Welcome to the PCMR, everyone from the frontpage! Please remember:
1 - You too can be part of the PC Master Race! It's not about the hardware in your rig, but the software in your heart! Nationality, race, gender, sexuality, religion, politics, and PC specs don't matter!
2 - Owning a PC can be cheaper than you may think. Check http://www.pcmasterrace.org/builds for our famous builds and ask for help here!
3 - Consider supporting the folding@home effort to fight Cancer, Alzheimer's, and more, with your PC! https://pcmasterrace.org/folding
4 - We're running a worldwide giveaway with MSI! You can get their super high end case and cooler right here!
Some bioses have a flashback feature which may or may not work, and some have dual bioses which literally has 2 bios chips which you can switch between with a switch or jumper. If those fail than you are SOL and need a new motherboard
Not exactly new motherboard. Just a repair shop with a tool to flash BIOS in their inventory. Half an hour of work in worst case, less than 10 minutes if they had similar board before.
Source: I've done that several times.
In some cases they might need to desolder the BIOS ROM chip, but that's not an issue for a repair shop usually.
Not every mobo works with one and not everyone has a second PC to use the flash tool. In fact, most people don't. But if possible, that's the easiest fix
Some motherboards have non-standard ROM chips. Most use SOIC-8 package, that's compatible with croc-flashers, but MSI for example is known to use WSON-8 chips. Those have pads underneath instead of legs, so you can't just clip onto it. You need to either carefully solder thin connecting wires to mobo or desolder the chip and use a pogo pin adapter for standard DIP/SOIC ROM flashing tools.
That's not true. It is temporarily bricked, and a cheap BIOS programmer, namely the CH341A can be purchased and used to rewrite the BIOS.
It can be done in one of a few ways. Most modern boards have headers plugging directly into the chip, there are alligator clips that can attach to the leads, or you can use hot air to desolder it and connect it directly to the programmer. Your local repair shop should have the necessary tools to desolder and resolder.
And in places with service centres like Taiwan, sometimes they reflash the BIOS for you for free. MSI did this one for me. Now I just do it myself.
Stop fearmongering; most motherboards have BIOS Flashback/EZ Flash plus options, which means we can recover from a corrupt BIOS attempt, and they can even perform a BIOS update without a CPU or RAM attached.
The higher end ones do, now low not so much. I bricked a MB with an i3 in it recently. Went down for a automatic reboot as part of a bios update, and never came up again
Haha, it felt a bit like that lol. That i3 microatx box served me well, and as it was a 9th gen replacement MBs were out of production so a replacement would have been $200. Aka a write off. RIP. I ended up building a newer ryzen 5 to replace it
I have never seen a motherboard that didn’t have a bios rollback that wasn’t a crappy oem pc. Even my cheapo gigabyte from 2011 had dual bios for this specific purpose
I recently retired a GA-880GMA-UD2H, which retailed for about a 100€ in 2010. I has dual BIOS. Granted, sometimes you had to manually jump some leads to make it flash the backup one, but still - tf are people buying in the modern era that doesn't have the feature?
Even if it doesn't have such a feature, you can still recover a bricked board with an EEPROM programmer. Software can always be recovered. As long as there's no hardware failure, there's hope.
Good news, your motherboard is now a chopping board of the PCB aesthetic
That's not true. It is temporarily bricked, and a cheap BIOS programmer, namely the CH341A can be purchased and used to rewrite the BIOS.
It can be done in one of a few ways. Most modern boards have headers plugging directly into the chip, there are alligator clips that can attach to the leads, or you can use hot air to desolder it and connect it directly to the programmer. Your local repair shop should have the necessary tools to desolder and resolder.
And in places with service centres like Taiwan, sometimes they reflash the BIOS for you for free. MSI did this one for me. Now I just do it myself.
I can speak to what happened last week when I randomly lost power on a sunny day during a Bios update.
I was having some random crashing/stability issues after replacing my mobo, processor, and RAM. Based on some advice I saw on Reddit I updated my bios. At about 3/4 through the update I unexpectedly lost power for ~10 minutes.
In those 10 minutes I went through many of the stages of grief and sent a number of woe is me texts to friends and family. In my mind the board was toast.
10 minutes later the power comes back on and I power up the system expecting the worst, but my computer was like, "I got you, dawg." and picked right back up at 76% and finished installing the update with no problem.
I feel extremely lucky and I don't even know why or how it was able to shrug off the disruption, as I always thought power failure during a Bios update was a death sentence.
