Despite building many machines in the past, updating the bios is not something I’ve ever done before as I’m a big believer in ‘if it works, don’t rock the boat’. That said, although my computer works fine at the moment, I do want the option at a later date to upgrade my processor to a 5000 series which I don’t think is currently supported with the current bios v1.20 and as my motherboard is currently in under Amazon’s warranty period, which means if the bios update fails I can return it and have another one delivered tomorrow, It’s the perfect time to give this a whirl.
The MSI X570 Tomahawk has a really handy flash button on which means you can flash the board without any components installed, the idea of popping in a usb stick, pressing a button and crossing my fingers, looking for a tiny led to do something and hoping I’m not turning it off too soon doesn’t sound like fun so I opted to use the M-Flash option.
The flashing process on my MSI board is very simple, I downloaded the latest non beta bios from the official MSI website onto an small capacity, usb 2.0 stick, I don’t know if I had to use a 2.0 USB stick but for the button flash the internet chatter seemed to find the USB stick you use matters. I then entered the Bios, selected M-Flash, it restarted and asked me to select the flash file I wanted to use, then I had to wait.. it felt like a long time but it has a progress bar which helped break up the panic.
The update finished without issues and I was back in the Bios showing the bios version 1.40 which is just what I wanted. obviously a few days later version 1.5 was released and I had to go through it all again.