some bios flashing Q's

[dinde]

hey. i got an 8rda+ and i wanna flash the bios to the new one. i havent been experiancing any probs, so should i do it anyways? first, how do i flash the bios relatively safely? im running the stock bios that it came with. also, everyone sais not to flash the bios when the cpu is oc'd. why is that? im just asking because when i first put in my 2100+, it was automatically put @ 100 fsb. should i put it to 100 fsb when i flash it?


oh yeah, and if the bios flash goes bad, what should i do?

 

[Lord Evermore]

If the history for the BIOS versions doesn't indicate anything changed that you don't need or that you haven't had a problem with, or if discussion forum threads about the particular BIOS versions doesn't indicate whether there is a performance difference, then it's recommended not to flash it, because you can kill the BIOS making the system unbootable.

There is another thread going right now explaining what to do with a bad flash, however it's not guaranteed to work. Most board makers have a page describing how to flash the BIOS, and you can easily find many websites explaining it.

The reason you don't want to flash with the CPU overclocked is simply to prevent corruption or crashing during the flash, since that causes a bad flash. Your CPU isn't overclocked if you set it to a 133MHz bus; many motherboards default to a 100MHz bus when the CMOS settings haven't been adjusted, so that they don't accidentally boot a 100MHz bus processor using a 133MHz bus.

 

[azkiwi]

Are you that bored? If it ain't broke - don't fix it. Just do a search on bad flash if you need horror stories o fhaving teo extract your BIOS chip and FedEx it to Taiwan. OK, so its not that bad, but its one thing that if it goes badly wrong (which very occasionally it does) you cannot recover from without serious downtime. If you don't have a problem, there are much more productive corners of your computer to tinker in.