I once bricked a motherboard with a bad flash, probably around 2012. I ended up desoldering the SPI flash and reprogramming it from another computer. Worked. In hindsight, it was quicker to do that than to go through the "front door" with the manufacturer-provided utilities.
Trying every combination to flash my Asus motherboard's BIOS
21–30 of 76 posts
Re: Trying every combination to flash my Asus motherboard's BIOS
#22Interesting non-BIOS observations: > So I popped everything together, made sure it benchmarked as expected, tested an Intel Arc A750 in preparation for testing on a Raspberry Pi, and then decided the 7900x's egregious power consumption wasn't to my liking the thing idled over 90W, and would eat up over 285W while compiling Linux! > I wanted to enable AMD's 'Eco' mode, which limits the TDP from the stock 170W to eithe…
Yes, we're unfortunately back to an unhinged race for the performance crown at any cost.
He may just have a well binned chip, they have to configure for the lowest performing chip otherwise yields would be down and prices would be through the roof.
Re: Trying every combination to flash my Asus motherboard's BIOS
#23Interesting non-BIOS observations: > So I popped everything together, made sure it benchmarked as expected, tested an Intel Arc A750 in preparation for testing on a Raspberry Pi, and then decided the 7900x's egregious power consumption wasn't to my liking the thing idled over 90W, and would eat up over 285W while compiling Linux! > I wanted to enable AMD's 'Eco' mode, which limits the TDP from the stock 170W to eithe…
Yes, we're unfortunately back to an unhinged race for the performance crown at any cost.
Higher idle power consumption is more common on AMD CPUs (I think it's inherent to their design). I don't think intel CPUs consume nearly as much power when idle. Oddly enough, AMD GPUs also have the same problem under certain conditions (multiple monitors, or high refresh rates can result in 100w idle GPU power )
But I agree that the power consumption figures under load are a bit nuts, and intel/amd now seem to be eager to double max power use if it means they can squeeze 5% more performance out of the die.
Re: Trying every combination to flash my Asus motherboard's BIOS
#24Good grief The ineptitude of firmware programmers continues to astound me. Asus should upload their firmware to the LVFS https://fwupd.org/ > and make firmware updates as simple as 'fwupdmgr update'.
You can actually use `fwupdtool install-blob` to update the UEFI if the board supports and uses UEFI capsule update. I did that with my Asus B550-I and it just worked, it reboots to ASUS EZ-Flash and does the update automatically. All Asus would need to do is publish updates on LVFS.
Ooh that's very interesting. I had to reverse engineering the firmware update process for my work laptop[0], I'm guessing the update process there doesn't use capsule updates though...
Re: Trying every combination to flash my Asus motherboard's BIOS
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can actually use `fwupdtool install-blob` to update the UEFI if the board supports and uses UEFI capsule update. I did that with my Asus B550-I and it just worked, it reboots to ASUS EZ-Flash and does the update automatically. All Asus would need to do is publish updates on LVFS.
How do you know if the board supports it? Asking because I want to update my firmware for my lenovo legion
Anecdotally, my work Thinkpad just works with fwupdmgr. Lenovo do support this.
Re: Trying every combination to flash my Asus motherboard's BIOS
#26Maybe it's just that the last motherboard I got (MSI, and ... it was a newegg refurb), but the last PC I built was BY FAR the worse experience ever.
- RAM: only 2 of four slots worked, couldn't install in the "optimal" bank setting, just to get it to boot. Tried with two different stick brands, which various sites said would be compatible
- Ryzen 5600G needed a bios update to ... kinda ... get work. The HDMI does not work at all however
- BIOS update required undocumented help from the internet: need a FAT system on "not too big" of a flash drive.
- OK, so try a new minimalist video card ... doesn't get recognized, but an old video card does work.
- On the linux side, the kernel support for 5600G took another six months, the HDMI-over-displayport-adapter I DID get to work for 4k is now flickering and dropping signal... there are some support notes in arch linux about switching from y color space to others, or some EDID hack, or some thing with fooling DRM. None of this is configurable in text files of course, some systemd binary or direct bin file hacking....
I've never had to do even one of these problems building other PCs (this is probably my seventh or eighth box build in my lifetime).
Re: Trying every combination to flash my Asus motherboard's BIOS
#27Interesting non-BIOS observations: > So I popped everything together, made sure it benchmarked as expected, tested an Intel Arc A750 in preparation for testing on a Raspberry Pi, and then decided the 7900x's egregious power consumption wasn't to my liking the thing idled over 90W, and would eat up over 285W while compiling Linux! > I wanted to enable AMD's 'Eco' mode, which limits the TDP from the stock 170W to eithe…
Yes, we're unfortunately back to an unhinged race for the performance crown at any cost.
When were we not in an unhinged race? GHz sells chips, gotta get as many as possible; it's just AMD and Intel have gotten really good at pumping the watts through the chips lately.
But you can buy CPUs with lower power limits, sometimes these are released later in the cycle though, or set the limits yourself. Or probably just leave it at defaults and not usually get up to the crazy high numbers anyway; most desktop use cases aren't going to scale usage so high, although there's plenty of examples that do.
Re: Trying every combination to flash my Asus motherboard's BIOS
#28Maybe it's just that the last motherboard I got (MSI, and ... it was a newegg refurb), but the last PC I built was BY FAR the worse experience ever. - RAM: only 2 of four slots worked, couldn't install in the "optimal" bank setting, just to get it to boot. Tried with two different stick brands, which various sites said would be compatible - Ryzen 5600G needed a bios update to ... kinda ... get work. The HDMI does not…
Refurb often means previously broken and hopefully fixed; sometimes it just means returned, but the box wasn't nice enough to sell as open boxed. Looks like your board probably still had issues after refurbishment. It would probably have been better to return it when you first got it, although newegg return processing isn't always easy.
It's hard to be patient, but buying parts after they've been out long enough to get supported by the software you want to use also helps let other people find the problems with the rest of the package.
Re: Trying every combination to flash my Asus motherboard's BIOS
#29I updated my asus mainboard recently too. It was straightforward: Copy the new firmware image into the efi partition somewhere. Reboot. Select the efi fat32 partition and the firmware blob therein in ez flash. Update. Why format an usb stick when there is already a perfectly good fat32 partition lying around?
Some BIOSes (Gigabyte, I think) will also read NTFS, so if you've got a Windows install, that's another easy option.
Re: Trying every combination to flash my Asus motherboard's BIOS
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, we're unfortunately back to an unhinged race for the performance crown at any cost.
Higher idle power consumption is more common on AMD CPUs (I think it's inherent to their design). I don't think intel CPUs consume nearly as much power when idle. Oddly enough, AMD GPUs also have the same problem under certain conditions (multiple monitors, or high refresh rates can result in 100w idle GPU power ) But I agree that the power consumption figures under load are a bit nuts, and intel/amd now seem to be e…
Anecdote:
With me using my computer, 2 x 27" QHD 144Hz monitors, my AMD GPU is using 28W, while the CPU is using 18W.
(Radeon RX 6700XT 12GB, Ryzen 9 5900X 12-core)
I know the Zen 4 / Ryzen 7000X use a lot more power, as they are designed to pull power and use all available thermal headroom all day!