I never expected this many BIOS updates. 11 so far.

[nerp]

Another BIOS update this month from ASUS for my H170 PRO GAMING. The release notes are always vague and flashed it no problem.

That's 11 total BIOS releases for this board so far in about a year's time. Eight have been released since I bought the board last year. Each was successful and none did anything very noticeable in terms of changes. I suspect one fixed the Skylake microcode, but I'm not clear on what all the others did.

Either way, I'm happy that this board has been supported so consistently and it makes me think I'll probably buy one of ASUS's more popular boards again. Nothing worse than being abandoned by a hardware company that has moved on to new things.

But it does seem pretty wild that there have been so many BIOS updates for this board over time. I've never seen anything like it. Is this normal? I've owned a lot of hardware over the years but never seen this many BIOS updates for one board.

What gives?

 

[Mr Evil]

My current motherboard, an Asus Sabertooth 990FX, had 10 BIOS updates over a period of one year. The oldest motherboard I still remember was an EPoX 7KXA, for which I found a list of 9 BIOS updates over a period of one and a half years (I think that includes betas though), so it's not that weird.

I would prefer longer term support though. Two years of support for new CPUs would be reasonable.

 

[nerp]

There are some legendary boards that were updated many years after initial release for CPU support, but that's mainly because they had such a massive install base and many users clamoring for CPU support. I imagine lots of people own the same board but it still seems pretty high. On one hand, it's nice to think each time I'm getting "performance and stability improvements," but on the other hand, it makes you wonder if there was so much wrong that needed fixing.

Now that I think about it, there was a time when I first had this machine that I often had no keyboard and had to reboot. Other small random hard to replicate problems with USB. I can't remember the last time anything like that happened. I suppose my questions would be easily answered if ASUS bothered to provide detailed release notes but they have a lot of products and I honestly would rather be left in the dark with more updates than fewer but more detailed updates if it's a question of where they spend their resources.

 

[bonehead123]

all this means is that ASSUS rushed the board out to market before it was actually ready for primetime...

I would venture to say that most of the updates were bug fixes and feature enablers, for stuff that should have been there from day 1. But as usual, greed took a higher priority than completing all of the labwork and testing and making sure they released a quality product.

I've had my current board (in my sig) since late-Jan, and it has had only 4 updates, the most recent being released only a few weeks ago. All of them worked flawlessly so far (finger crossed ), and provided better stability, improved chipset performance, and additional ram compatibility...

 

[nerp]

But you're just speculating. Just as I'm forced to speculate. It could be that if your board was released at the same time as mine, it would have had just as many BIOS updates. Then would it also have been rushed to market?

 

[UsandThem]

My board in my signature is on its 5th update. The first two were to Intel CPU microcode fixes, and the last two were for fixing DDR4 compatability and XMP stability.

Out of helping people over in general hardware and computer help sub-forums, the most common BIOS updates I see listed across all the different manufacturers seem be related in some way to DDR4.

 

[Iron Woode]

My Asrock H97 Pro4 showed a new BIOS dated 7/20/2016. The last one was last year.

the update says:
1.Update NTFS module.
2.Add ME FW version in BIOS setup.
3.Add NVMe support.

 

[master_shake_]

my z97-ws has 8 bios updates.

the latest one was today strangely enough.

it doesn't even get listed in the motherboards section. it's under servers.

also i had to fill out a report for it when a raid card didn't work.

i think they fixed it though.