I have a jackass Back-UPS 600 which starts whining and beeping (no problems whatsoever) while gaming 50% of the time. earlier it used to be 0% but it has enshittified over the past year (ain't no way I'm changing the battery it gives over 20 mins of backup)
The ones that can handle my pc at full power are expensive, and while it can easily handle bios update level power consumption, when you go over its rated power it will start beeping to warn you it cannot handle the load in case of an outage
I got a 1500VA unit for something like $200 at Best Buy. I would've shopped around but it was an emergency. My previous apartment's electricity was incredibly dirty that whenever the fridge's compressor would turn on my PC would reset. Its good for 900W for a couple minutes, long enough to close whatever you're doing and shut it down. And it completely fixed the dirty power issue.
How often are you going to run into a power issue while you're running at full chooch, though? Plus, you're unlikely to sustain your theoretical maximum wattage.
I recently splurged on a nice UPS, about $250 for a 1500VA/1000w, I've got a dual GPU setup on a 1200w PSU and pushing that as hard as I can with 3 monitors hits 80% of the UPS. And that's an occasional occurrence, not the norm. 90% of the time my computer is on, it's nowhere near that load.
So yes, in theory I could be left out to dry at some point, or maybe I could just avoid running the heaviest, most ridiculous possible workflow during a freak storm and be covered for 99.9999999% of the seconds of my computer's runtime.
Recently bought Space Marine 2 on sale and 90% of the time it would crash and restart my computer in the loading screen, the other 10% of the time it'd do the same thing but during the initial cut scene.
Updated my BIOS and have had literally 0 problems since
It's a good game to just shut the brain off and play.
I didn't get it at launch becaus I just have a rule where because there is literally so much content out there, and because I only have so much free time with a two year old, there is 0% of a reason for me to buy a game at full price.
I do not get fomo for games, I'm 36 and not playing multiplayer as often, and for the amount of playtime one $60-70 AAA game gives me, I can get quadruple the playtime off cheaper indie games or older games on sale.
I didn't necessarily. But I had tried a bunch of other things, and there was no reason hardware wise I shouldn't have been able to play the game. I may have just been updating drivers or something but I just somehow caught that the most updated version of my BIOS was like, v40 and i was on v18 or whatever and I figure "fuck it why not let's try it."
I update it when I set the mobo up. That's it. I have nasty flashbacks to a bios update screwing up my laptop, FPS was never above 15 after that. I usually played had a full 60 FPS before I did that.
I wasn't alone either. I found a Reddit thread with a couple of others making the same complaint. I created an account just to to join in.
It wasn't solving the issue. We eventually got a new bios update pushed out a couple of days later. But then my laptop wasn't handling games quite as well.
Many times if you have intel. It’s required recently because of the degradation issues. Every couple months for two years new updates to further decrease the chance of degradation were released
People debating on UPS's in the comments.
I live on a country where power supply is unreliable to say the least, and trying to have any work done without an ups can be a nightmare. I specifically have one that can keep my whole pc and two monitors for 6 hours depending on the load.
Are people really in 2026 having a multi-thousand dollar computer not plugged into a UPS? That's crazy to me, they're $150 for an OK one and it could save your computer.
i'll get one after the fact. so far 20 years of PC use with little power interruptions, and when they do happen, nothing happens to my PC. if you don't live in a 3rd world country you're probably fine lol but when it does happen i'll cry and regret and learn
i live in a 3rd world country and i had myself more than 10 different pcs, all of them mostly running for 16 hours a day for the most part, also my mother was a computer teacher so we had aswell around 20-30 PCs running all day on the 2000s.
Never ever got a UPS and never ever got a problem with storms at all. And storms here are extremelly powerful, sometimes the light goes out and thats it.
I always use a APC pro that runs the system off battery with sine wave of course. The battery is charged as it's used. The difference is there's no time switching over. Not a nanosecond. Data centers sell used ones and APC still has great replacement batteries for the 24volt two cells.
I know, but a simple power outage isn't what kills your hardware, its the current spikes that comes with it, and a surge protector protects you against that very much. Within reason of course, I mean something like a lightning strike can still kill your hardware under bad circumstances, but that's also the case with most desktop UPS as well.
That would be nice to have yes but I'm not sure that's something we get here in the US. And surge protection is really only half the picture of course, in the posted video a total power outage would still likely brick the PC if it happened during a BIOS update or Windows update even potentially.
And if for some reason you need alot of backup time instead of getting a really expensive big UPS id go for a good solar inverter/charger and a lead acid or LiPFO4 battery, you get more bang for your buck and have more options for expansion or other features.
For example my humble setup. Please ignore the poor cable management im waiting on more supplies and equipment.
