upgrade, it was from a "floppy" disk .

But at least, I finally got this last one right . . . I hope. (So far, so good.)

 

[mubs]

I reviewed the Gigabyte list of BIOSes again, and this warning was strong enough that I thought I'd try to update it again:

• Major vulnerabilities updates, customers are strongly encouraged to update to this release at the earliest.​

Credits to "Assaf Carlsbad and Itai Liba from SentinelOne"​

• Introduce capsule BIOS support starting this version.​

As it happened, I was right on both my counts just above. Reading the "fine print" in the manual, I saw that I had to connect the flash drive with the BIOS file to one specific USB port. But that still didn't work; the drive was formatted in Linux, so I copied the file to a FAT32 drive, and that worked. (No reference to that aspect in the manual.)

Ow! I'd better check if I need to update too. Thanks.

 

[ddrueding]

I update new motherboards immediately, then check every once in a while. I won't install one less than a month old; that is usually long enough for them to figure it out and issue a revision.