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Flashing your bios without recording old settings...

Scougar

Scougar

Scougar

Soldato
Joined
30 Jan 2007
Posts
15,485
Location
PA, USA (Orig UK)
That moment in time when it is late at night and you flash your bios impatiently without recording the old overclock settings and tweaks you made in the bios.

Dang it. Now I have to spend hours putting it back lol.
 
I have done that several times. What is worse for me is thinking that I'm prepared by backing up the old settings to find that I get a message telling me that they can't be loaded due to being from an older bios - grr.

Now I just take a load of screen grabs and have them on a stick.
 
I can't even remember what a stable voltage is etc. At the time I was thinking, whatever... I will just redo it. And ignoring all those details like, how you get the xmp profile to with without crashing... How you get it to not throttle down. All the little but important stuff.
 
I actually remembered (surprisingly) to back up my multiple OC profiles the last time i updated the BIOS but the new BIOS refused to import them. I was less than chuffed to say the least.
 
I remember "the old days" when flashing a BIOS on a motherboard was considered to be quite risky. Motherboards did not have dual BIOS features then and often the BIOS chips was soldered to the board. Flashing through DOS with a floppy disc was the preferred choice over Windows but still not fool proof.

I remember flashing a BIOS on a DFI board for it to simply die. Thankfully that board had a socket type BIOS chip and I paid around £15 for a reprogrammed chip so then I could "Hot Flash" my original borked one.

Other times I was not as lucky.

Having a dual BIOS board can be a life saver, showing restraint and only flashing when the noted changes are to fix and issue you are experiencing is a definite. But where is the fun in that :D

I do cringe a little when I read of people already flashing their 1070 and 1080 cards, even noting requests for the Titan X Pascal cards and modified BIOS's. AFAIK each of those cards do not even have a dual BIOS feature...!
 
Vimes said:
I do cringe a little when I read of people already flashing their 1070 and 1080 cards, even noting requests for the Titan X Pascal cards and modified BIOS's. AFAIK each of those cards do not even have a dual BIOS feature...!
Click to expand...

Some have them. I've got a 1080 GLH that has dual BIOS, but haven't bothered to use it yet.
 
Vimes said:
I remember flashing a BIOS on a DFI board for it to simply die. Thankfully that board had a socket type BIOS chip and I paid around £15 for a reprogrammed chip so then I could "Hot Flash" my original borked one.
Click to expand...

Until i found that company selling spare bios chips i used to buy 2 mobos so i had one to use and one for another bios chip to hotswap :)

It used to be so easy to corrupt the bios back then.

As for gpus i think your ok if you have a backup or onboard gpu to use when you bork your main card. I've started leaving my onboard GPU as primary on my second mobo bios slot so when i messup a flash i can just switch the bios on teh mobo and restart to reflash the gpu.
 
IIRC I think that it was this shop I used a long time ago for buying and programming BIOS chips.....

http://www.biosmaster.co.uk/index.php?route=common/home

I remember just entering details like the CHS values of the hard drive and spending a little too long in the BIOS could have catastrophic effects.

I think that I have been more surprised at people swapping BIOS's for their Pascal 1070 /1080 cards as there isn't even a BIOS editor available as yet.

Just found my BIOS chip from that DFI board.....

screen capture software
 
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I have bought an updated bios online before for my Acer L3600 so I could use a faster CPU, and as it was my main machine that I was using to look for jobs at the time, I just opted to buy the bios.

Anyway... so at present I am back at 4.3Ghz, and I thought it was stable, but sitting on the desktop it will randomly freeze the PC, no warning. It used to do this ages ago when I was trying for 4.4 and 4.5 but I can't remember what setting I changed. Great. Silly me for not recording the settings.

That's the daft thing about this chip, it crashes when not stressed :(

I wish there were some clues as to what went wrong. (I am seeing a LOT of errors in the event viewer. I might just opt for a clean windows install).

Update: Well.. I seem to be back to where I started at 4.3, which is good. I also did a full win10 reinstall, so that is good.
 
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Vimes said:
I have done that several times. What is worse for me is thinking that I'm prepared by backing up the old settings to find that I get a message telling me that they can't be loaded due to being from an older bios - grr.

Now I just take a load of screen grabs and have them on a stick.
Click to expand...

Same here.:rolleyes:
 
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