Also you can hook your PC up to it via USB and the PC will know when its on battery power and do a hibernate or shut down when the battery runtime gets low enough.
Its far less plug and play then that, but yes its possible. But only really necessary if your useing it as a server, for a normal use desktop I wouldn't bother.
UPS stands for Uninterruptible Power Supply. It has a battery that holds a few minutes of power to prevent sudden disconnects, brownouts, and surges. As well as providing crucial few minutes to save and close during a total outage.
you ever considered the fact that not everyone spends multiple thousands of dollars on their computer?? also most cheap UPS options don't have high enough outputs for a lot of PCs
also i only just saw your comment where you said you bought yours a couple years ago. your comment is based on a 2-years-old price.
Work-from-home gamer Andy here. My power rarely ever goes out. Surge protector has done me fine for years. Most office app work constantly auto-saves nowadays. Have never lost work from the power going out.
You can skip the UPS and get a portable power bank from Ecoflow or Anker instead. Virtually all of them use LFPs now that will greatly outlast the sealed lead acid batteries in a UPS and the new ones almost all feature sub 10ms switchover time
If I ever start to go into anaphylactic shock I am gonna start doing a BIOS update, no need for artificial adrenalin when your adrenal gland is working at 9000%
Question from someone who only know basics on pc build and os management. What can it happen if power cuts off during bios install? Is there no way to start over?
Most of the time, the motherboard is completely bricked. However, most modern boards usually have something that allows them to flashback their bios using a USB, or two copies of the BIOS as a backup.
Most of the time, the motherboard is completely bricked.
That's not true. It is temporarily bricked, and a cheap BIOS programmer, namely the CH341A can be purchased and used to rewrite the BIOS.
It can be done in one of a few ways. Most modern boards have headers plugging directly into the chip, there are alligator clips that can attach to the leads, or you can use hot air to desolder it and connect it directly to the programmer. Your local repair shop should have the necessary tools to desolder and resolder.
And in places with service centres like Taiwan, sometimes they reflash the BIOS for you for free. MSI did this one for me. Now I just do it myself.
If you spend a bunch of money on an awesome PC, you’d be dumb not to spend a relatively small amount more for backup power supply, that’s gonna be true regardless of what happens during a BIOS update or otherwise, although I may be biased in saying that because my main home PC is an always-on machine that runs local servers, subnet router, reverse proxy, is in a tailnet, etc.
Some motherboards have a feature like Dual BIOS backup. If the main BIOS fails, it will automatically load the backup BIOS and restore it. After the restoration, it will display a message like, “BIOS upgrade failed. Reloaded from backup.”
Another type of fail-safe allows the system to load the BIOS from a USB drive when a specific key combination is pressed. For example, if you hold Ctrl + Alt + F1 simultaneously, it will try to load a file named 1.bios.bin from a USB flash drive. So, you would need to prepare the USB drive on another computer first.
what a bunch of guys that can't do their reading in here, omg
even if you don't have dualbios or whatever you can grab bios flasher for like 2$ and reflash it yourself if you made backup, which you should of course
my UEFI on my laptop has an backup, luckily... my notebook started to make problems so I made a clean reinstall last week. when I was finished with the drivers I wanted to make a Bios update... well it crashed during the updated, but luckily it still starts normal...
Our power suffers brown outs damn near daily, so much of our house is on UPSs. Put your home network on its own and you'll maintain internet during an outage, until either you or your local ISPs leg loses UPS backups.
I always time it Fridays at midnight, because historically there were never any power outages at that time and day where I live. (We don't have outages caused by natural causes(yet), only maintenance and repairs.)
Also winter is much better for doing BIOS updates than summer, most outages happen in summer where I live.
Actually, there is award: bios and the operating system interact with each other, and a malware can infect bios though this way, the bios updates can be security updates to minimize that risk
In the netherlands your "binnenshuis" insurance saves your computer so its not needed. which every smart person has because its insurance for every thing that breaks inside youre house.
•
u/PCMRBot Bot 11h ago
Welcome to the PCMR, everyone from the frontpage! Please remember:
1 - You too can be part of the PC Master Race! It's not about the hardware in your rig, but the software in your heart! Nationality, race, gender, sexuality, religion, politics, and PC specs don't matter!
2 - Owning a PC can be cheaper than you may think. Check http://www.pcmasterrace.org/builds for our famous builds and ask for help here!
3 - Consider supporting the folding@home effort to fight Cancer, Alzheimer's, and more, with your PC! https://pcmasterrace.org/folding
4 - We're running a worldwide giveaway with MSI! You can get their super high end case and cooler right here!
Need help? Use our Daily Simple Questions Megathread or create a new post!