Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Do You REALLY Need To Update Your BIOS?”.
What, if you just sort of ignored every update for your motherboard’s bios that was released by the manufacturer? Do you really need the latest and greatest version number or to put yourself through the stress of updating it? Well, no! Actually, unless you do your computer’s basic input and output system or bios is what your motherboard uses during the startup procedure to initialize communication between the other components in your system and to test their functionality. Before handing the keys off to your os of choice after mashing, the bios setup button during boot, typically f2 or delete you’ll, have access to all sorts of powerful tools with control over many aspects of your pc. Like cpu and memory, clock speeds, boot device, selection and settings and much much more but like many other pieces of software, your motherboard manufacturer will sometimes have to make changes to the bios to improve stability, support, newer platforms or cpus and sometimes just fix some bugs. These are known as bios updates. If your system is a couple years, old chances are there’s a bios update available and even with new motherboards, you can still end up buying stock. That’S been sitting on a shelf for a while and uh yeah just out of date. When you get it so what sort of things might you be missing out on if you just left it the way it came in the box? Well about those new cpus, that’s one of the biggest reasons that people may want to update their bios as the sun sets on socket am4.
Let’S look back at awe these motherboards released in early 2017, which supports cpus, released five generations later in 2022. That means, if you built a pc using something like a b350 or x370 chipset, not long after release. One bios update can unlock a whole new tier of cpu performance.
Another performance related reason you might want to consider updating your bios is ram compatibility and stability before you even realize that bios updates are a thing. You likely first end up going into the bios, because there’s one thing people on reddit will not let you forget, and that is to enable xmp or docp, which reads the rated ram speeds of your ram kit and applies it in the bios. If you don’t do this, the ram will typically run at the platform’s default speeds known as jdec, and you could be missing out on a lot of performance.
Well, some of you may have experienced that applying an xmp or docp profile just resulted in stability issues or crashing. Typically, these sorts of stability issues are more prevalent in the early days of a platform, and bios updates can usually be used to improve stability, especially in the higher clock. Speed ranges, although also your cpus individual memory controller, can make a lot of a difference there. It depends amd motherboards, also integrate ag esa into their bios. Its functionality is identical and that initializes your components, but newer versions enable things like higher boost frequencies in your cpu for small performance, enhancements, quicker boot times and stability and bug fixes. But did you know that bios updates can even help your graphics card perform better? Let you know right after we thank brilliant for sponsoring.
Today’S video brilliant is a visually stimulating website designed to make learning stem topics, fun, trade, boring long lectures for problem solving and interactive visuals. There are over 60 courses to choose from including their pre-algebra course start your algebra journey in a low pressure environment with puzzles and intuition guides along the way join the community of 11 million learners and educators. Today, first 200, people who head to brilliant.org techcookie, will get 20 off an annual premium subscription. Last year, both amd and nvidia introduced a new feature called resizable bar, which allows your system cpu to access all of the video cards memory. At the same time, whereas systems without resizable bar can only access the gpu in 265 megabyte chunks back when gaming graphics cards maxed out at only a couple of gigabytes of video memory. This wasn’t much of an issue, but with newer cards and the games being able to use in excess of 10 gigabytes having to request data in just quarter, gigabyte chunks at a time can be very inefficient to enable this functionality.
Systems require both bios updates and video card firmware updates, along with toggling resizable baron in the bios menu and just like that free performance. Finally, a word on security. Earlier this year, hp had to release bios updates to over 200 products, because not one but two separate vulnerabilities were there that gave attackers the ability to execute code with the highest rights in windows.
You may also have heard of spectre and meltdown exploits along with their many variants that affected the majority of modern intel and amd processors. Well, those are patched using the bios and cpu microcode updates. Yeah sounds like another good reason to update, but i won’t lie updating your bios, isn’t always sunshine and rainbows.
If you have a power loss during an update, you’re screwed your system’s gone, she’s dead. You can also mitigate that risk by using a ups battery backup, but that still won’t help you if your cat steps on the power of our switch. And if you are a bit locker user, don’t forget to disable bitlocker before an update. Otherwise, you could end up blocking yourself out of your own drive, so uh sure hope you saved that recovery. Key motherboard manufacturers are doing what they can to make the experience less of a chore and less of a risk.
At one point in time, an update would have been performed exclusively via command line. These days, it’s not uncommon to see motherboards with internet update applications in the bios menu or even from operating systems, and also dual boot bios chips that you know if one fails and is bricked, the other one can just use it, and some also have usb flashback Ports, some of which don’t even require a cpu to be installed to update the motherboard. So, ultimately, if your bios and hardware are all copacetic now, they will continue to be so for a long time in the future, even without an update.
But if you want to upgrade your hardware from one generation to the next or you want the latest in security and performance, or you just really have your heart set on a new feature, you might want to check if a bios update is available for your system. No matter how much may feel like the final frontier for tech enthusiasts also, if your computer is like having a bad time and crashing and stuff update the bios, that’s the first thing. I always do so huge thanks for watching hit like check out our other videos comment with video suggestions and just have a great all day see you later .