How do we update the BIOS on our PCs?

Hello to everyone!

Many of us have computers at their homes (desktops and laptops - although smaller mobile devices have also gained space), and naturally they need to be up-to-date so that we benefit from the best and most recent features available. This applies to the operating systems and their associated programs in the first place, but also to the lower-level sides of the computer, like the hardware components and the firmware - so let's think today about the "middle of the road" that is between the Hard and the Soft sections of our desktop PCs, i.e. the BIOS or the Basic input/output system!

This is my first article here on LinkedIn, and the technical tips in it are applicable to desktop and laptop PCs that have BIOS. Tablets and mobile phones are not covered here, at this point I have not heard anything about updating BIOS on tablets, so let's just talk about... computers!

As a person who not only likes programming, but also computers and their power, during the past six years I had the opportunity to build some desktop computers on my own, at home, mainly for computational purposes regarding number research, and this way I looked for several of the best possible configurations on the market, with motherboards belonging to worldwide-known brands like 华硕 , GIGABYTE , and MSI , and CPUs manufactured by both 英特尔 and AMD giants. Of course, all the motherboards came with preinstalled BIOS versions, and two of them (from Gigabyte and ultimately also from Asus) even with a second BIOS or dual BIOS, but I will talk a bit about this feature later.

From time to time, like in the Windows systems that regularly get updates from 微软 , also the BIOS modules are provided with newer versions that are available for download on the producer's website. The frequency of these updates may vary from case to case - sometimes they can be released once or twice a month, some other times we may get five or six of them during the whole year, or even at most one update in the year if the motherboard model has already turned several years old, like kindergarten babies!

This has also been the case with all the new motherboards that I got from 2017 on - before that, I had an Acer motherboard belonging to the Veriton series, whose BIOS was already the very last version from 2010 and never had the chance to experience a BIOS update. But from 2017 to the date, there were really tens of times that I performed this kind of updates! Even earlier today there was an update, before writing the article :) .

Some of us may be scared by this idea, as we actually need to be careful and also lucky during the update process - if there is a power outage or anything else that interrupts the process, or if the update does not complete well in any case, we will not be able to normally start the system again, and - especially in the older times - there was an increased risk of breaking the motherboard completely and needing to buy another one, or at least making complicated replacements of BIOS chips on them, besides the softer solutions like short-circuiting 2 special pins on the motherboard for 10 seconds with the computer completely powered off, or the more modern "BIOS Flashback" approach. So there is also a certain danger when we dare to update the BIOS, but then let's just remember: No risk, no fun :) ! Or this: At least we try!

So far I have used seven different motherboard models (and 8 distinct pieces) that supported BIOS updates, but at this time I only touch two of them on a regular basis - an MSI X670E board (that is in the picture) and an ASUS ROG Z790, that were released in the last months of 2022, so they are young on the market and are already receiving regular updates for their BIOS. As for the "older" boards, two of them got partly or completely broken over the time, but not because of the BIOS updates, instead it happened due to other wrong user behaviors :), and all of them got a lot of updates - I did not count all of them, although I love numbers, but surely there were several tens of those!

When updating the BIOS, it looks like we can also do it from within the operating system (for example, without restarting Windows for the update), but as far as I am concerned I always use a USB stick for the Flash mode. This implies us downloading the BIOS file from the motherboard website (it can be 16 MB or 32 MB in size, for my newer motherboards it is 32), then restarting the PC and entering the BIOS, and from there going to the USB drive that contains the file for the update - and depending on the motherboard we will again restart the PC once or even twice more. Within several minutes we should be done with all of it if successful!

Most of the times I updated a BIOS, the operation was indeed a success. It never happened to me to get unexpected power outages during the update. More empowered PC users can also get UPS (uninterruptible power supply) devices that would sustain the electrical needs of the PCs for several minutes, in case an outage occurs, otherwise we really cannot have influence on the probability that an outage interrupts our BIOS update. I have not bought any UPS by now, so every time I was lucky enough not to get a blackout right during the update!

