Just got finished trying to flash my BIOS using official updates for my Intel mobo. Now I can only run with a single core. To top it all off I tried to reseat my CPU as an act of desperation now one of the shitty plastic heatsink clips broke off. So now I have the corner weighed down by a CD case & a book.. and it still idles at 65C.
shut down, get a new cooler, all quick fixes can end up in even more despair right now. If you have spare money get one that uses a proper screwing system instead of that intel plastic crap (even forgot the name of it). what mainboard, what cpu, what ram? why did you want to flash? 65° Celsius is way too much for idle, BEWARE that some intel CPU series have a working range of below 75° only.
I flashed because of a friend's suggestion to fix POST randomly failing with no errors. Core 2 Duo e6550 CPU, DP45SG mobo, Muskin 2GB DDR3 model 991657. I have already lined up a new build so this only has to last about a month at most. I'm using my computer like a netbook now. Only chatting & web browsing with some scripting & pixel art for said friend's game. Haven't seen it spike above 75C since I 'fixed' it.
I also had that random bios fail without errors before. My problem was a badly working usb-hub, but I noticed that that was the problem just after already replacing the PSU If you want a more solid quick fix, you can try putting a cable tie around the broken "thumb-screw" and pulling it trough the hole in the mobo. c2q and c2d cpus are specified for a lasting 75°C but may survive up to 95° over long time.
Had no zip ties, had no cable ties.... BUT! I did have iron thread. I had no idea what I was doing when I made this build. I got this mobo in the rationalization of "my CPU is intel.. PERFECT MATCH!"
IF you get a MB make sure its not Gygabyte if you want performance SATA. They have there own shitty SATA controllers that are utter crap. They also have intel's controllers on it but, only for 3 drives.
I buy Gigabyte out of sentiment - I had some good motherboards earlier from them and I care a lot more about long term support than 5% in synthetic benchmark of 1 feature. And anyway if you're buying a motherboard it doesn't happen every week. You do it once a year or so and that's when you read everything about that topic.
I think Viroman is generalizing. When I've bought my gigabyte board I've heard horrible nightmares about asus boards. My 6 onboard sata ports work fine and fast and even the extra 2 cheap sata controllers I've put on pcie 1x work like a charm. So far everything this board advertised works as proposed. EDIT: Okay, my board is still c2q generation with ep45 chipset etc. But even if I had to buy a new board now, I would see sata6g features as gimmicky stuff and rather have proper sata3g onboard and a good sata6g controller on pcie 8x than fucking around with gimmicky problems.
My asus board is a bloody nightmare. First off, I bought a really overpowered processor because I thought I'd be doing lots of map compiling and rendering for university, and a liquid cooler for it because I was worried it'd overheat. The cooler works wonders, the CPU idles at about 35 celsius and doesn't go above 45 even in hot weather. The trouble is the damn coolant pipes make it impossible to use the first two RAM slots. Add to that the fact that the little clip to unseat the graphics card is buried behind the goddamn card and boxed in by capacitors, so I had to file off the hook on my last card with a pair of tweezers to get it out, and the whole board is just a bloody nightmare to work with. It hasn't failed yet, you just can't do anything with it. So it's fine if your solution to any PC problem is to buy a new one.
I'm a bit of an Asus fanboy, they've always had good shit for me. I can't judge other motherboards but in general, placement can be a pain, and I've had to grind down parts of coolers to fit them in, but then again my last 4 motherboards have all been Asus, so it might be an Asus thing, or a general motherboard thing. Idk.
When i can get around to selling my 360 & its array of games I'm going to look at reviews for ASUS & Gigabyte mobos(friend suggested Gigabyte, but hes the reason why I can only use 1 CPU core). I'm going to buy the parts, assemble them and hopefully won't have to open it beyond cleaning for another 3 or so years. So space management isn't much of a concern for me.
You should be fine if you just make sure everything will be accessible before you seat things. Like I should probably have tied something to the GPU clip before I put the new card in so I could pull it if I needed to.
I have bought 2 different Gigabyte boards when updating peoples rigs and one for me a few years ago. They were shit then and still are. Not only did their controllers do weird things they randomly caused BSOD(if your an SATA boot drive setup) on boot ups. Disabling the Gigabyte controllers makes the BSODs go away. Its not a driver problem because I made sure the drivers were installed properly for both installing windows and after windows was installed. I tried updated drivers from their site then the drivers on the MB CD. It can go a few boot ups fine... then BSOD. If you don't get the BSODs you suffer much lower throughput from the controller then you get with the Intel controller on the board.
Never had any problems with GIGABYTE. Never had any problems with ASUS, although the ASUS board seemed lower quality than my GIGABYTE MSI on the other hand...