Rant A simple BIOS update - that's all it was

Okay, now I have to know

4960X

 

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/u...extreme-edition-15m-cache-up-to-4-00-ghz.html - that look familiar?

 

That's the badger. It shall be missed, dying in a not quite blaze of glory when the mobo decided to put 1.8V through it

 

Was it a case of, "That doesn't sound or smell right...!"...?

 

I had a 3970x on a MSI Big Bang Xpower II. It lived up to its name.

 

Asrock Dual Vsata, Supports P4 and Core 2 Quad (800-1066 FSB), DDR / DDR2 and AGP/PCI-E.... Love the bloody thing even if at the time of its launch it was considered uber budget tier. Bios is crap and it looks like something that has had multiple tins of coloured paint dropped on it but its so useful for older 775 era hardware.

I have had some weird bios oddities lately:

- X570 Aorus Pro on the original ABBA bios release would no longer recognise my NVME SSD.
- B450i Aorus Pro has no option to turn off the onboard wifi which caused quite the headache when I kept getting a stopcode error installing windows (can't recall the exact message but it refers to the onboard wifi). Had to physically pull the wifi card in the end.
- Asus Z370i Strix - 8700K running on auto voltage would happily sit at 4.9Ghz with 1.35 volts under full load. Switching to manual overclocking and starting at 1.35v (so I could work downwards) instantly blue-screened the moment load was applied.

Saying that also some positives - My current x470 Aorus Gaming 7 Wifi seems to really gel with my 3900X on the ABBA bios. Seeing consistent 4.5-4.6 on the first CCD and 4.3-4.4 on the second. All core in game is now around 4.35-4.45 (Destiny 2).

 

The one I had was very similar - I went from a Pentium D to a Core 2 Duo, to a Core 2 Quad all on the same board. It even supported AGP cards. Brilliant thing, it was.

 

I remember when i were a lad, that EVGA board (Maybe Socket 775?) And after i bought it, set it all up and got it working pretty dreamy smooth, I then read all the reviews recommending not to buy it due to it's constant bugs.

Worked fine for me till i sold it on

Sam

 

For what it's worth I've had quite a few MSI boards and never had any problems. I'm posting via one now.

 

Can I ask the inevitable question from the msi haters. How many failures have you had over what period of time?

I've had several MSI mobos and all our gpus recently with zero failures ( touch wood).

The only mobo failures I've had have been gigabyte, 3 in total but I still wouldn't write them off.

 

It's not failures, mate, it's the monumentally sh!te BIOS and buggering about required for seemingly routine tasks. I have a long history of problems with them, but two out my last three MSI boards have caused me grief.

Of course, the Asrock board I originally wanted is now in stock - taunting me!

 

Over the last 10 years?

GPUs - Haven't touched MSI since I went through 4 560tis in a space of 11 months... First, the fan crapped out after ~6 months... second did the same, and the final 2 of those 4 were DoA.
Motherboards - everyone I've come in contact with has been bricked, or at best hobbled, by some bios/efi problem or other...

And the response from MSI's support every single time was 'yeah? and? what do you expect us to do about it?'

I expect you to fix your **** MSI.

 

Oh, that sounds familiar, do they outsource their customer support to Asus call centres?

 

Never personally had it from ASUS, but more recently had it from Corsair.

...actually Corsair it was more 'we don't care what our warranty says... we ain't replacing it.'

 

It must take an ungodly level of tweekery to need to call an OEM (BIOS team) for advice on how to get summat done, that isn't intuitive... bordering on reinventing the wheel, from where I'm stood.

How much af said tweekery is conceivably failing, due to the frailty of the silicon and its' gods we pray to, for things to work?

I would say that if said tweekery is only possible on one brand/model example of a socket/chipset combo., then that should be the variant you use, rather than trying with an unknown.

 

ive ended up with an MSI board, i would of gone for an Asrock one, but there is only 1 z370 Matx Asrock board, and it doesnt have much in the way of board cooling the VRM's
Asus left a pretty bad taste in my mouth with my current board, for a small multitude of reasons, least not the poor fan control
Gigabytes Bios have ALWAYS been very flakey in my experience, so they were out of the running as well

leaving

Msi

still waiting for a few extra parts, but my past experience with MSI boards ( in the p55 era ) wasnt too bad, so ive my fingers crossed
and thanks to it being a custom build, im glad i dont have to deal with much of MSI's garbage bloatware

 

MSI BBXPII fets blew up.

Other than that David is spot on. They're just a sod to get working with everything and require lots of messing around with.

And they don't like certain usb things and go into "90 year old mode" and take about 7 minutes to post. Both of mine do that.