However I needed to restore the BIOS to an earlier version once, on the Gigabyte motherboard (that has Dual BIOS and belongs to the AORUS series), by taking the version from the secondary BIOS battery. As far as I remember, at that time I was struggling with some overclocking settings and this problem was not immediately after a BIOS update.

On the Dual BIOS motherboards, there are two shiny CR2032 batteries, and if I am not wrong, when we update the primary BIOS the secondary one takes over the previous version as a backup. So anyway, if we fail to update BIOS successfully on a D.B. motherboard we have the fallback to the 2nd chip, that easily saves us!

But what if we have a classic "Single BIOS" motherboard and we get an update failure?

That happened to me once too. Last year in September I made an update for the MSI X399 MEG CREATION motherboard that has a Threadripper CPU (from 2018, when the first desktop 32-core chips emerged), and after that the computer just kept restarting itself once in a few seconds, in a loop; that was the only time I ended up with a messy behavior after a BIOS update. And that mobo is - you guessed! - a "single BIOS gifted" one!

The BIOS update failure scared me, also because that computer was the biggest and most powerful one I had built by then, and after 4 years it was not even possible to replace the motherboard, as it was no longer available on the stores. I tried several methods of recovering the BIOS (resetting the CMOS, shorting the 2 aforementioned pins, taking the CR2032 battery off and putting it back in) and also the BIOS Flashback method (for the first time!), and after the Flashback update things worked well. The motherboard was saved!

How do we perform a BIOS Flashback update?

The modern motherboards have a special USB entry on their back (where other USB ports are), and on the top of the area there is a button called BIOS Flash or Flashback. We download the BIOS file from the website, save it on the USB stick and place the stick in the dedicated port below the Flashback button.

Again, the way this zone looks like depends on the motherboard model. In the pictures above we see the BIOS Flash section for three different motherboards, two of them from MSI (2018 and 2022 generations), and one from the latest ASUS ROG brand.

We will need to turn off the PC completely and also unplug the CPU power connectors and the RAM from the motherboard (it is recommended to unmount everything from the motherboard, but back then I only disconnected the CPU and the memory), and only keep the power supply connected to the motherboard through the large 24-pin connector, without turning the motherboard on. Then we need to keep the Flash button pressed for several seconds (3 is recommended), and the button will start to blink like an eye. This blinking event means that it has started to update the BIOS by this special method, without us having to turn the computer on at all (least of all entering BIOS or the OS). The update will last for two-three minutes, like a normal BIOS update, and the blinking will stop. After this, we connect all the components back to the motherboard, carefully of course, and turn the PC on again to see how successful the BIOS update eventually was :) !

Sure, after a failure that does not even allow us to see the BIOS, this Flashback procedure is required for us to update the BIOS again, it is the only solution left there for us. I was truly lucky to get away with it and have the Threadripper PC reinstated, thus learning also how the Flashback method works "the hard way".

Older motherboards with at least 4-5 years of life seem to have reached the end of their BIOS update support, at least the "oldies goldies" from my home have their la(te)st BIOS releases between December 2021 for the Gigabyte Aorus one to August/September 2022 for the MSI models.

Instead, the newer motherboards are just in their first half-year, yet they have already got a bunch of BIOS versions! And I often look up their MSI and ASUS corresponding pages for news, so if you also like to have up-to-date firmware in you computer, stay tuned and keep an eye on your manufacturer's news!

To summarize, if we like our computers to be as up-to-date as possible, we should not neglect the BIOS part, although there are some risks to cover - after all, risks are everywhere. All the parts of our PCs evolve over time: the hardware, the software, the BIOS middleware! And if we do not refresh our hard PC parts too often, at least we can stay fresh with our other counterparts - while also having a plan B for difficult use cases like failures!

Good luck with the BIOS and have a nice week-end!

Peter