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Trying every combination to flash my Asus motherboard's BIOS

jeffgeerling.com

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Re: Trying every combination to flash my Asus motherboard's BIOS

#31

Post by AtlasBarfed »

_rs wrote: post #20
scruple wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently updated an MSI Z690-A to the latest BIOS in preparation for installing a 13th generation Intel. I downloaded the updated BIOS file, put it on a thumb drive, renamed it to "MSI.ROM," put the thumb drive into the "Flash BIOS" port, had the motherboard connected to ATX and CPU1 power only, no CPU, or RAM, or any other hardware installed, flipped on power, pressed the "Flash BIOS" button and everything worked…

Yeah I’ll give a +1 to MSI, their BIOS firmware updates have been nothing but smooth for me and I haven’t had to think much about which USB sticks I’ve used. I’m about 80% sure I’ve used a USB 3 stick at one point but can’t be certain

IF you read the special notes about a not-too-big flash drive and FAT and all that.

IIRC I also had to try several USB ports in back and something else hacky to get the flash going. It was still half black incantation and performative dance learned from the internet, and about 5% directions provided by MSI on their website or within BIOS.

I've used Gigabyte and Asus/ASRock in the past, and I think a Biostar ... and I'll be going back to those in the future.

Re: Trying every combination to flash my Asus motherboard's BIOS

#32

Post by noman-land »

zbrozek wrote: post #21

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.

This is hilariously cavalier. I love it.

Re: Trying every combination to flash my Asus motherboard's BIOS

#33

Post by formerly_proven »

neogodless wrote: post #30
mardifoufs wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Which number are you looking at? 18 W idle for a 5900X is very low. 30-40 W is typical for these. Your system is probably not configured correctly, is using slow RAM or you're looking at something other than package power.

GPU idle power seems quite high though, but as I understand most AMD GPUs struggle with power management with more than one monitor connected (no experience here, last AMD GPU was 2012).

Re: Trying every combination to flash my Asus motherboard's BIOS

#35

Post by colechristensen »

toast0 wrote: post #27
iforgotpassword wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 u…

Before Ryzen AMD was way behind for many years and Intel didn't have to compete. TDP was lower for a long time. The previous big run achieving speed by pushing power was in the Pentium 4 era if I remember correctly.

Re: Trying every combination to flash my Asus motherboard's BIOS

#36

Post by neogodless »

formerly_proven wrote: post #33
neogodless wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Which number are you looking at? 18 W idle for a 5900X is very low. 30-40 W is typical for these. Your system is probably not configured correctly, is using slow RAM or you're looking at something other than package power. GPU idle power seems quite high though, but as I understand most AMD GPUs struggle with power management with more than one monitor connected (no experience here, last AMD GPU was 2012).

If you mean PPT then yes, that's closer to 40W.

CPU Power is 15-20W. SOC Power shows 17W.

The RAM is DDR4-3600 CAS16 running at 1800Mhz, which I don't believe is slow.

GPU is "relatively" idly but just having Ryzen Master or Adrenaline open and displaying these values means it is not truly idle.

Re: Trying every combination to flash my Asus motherboard's BIOS

#37

Post by AtlasBarfed »

toast0 wrote: post #28
AtlasBarfed wrote: post #26

Maybe 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 g…

I did an AMD APU back in the A8/A10 days and that was the crankiest and most annoying build I did until that point.

It is so appealing to a non-hardcore gamer to get an AMD + graphics integrated chip, and it makes so much sense with all that excess silicon real estate, but the obvious lack of attention in the entire chain of software and hardware and firmware support is unacceptable.

The board (a B550) seemed to have gigantic amounts of support issues from what I can tell, because there were far too many people with similar issues, and they couldn't have been all refurbs. And obviously, a refurb/open box means there are lots of returns.

It was a bad decision on my part, but why is the board accepting an old PCI graphics card but not a "modern" one, even after the most recent BIOS (which is five months old at this point, so it looks like MSI is just abandoning this board from a support perspective, even though the advertised processor support was only enabled in one of the more recent BIOS releases)

I should have built it while I was close to a MicroCenter, but I'm not a person that likes to remount a CPU, so once the CPU is mounted, I'm pretty reticent to swap out a motherboard.

I'll just make it a containers / VM hosting box.

Finally, I just booted up my previous "fastest" box that I upgraded (problematically) to the latest Ubu and wow is it a lot slower than it was. I've had problems with snap update daemons and maybe all the snaps are eating available RAM with all their copies of libraries.

People, serial speed improvement is dead, it is the deadest of the dying "Moore's law" patterns.

The software industry has to start making its code more efficient. We need to loopback and start improving the stacks and execution environments to squeeze more from less. I'll know when we stop putting our heads up our you-know-wheres when OS releases make old machines faster, rather than bogging them down with Javascript Electron monstrosities and memory-is-cheap containers with complete OS's in them to run a web server or web browser.

Linux in particular probably needs to start repackaging libraries into stability-focused libraries. Sweep the libraries for parts that have not changed much in 5-10 years, and start moving those into "mature" libraries, and have "volatile" libraries. But then again the constant churn in GPU compute, vector extensions, etc means that just is not going to stabilize.

We might still be 50 years from where hardware "wringing" is done and the hardware interfaces stabilize for decades rather than years.

Re: Trying every combination to flash my Asus motherboard's BIOS

#38

Post by jamiepenney »

colechristensen wrote: post #35
toast0 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 u…

Before Ryzen AMD was way behind for many years and Intel didn't have to compete. TDP was lower for a long time. The previous big run achieving speed by pushing power was in the Pentium 4 era if I remember correctly.

Yeah I was going to say, this reminds me of the Pentium 4 days when Intel ran into problems with both maxing out the clock speed and their huge instruction pipeline. I just want a machine that can perform well under pressure, but doesn't double as a space heater while idle...

Re: Trying every combination to flash my Asus motherboard's BIOS

#39

Post by [deleted] »

colechristensen wrote: post #35
toast0 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 u…

Before Ryzen AMD was way behind for many years and Intel didn't have to compete. TDP was lower for a long time. The previous big run achieving speed by pushing power was in the Pentium 4 era if I remember correctly.

[deleted]

Re: Trying every combination to flash my Asus motherboard's BIOS

#40

Post by [deleted] »

Scoundreller wrote: post #13

Interesting 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…

[deleted]
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