Motherboard BIOS update - Just grab the latest?

[causticspill]

I'm still running a BIOS from 2018 on my 1700X / MSI X470 Gaming Pro Carbon and now with a 3700X on the way I'm looking at a long list (8+) of updates.

Common sense says to just grab the latest bios and go. However, each update is running 9-10 MB so I wanted to ask and make sure that I'm not missing anything if I skip a few years worth of updates.

Can they really bundle everything into the latest without enlarging the file size? Just grab it and ignore the rest?

 

[Spartacus09]

Yes, most of the time each update is built off the previous so any current update includes fixes and improvements off all previous versions. ~cumulative updates

 

[Ready4Dis]

Yeah, the bios eeprom (flash memory) is only so large, so the releases will all be very close in size. You won't be missing anything unless stated by the bios revision. Sometimes with the smaller flash on older boards (mostly b350's) they had to drop some support off the board to allow the zen 2's, but an x470 won't have this issue.

 

[ashmelev75]

Can they really bundle everything into the latest without enlarging the file size? Just grab it and ignore the rest?

Generally, the BIOS files always match the size of the flash memory chip (8/16/32MB), since the update does a full overwrite even if the actual BIOS size could be less that that.

For Ryzen 3000 support on motherboards with limited flash size (16MB) some tables for older CPU support / graphical GUI / etc were cut in order to fit the 3000 support.
So grab the latest BIOS, but check that it still supports the old 1700x if you still going to use it for a while. Otherwise update only before you swap the CPU.

 

[ND40oz]

Generally, the BIOS files always match the size of the flash memory chip (8/16/32MB), since the update does a full overwrite even if the actual BIOS size could be less that that.

Yeah, when you update your BIOS, you're not doing an update like you would with Windows, you're completely erasing the current one and the writing the new one in its place.

 

[Ready4Dis]

Yeah, when you update your BIOS, you're not doing an update like you would with Windows, you're completely erasing the current one and the writing the new one in its place.

This is correct, but if the file is zipped for download they may be slightly different sizes, which is why I said they all will be close.

 

[causticspill]

Thanks all. I didn't consider that the zipping could hide some file size and also that they are swapping/removing some information. I did see that for MSI, it looks like they've indeed stripped out the fancy GUI from older bios' in order to fit in more important code.

Mostly it's a (new to me) Ryzen thing that I wanted to confirm- I don't recall having to update motherboard bios hardly ever when I was on Sandy Bridge. Also, while I fiddled with the 1700X early on, I've mostly left it alone and as such have ignored my bios. It's come back though after I got a rude awakening the other night when I figured I could just slap in another 16GB of RAM and the PC was like "uh, no".

 

[Furious_Styles]

Thanks all. I didn't consider that the zipping could hide some file size and also that they are swapping/removing some information. I did see that for MSI, it looks like they've indeed stripped out the fancy GUI from older bios' in order to fit in more important code.

Mostly it's a (new to me) Ryzen thing that I wanted to confirm- I don't recall having to update motherboard bios hardly ever when I was on Sandy Bridge. Also, while I fiddled with the 1700X early on, I've mostly left it alone and as such have ignored my bios. It's come back though after I got a rude awakening the other night when I figured I could just slap in another 16GB of RAM and the PC was like "uh, no".

Well typically you don't need to update the bios if it's working fine for you. Also they probably stopped releasing bios updates for sandy 5+ years ago, depending on manufacturer.

 

[Starfalcon]

Ive updated my bios at least 4 times on my MSI board since I got it. Most of them have improved memory stability and cpu clocking. Plus when the new ryzen comes out everyone that wants to upgrade will need to get the newest bios goodness.