Is there anything more nerve shredding in PC upgrading than flashing a Mobo BIOS?

Cooper

Cooper

Cooper

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..because I can't think of anything that is.

I swear, my finger has been hovering over the 'Flash BIOS' button for an hour now, but all I can think of is imagining the stress, pain and expense if it all goes wrong...bad BIOS flashes are the stuff of nightmares for me, that anxious wait for the progress bar to creep up, then that terror filled moment when it does the first reboot.:(

..I also have in the back of my mind the supposedly appalling Asus RMA policy, which would probably mean I'd just rather buy a new motherboard than go through that and wait weeks for a fixed Mobo to return.

My Mobo is running the original launch BIOS from April 2014 yet I feel this is unfinished business when it comes to the smooth running and final upgrade to my PC, but I'm so nervous about doing it that I have kept putting off until now.:p

Reading the update notes to the BIOS revisions its clear that various fixes have been implemented, OC stability fixes, NVMe supoort added, and support for 5th Gen Broadwell, but still I can't help but think of the old saying 'if it aint broke dont fix it'.

Justified fears or paranoia?
 
Putting your fingers anywhere near an old Delta fan was always a risky business, I've done loads of FW flashes on everything from mobos to HDDs and never ever had a problem.
 
Bios flashing much safer these days due to backup bios and various methods to update bios.
I remember back in Abit NF-7 days when I had additional some bios backup device as the bios was so flaky with updates.

tom_e said:
Putting your fingers anywhere near an old Delta fan was always a risky business, I've done loads of FW flashes on everything from mobos to HDDs and never ever had a problem.
Click to expand...

Those deltas give me chills down my spine! Why did they need to be so fast and chunky?
 
Unless you have a MSI motherboard flashing a bios is nothing to worry about. I update my boards every time a new bios is released. The best Asus boards even have usb flashback where you can flash the bios without even having a cpu in the board.
 
its worrse flashing a GPU bios,as most mobos have back up bios switches anyways,plus a mobo is cheaper to replace should you bust it.
 
I always flash when a new BIOS update is released, even though I should be able to fix a bad flash with the Asus board I still get nervous when doing it.

My biggest worry is if the power cuts out during the flash, thankfully power cuts around where I am are extremely rare. Think I have only had a couple of power cuts in the last 10yrs.

Don't like it either when the flash is done fine and then it powers off the PC and back on again after a few seconds, then it does it again a few seconds later.

Thankfully I have never had a bad motherboard BIOS flash, have flashed HDD's, CD-RW/DVD-RW and Blu-ray drives without issues. Had one bad flash with my MSI 980 Ti 6G, but I was able to recover that easily enough with another flash, thank god for the IGPU.
 
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Ive done blind bios flashes on a borked gfx card before now! Thank god modern ones come with two bioses and so do a lot of good motherboards.

Loving the blind usb bios update on my Gigabyte. The fact it updates the bios with no cpu or ram in is amazing!

Great if you have bought a new cpu and forgot to update the bios so it recognises it before selling the old cpu :)

And already i had managed to bork both bioses on my MB and needed to use this usb facility :) Did it really quickly and then copied the new bios to the backup one and all was good again.
 
I've done it loads of times, and never had a problem. Nowadays most motherboards have some kind of rescue procedure for a borked BIOS update. It's more hassle putting all your settings back into a defaulted BIOS.

It's worth it, especially on new boards as they fix bugs and sort out memory timings and compatibility.
 
Sure cuttinng pin on Titan VRM IC controller. Damage or cut wrong pin which is about 1mm in size card dead!!!
 
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