Gigabyte Q-Flash Plus to the rescue

This past week, I built yet another new computer for my school. Nearly identical to the last build that I did for the school, the main difference was that I went with a Gigabyte B550M Gaming motherboard instead of an Asus Prime motherboard. Why? Simply put, to avoid the issue I had last time where the motherboard wouldn’t post with the Ryzen 5000 series CPU in it. The crucial difference between the two motherboards is that Gigabyte have included their hardware based Q-Flash system on the motherboard, which lets me update the UEFI even if the UEFI is too old to boot the new generation CPU’s.

That little button on the motherboard is a life and time saver. Of course, the concept of this isn’t exactly new – Asus had a feature like this on their higher end motherboards a decade ago already. However, it’s one of those absolutely awesome features that have taken a long time to trickle down to the budget/entry level side of things and to this day, many motherboard still don’t sport this essential feature even though it would drastically improve the life of someone building a computer. There’s nothing quite like spending time building a PC, getting excited to hit the power button and all of a sudden seeing everything spin up but output no display signal. That scenario makes you start to question your sanity.

So what does it do? Simply put, whilst your motherboard may support a new generation of CPU’s, it more than likely requires a new firmware to do so. This becomes a chicken and egg situation whereby you buy the motherboard and CPU, but the motherboard came from the factory with the older firmware on it and as such can’t boot your new CPU. In the past, the only way to get around this was to use a flashing CPU, i.e. a CPU that the motherboard supports out the box and flash the firmware, remove the flashing CPU and then put in your new CPU. This of course works, but is tedious and does increase the risk of damages in the sense that you are now doing twice the amount of CPU insertion and removal.

Q-Flash Plus and other systems like it basically let you flash the firmware, even if your system has no CPU, RAM or other components installed. I used it to great success this week to get the new motherboard flashed to the latest firmware. The process is pretty easy and goes like this:

1. Connect motherboard to your power supply correctly, so 24 pin and 8 pin connectors.
2. Use a smaller capacity flash drive. Format it with FAT32 and place the latest firmware on the drive. Rename the file to GIGABYTE.bin
3. Place the flash drive into the correct port – this is usually just above the button, but check your motherboard manual to be sure.
4. Press the button once and sit back. The LED indicator near the button should start rapidly blinking, as should the USB flash drive if it has an indicator light. After a few minutes, the PC powers up whilst the Q-Flash indicator blinks in a slower pattern.
5. When done, the PC in my case restarted itself and posts properly.

In my case, the PC restarted after the flash completed, but I already had all the components installed. Others flash the system completely bare, so in that case the motherboard may just turn off when complete. This isn’t something I have a lot of experience with, so your results may vary.

After using this to get the new PC up and running, I’ve come to the conclusion that it is a feature all motherboards should have, no matter what level they occupy. It’s one of those features that is just too handy, too useful to be reserved for higher end motherboards only. It no doubt does add some expense to manufacturing, but again, it’s one of those things that is just too handy to have.