A QUICK BIOS UPDATE OVERVIEW

BASICALLY JUST THE INPUT/OUTPUT SYSTEM. NO LITERALLY, IT IS

WHEN YOU’VE SPENT A LOT OF TIME and hard-earned money piecing together a PC that you’ve carefully planned out, it’s important to know the ins and outs of your new machine. Much like anything else you’ve researched, saved up for and purchased, a PC isn’t something to rush into, as you’ll more than likely miss out on some important values and may not be getting the most out of your new pride and joy. One of the most vital elements of your PC to understand is the BIOS, short for basic input/output system. It’s a piece of software that’s installed onto your motherboard via a small memory chip, and allows you to set up the fundamentals of your PC. You can tweak fan, CPU and RAM speeds, boot priority order, date and time, voltage parameters, and much more. It’s a rudimental piece of software, so don’t worry when it loads and looks like something from the early 2000s running at around 20 fps

After you power on your PC, it’s the first piece of software that loads. It then runs a quick diagnostics test known as a POST (Power On Self-Test), which checks to see if there are any issues with your hardware—if there are, it won’t load. This is where a more premium motherboard with an LED indicator or a beeping system can come in handy, as it can let you know what the error is. It’s similar to when you get an EML (engine management light) to appear on the dashboard of your car. You can plug in a diagnostics tool and it will give you an error code, which you can then research further to get to the bottom of your issue. Our motherboard, the ASRock B660M-ITX/ac, is a budget board and unfortunately doesn’t have the self-diagnostic features that a more expensive mobo has, so getting to the bottom of a POST issue is a little more complicated. It’s always best to start off by updating your BIOS to eliminate any potential issues.

DIFFERENT METHODS

Keeping your BIOS running on the latest firmware is as important as any other update on your PC. It can fix bugs and instability issues and improve compatibility with newer CPUs. We had this exact issue when using our ASRock B660M-ITX/ac. Although compatible with our Intel Core i5-13400F, this motherboard came out before the CPU, so needed updating to work with this 13th gen processor. There are a few ways to update your BIOS, so we will go over them starting with how we updated our ASRock B660MITX/ac to work with Intel’s latest 13th-gen chips.