Background:
My current board just got fried in a power surge. At least, I think it was just the board. Still testing. Anyway, I’m taking the chance to update my platform now that Zen2 is out. I’m set on the 3700X, and I’ve narrowed board choice down to a few options, with the Gigabyte X470 Aorus Gaming 5 WiFi sitting at the top. The only other board I’ve found that checks all my boxes is the Crosshair VII Hero, but that’s over £100 more expensive. There are also 2 or 3 other contenders that are missing a feature or two, but are priced okay and don’t have the roadblocking issue of the gigabyte which I’m about to detail. Oh, and I’m not looking at X570 boards, only B450 and X470. I don’t trust and don’t tolerate tiny fans.
The actual issue:
On pretty much all gigabyte boards I’ve looked at, in order to update the bios to support Ryzen 3xxx, they require you to run some “EC FW Update Tool” windows executable. I’d stab a guess at EC FW standing for Embedded Controller Firmware?
What is this? What does it do that they couldn’t achieve with their actual, builtin bios flashing utility, QFlash?
Does it even apply to Linux users? I’d imagine so, since firmware is the domain of ROM rather the kernel, right?
That being the case, would the tool work correctly under Wine? My instinct says no…So then would I have to make a windows partition just to update the firmware?
Cursory glances around reddit and the gigabyte forums indicate a lot of confusion and not much solid information surrounding the purpose or function of the tool, beyond “you need to run it before updating to bios F40 and later”.
Also of note is that I’m upgrading from a first gen ryzen which I’m hoping is intact following the power surge, so at the very least I could get up and running on the board with that before tackling 3rd gen and the bios updates.
Anyway, this tool having been around since mid-May by the looks of it, I’m hoping one of you good people has come across it already. Cheers in advance!