Flashing BIOS without RAM?

Quartz

Quartz

Quartz

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I know some motherboards can flash a BIOS without a CPU, but can they do it without RAM? I ask because 64 GB DIMMs are appearing and BIOSs may need to be updated to cope.
 
You can't enter bios without memory installed so the only other way to update is with bios flashback feature.
 
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Quartz said:
Well yes, but does that work without RAM installed?
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Yeah, I believe so. They say CPU because the CPU is normally the one that doesn't have support.

Afaik, there's a chip/software on the board that does the flash and you only need power present to the board, nothing else.

Gigabyte, MSI, Asus and ASRock explicitly state you don't need memory (or they did with select B650 boards).
 
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Quartz said:
It's not a question of belief but that you didn't actually answer the question.
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Generally speaking it should be possible to flash without RAM installed as the BIOS exists within its own environment. There might be caveats to that, it's unfortunately not a black and white answer.

There's a lot of vendors, there's a lot of quirks, and there's a lot of dodgy Chinese alternatives hitting the market which people are using to save cash.

It should work but it's a variable question, we can't know 100% without understanding which hardware is involved.
 
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