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Question NVME on Old Bios?

R

Roger Wilco

Diamond Member
Motherboard: MSI 270 Mortar M-Atx

TLDR: I've been avoiding updating the bios on my motherboard, because I don't want to sacrifice CPU performance for the spectre/meltdown patches. I've been considering getting an NVME drive to plug into the M.2 port, but I'm worried about compatibility on an old bios.

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The support page for this motherboard (https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/support/Z270M-MORTAR#down-bio) shows a bunch of bios updates that improved compatibility with various NVME drives. Do you think any modern NVME should still work fine on this board with an old bios, or will there be issues? Should I just suck it up and update the bios? How bad will the performance penalties be?
 
Roger Wilco said:
Should I just suck it up and update the bios? How bad will the performance penalties be?
Click to expand...

There is usually around a 0-5% performance penalty. If you're running Windows 10, you're in effect already running the fixes, because 10 is capable of updating CPU microcode on startup. The BIOS fixes only apply during boot, and when running older OS. Further, newer Windows 10 versions already have migations in place.

In short, don't worry and just go for it. Depending on which drive you're running now, you should see a good increase in storage performance.

Oh, and you can actually disable the Windows fixes with a bit of registry editing. For the time being at least. Have an older Haswell system which isn't much online anyway and not used for browsing at all, so might as well.
 
If you don't want to get the Intel CPU microcode updated, I recommend to use the BIOS 7A69v12.
It will give you full NVMe support.
 
The z270 chipset should be plenty new enough to not have issues with NVMe drives without the security patches.

That said, the performance hit isn't bad enough not protecting your PC from the various exploits. So regardless of adding a NVMe drive or not, that is something you should strongly consider.
 
Thank you for the replies everybody. I will consider updating the bios.

The NVME should be a solid upgrade over my HDD for game storage 🙂
 
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