I’m very late to this thread but I just went through this hellscape and have something to add if any others need a working solution.
The setup is an Aorus X470 Gaming 5 WIFI board with a 2700X CPU. The BIOS was F5 when I started and I successfully have Fb3a running now.
The system as a whole is a little old so I wanted to update it for my son to last a few more years. The idea was to get a 5800X3D and new GPU but the BIOS needed to be updated — and as outlined above, Gigabyte really makes it clear you need to:
[1] update to F31
[2] install ecfwupdate_B19.0606.1
[3] update to F40
[4] update to Fb3a (in my case to support the 5800X3D)
Anyone reading my reply right now has probably discovered that there are ZERO answers out there for getting past the ecfwupdate_B19.0606.1 stage which always ends with “Load Flash.dll failed!”. In many cases people appear to become so frustrated they simply updated the BIOS anyhow and downgraded to 2 sticks of ram.
Anyhow, I came across an answer on this page:
…it’s the only answer which actually made sense and actually works. You can read his answer but here’s the meat of it:
"In the download zip there’s a file called Uiset.ini, ini files are generally used to initialize .exe files with specific values , this file does control IFU_XE32_v1310 behaviour. I don’t even need to use the ECFwUpdate.exe program.
The issues seems like it is not automatically loading the correct file so I just set AutoFlash=1 to 0 and it does indeed correctly launch the program, but I need to manually select a .bin file."
[1] I followed his example by editing the uiset.ini and changing AutoFlash=1 for AutoFlash=0.
[2] Next, I ran the IFU_XE32 app (not ECFUUpdate)
[3] When IFU_X32 loads it allows me to choose a bin to install
[4] I choose v615.bin and load it, after 30 seconds the PC reboots.
[5] Everything still working so I run IFU_X32 again and load v817.bin, after 30 seconds the PC reboots again
[6] Everything still working so I made it through the EC FW hellscape!
[7] Reboot to BIOS and it’s reverted to F5 which WAS expected
[8] Update to BIOS F31
[9] Rebooted and everything works. Reboot to BIOS…
[10] Update to BIOS F40
[11] Rebooted and everything works. Reboot to BIOS…
[12] Update to BIOS Fb3a
[13] Rebooted and everything works.
Fb3a is the recommended BIOS for the 5800X3D so I’m stopping there even though there are 2 more revisions (I’ll wait until there are no trailing letters).
Tomorrow I plan to pick up the 5800X3d now that the board is successfully updated to host it.