Flash OEM Motherboard with Intel Chipset BIOS?

Steve Mavronis

Steve Mavronis

New Member
I'm just curious about this. I'm always leary about flashing a BIOS if not needed for anything specific. I was wondering though, can you flash an OEM Intel Motherboard with Intel BIOS matching the chipset used on the board? For example an OEM branded i975x motherboard in BTX format flashed with an Intel i975x BIOS made for their ATX format motherboard? Or does a BIOS update detect a manufacturer identification string to see if it matches before being allowed to be flashed?
 
Good question. If you have a computer from Dell, HP or one of the other namebrand manufactors it's best to use the BIOS updates they supply. If you get the BIOS from the mobo manufacture it may not work with OEM motherboards, they may have small differnces then the retail version that may it incompatable. There is nothing specail needed to flash a BIOS but a UPS is highly recommended, that would be a bad time to have a power outage.
 
nope, as far as i know, they have those motherboards made specifically for them, along with the bios, and as far as i know, the new bios probably wouldn't take, which would end up with a bricked mobo, so if sometime when you're going to be upgrading anyway, just try and flash it, it works with some mobos(x38 rampage to x48 rampage formula)
 
I would consider is unusual to find a BIOS on a proprietary mainboard that was the same as the bios on the similar or same generic one. The manufacturers usually partially cripple BIOS features so they are rarely the same as what the mainboard manufacturer would provide. Not likely to work. Likely to put your mainboard out of commission.
 
Yeah I'm not messing with it. I wish that I could by a better non-locked BIOS with a non-OEM motherboard that is in BTX format, because thats the way my Gateway FX530 case is arranged. But Intel stopped production on BTX in 2006. The only way for me to do ATX like a normal person would be to build a new PC from scratch. But with my PC only a year and a half old and still under warranty, that isn't too likely at this time.

All this curiousity is because I bought some Patriot extreme performance CL4 memory (rated at 4-4-4-12 at 1.8v)with heat spreaders that is overclockable. But the Gateway BIOS has the CPU (Q6600) and FSB (1066mhz) overclocking locked out. I tried overclocking the memory directly from 667mhz to 800mhz which worked stable at 2.1v with timings of 5-5-5-15. But it still didn't beat the benchmark scores of 667mhz at 1.8v with stable timings on my system of 4-5-5-15. At 800mhz it scored much lower on 3DMark06 and the Vista Windows Experience Index for memory still remained at 5.5 too. The other categories all had the highest 5.9 index score. I was hoping to at least hit 5.6 or more. I also tried changing the 800mhz timings to 4-5-5-15 but all I got with the lower CL was 3 beeps and the adventure of jumper resetting the BIOS. If only I could have played with overclocking CPU/FSB/RAM at the same time then I would have some nice improvement overall.
 
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