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  • peconi2 - Thursday, October 10, 2019 - link

    It seems my Gigabyte Designare X299 went the other way about it. They left support for those CPUs but removed support for Optane in latest version of BIOS. I rather loose support for older gen CPUs than Optane IMHO.

    A few revisions back when they added support for 9-th gen CPUs they removed support for ECC RAM as well... I guess the space is REALLY limited ;)
  • DigitalFreak - Thursday, October 10, 2019 - link

    Just go back to the old text based format for BIOS/UEFI. Having all the fancy graphics in a BIOS is stupid.
  • Drazick - Thursday, October 10, 2019 - link

    Will we see new chip set any time soon for those CPU's?

    What if I buy a board now with the new CPU's and it doesn't support out of the box, what should I do?
  • 1_rick - Thursday, October 10, 2019 - link

    The best thing to do, honestly, would be to not do that. If you have to, though, your best bet is probably to buy it at a local store that could put in an older CPU and flash the BIOS for you, rather than, (say) ordering from Newegg or Amazon.
  • M O B - Thursday, October 10, 2019 - link

    ASUS boards allow you to flash the BIOS without having a supported CPU. Just need power!
  • Drazick - Thursday, October 10, 2019 - link

    Can they connect to Internet or must I make a Flash Drive with the BIOS for that?
  • 1_rick - Thursday, October 10, 2019 - link

    Probably would need a flash drive. You need to get into the BIOS to do the Internet updates (based on the Asus motherboards I have).

    Also, I don't think they all support CPUless flashing.
  • rocky12345 - Thursday, October 10, 2019 - link

    It seems like updating your bios these days can become a real problem. I don't have a Kaby Lake X CPU but if I did and decided to upgrade to the latest bios (without reading all of the fine print) & all of a sudden my system would not post because support for the CPU was taken out. I think I would be very upset at both Intel and the main board vendor for basically scrapping my system.

    The big take here is read the fine print before installing anything new and hopefully avoid huge problems that could happen. I would never have bought one of those CPU's mainly because to me it was a useless product that had no place being installed on such a high end platform. I do feel sorry for those that bought these CPU's and could now be facing huge problems if they try to update without knowing they could kill their systems in the process.
  • 1_rick - Thursday, October 10, 2019 - link

    This is why the motherboard makers usually say "don't upgrade the BIOS unless the new one has something you need." As far as I know, removing features is pretty rare, but it does happen--most recently, with AMD BIOS revisions removing support for first-gen Ryzen due to insufficient space, and with PCIe 4 support being removed from x470 boards.
  • extide - Thursday, October 10, 2019 - link

    They didn't remove first gen Ryzen support.
  • 1_rick - Thursday, October 10, 2019 - link

    My mistake--they removed Bristol Ridge support.

    But my point was that "removing features is pretty rare, but it does happen".
  • HideOut - Tuesday, October 15, 2019 - link

    However, there is a chance that the newest 5xx chipsets will have to remove 1xxx ryzens for the same reason.
  • imaheadcase - Thursday, October 10, 2019 - link

    THe problem is when people do have a PC issue, its the standard "upgrade all drivers/bios/etc" to see if fixes issue.
  • shabby - Thursday, October 10, 2019 - link

    These aren't $99 boards, can't they spend a bit more for a larger bios chip?
  • chaos215bar2 - Thursday, October 10, 2019 - link

    This.

    I would have assumed that with more complex BIOS/UEFI implementations would come larger storage for the resulting images. Is there a reason that isn't possible? Even "large" here is downright microscopic compared to most modern storage media.
  • GreenReaper - Thursday, October 10, 2019 - link

    Sure, they can, but realistically: did you ask about BIOS flash capacity before your last motherboard purchase? No? And now you know, is it going to be a big factor in your next purchase? Not really? Well, nor does just about anyone else, so it doesn't factor into feature selection unless the manufacturer knows it'll increase greatly support costs - which it probably won't.
  • 1_rick - Thursday, October 10, 2019 - link

    To be fair, they did already EOL Kaby Lake-X quite some time ago, and nearly nobody bought those chips anyway.
  • peevee - Thursday, October 10, 2019 - link

    "the amount of free space inside BIOS firmware has reduced drastically."

    Flash being as cheap as it is, a modern chipset should have something like 128GB-256GB of flash built-in (in no-latency PoP configuration), share it between BIOS code and boot partition as necessary and be done with it.
  • EliteRetard - Thursday, October 10, 2019 - link

    MOBO makers are just now (reluctantly) being forced to use 32MB chips vs the old 16MB ones (yes, megabyte). Convincing them to even go 128MB (NOT GB) would be astonishing.
  • rpg1966 - Thursday, October 10, 2019 - link

    If mobo makers won't provide more storage for BIOS, why not just provide two versions of each BIOS, between them containing the data required the full range of processors?
  • Shadowarez - Thursday, October 10, 2019 - link

    So my Asus Sage 10G and Asus Apex maybe able to use the newer 18core that costs half as much as my i9 7980xe?
  • AshlayW - Friday, October 11, 2019 - link

    7640X and 7740X are a disgrace and should be forgotten.
  • Shadowarez - Friday, October 11, 2019 - link

    I have a ES 7640x in my hrpc it clocks to 5.0ghz all core under stress 100% 75c max. Not bad for free when bought my i9-7980XE.

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