Retail BIOS chip for an OEM motherboard?

Thanks guys. I already Emailed them about returning the item. Hopefully my second one's not as terrible as this one! xD

Can I have the fruit bag in the happy meal? 

There is absolutely no difference between the OEM motherboard and a retail motherboard physically. If you want to buy a retail bios CMOS, go ahead and pull the CMOS installed on your motherboard and replace it with the more capable retail CMOS.

We did say this, but we needed clarification. A new BIOS chip (it's socketed) would work?

All CMOS made in the last 10-15 years are socketed so they could be replaced in the event of corrupted BIOS that is unrecoverable. The absolute only thing that seperates a OEM part from an exact copy retail part is the CMOS chip they throw in the socket. It doesn't make financial sense to create 2 different products where they could use 1 with 2 different .50c CMOS chips.

I've definitely bought a motherboard (1155) that had an integrated CMOS and a soldered bios chip, in recent times. I was very upset with that purchase "NEVER AGAIN, MSI !!"

I just wanted confirmation of what OP could change. This is good news, though.

Well then I should iterate, any good motherboard I have ever seen in the last 10-15 years has socketed CMOS. From what I've seen of MSI's motherboard line as of late, not worth a dime in the cash register unless you are paying $300+ on an intel plaform and $200+ on an AMD platorm. They don't give a flying fuck about their midrange and low ball motherboard lineup as they are making the money in the high end motherboards and high end graphics cards they produce.

haha yeah. Only ASUS and Gigabyte for me.

And just FYI, it was the MSI mITX B75ma-p45, if you needed the reference.

That's definitely a low ball motherboard. the power phase is using old crappy linear voltage regulators not digital switching MOSFETs.

Are you completely sure that the retail bios chip will work in it? Like will the bios look like a retail version once installed in my OEM board? I don't wanna stick with this board and miss out on features.

 

This person has a OEM rampage II motherboard and tried using a retail bios. It doesn't look like it changed much for him.. http://www.overclock.net/t/1398678/asus-rampage-ii-gene-oem-to-retail-bios

 

This is my motherboard compared to the retail version. There are some physical differences. (features missing from my OEM board like power/reset/memOK/debug LED)

BUMP! Anyone know?