Bit sick of very popular tech you tubers spouting nonsense about fatally bricked motherboards, when a $10 USB flasher is very likely going to fix the problem. Especially if it was just a power outage during a BIOS UEFI update rather than a bad EEPROM. It’s become a sort of urban myth that updating your BIOS is fraught with dangers, and while it may hold few fears for most folks on this particular forum, it’s a sad fact that out there in the wider world the vast majority of people don’t even know their BIOS can be updated.
So in this context you have the likes of Jayz2Cents talking about how absolutely essential it is to buy a motherboard with BIOS flashback or dual BIOS (which is a neat idea IF it works - looking at you Gigabyte!) and Bitwit Kyle actually having to return a ‘bricked’ $1000 dollar water cooled mobo because he didn’t have the faintest idea he could do a reflash himself. Glorious opportunity to inform and educate millions totally lost!
I’d really love to see Wendell or Ryan grab one of these very cheap devices and re-flash a few supposedly ‘bricked’ boards - could potentially save tens of thousands of perfectly good motherboards from the scrap heap.
My story with this one was installing a beta BIOS on an old z97 Gigabyte board I was trying to build a hackintosh with for a friend. It was a bad idea, and I had way too much faith in the dual BIOS system. It bricked, I spent £14.00 for a next day delivery from Amazon UK, and two days later it was unbricked and reliable again.
Honestly I’m pretty clueless - I had to watch half a dozen You Tube videos to even know where to begin - so if I can do it then anyone making their living from being a ‘tech expert’ damn well should be able to - and if not then should at least be aware of the possibility, how easy it is, and how incredibly cheap it is. These things are actually only about $5 if you’re prepared to wait for delivery from China.
I’m really saddened that so many perfectly fixable boards are going to e-waste because of this misinformation and I’d have thought it would make for a very informative and interesting video from Level1Techs - or maybe the Linux channel as I understand Flashrom is the default app to make this happen easily outside of Windows (probably easier than Windows)
Anyone got any good unbricking stories? I understand they also work for GFX cards, though I haven’t needed to try that myself.