Question Rant - Firmware Update on DS3H B450 WIFI

blckgrffn · Sep 11, 2024

Ranting just because.

Took in a older PC as part of a new buildout.

Old PC had a 8GB RX580, 16GB of DDR4 3200, 2600/wraith and a Gigabyte DS3H Wifi board. I had recommended this concoction years ago as a budget build and it boomeranged back to me.

Last week, I got ready to sell it again. Added a 1TB SSD and checked the firmware page. It listed out a lot of options, it was just short of being W11 ready but had been updated past some "apply these first and in order" updates available.

So like an idiot I used the latest and greatest update, something like 3 years newer than what was available.

I do it from in the bios, it completes, reboots.

Turns out that was the end. Dug out the troubleshooting speaker. Now I get either 3 beeps repeated twice or 6 beeps with a gap in the middle. Memory or keyboard. Tried different memory, no dice. Also telling is it doesn't beep at all if it has no ram, which is a bad sign too.

Since the Gigabyte forums are gone there is hardly any info out there about troubleshooting these things, but I did read about some people desoldering and programing the bios on this very board (lol) and then reattached the chip and having it be good, but that's nuts. Another support thread indicated that support for older CPUs are not as well supported with the latest firmware, so I tore down my work PC that has a 5800X in it to try that - I had a new heatsink to install on that anyway. Same beeps.

Now I am like 3 hours into it, and I thought I would be able to slap W11 on it and flip it for $200 or something on Craigslist. SMH.

I should have taken the release that was about two newer than what was installed instead of getting greedy and going to the latest and greatest all at once and saved myself all this trouble.

Do I sell the GPU/CPU, buy a CPU/mobo combo and move on? Dig out a $80 matx bargain board? Put it all in a dumpster and walk away (I don't think I can do this!)?!?

The cherry on top of all this? The best option to replace this board, IMO? THE SAME DARN BOARD. Darn it.

/rant

In2Photos · Sep 11, 2024

What revision is the board? What firmware was on it and what version did you install exactly? Have you tried installing an older BIOS back on it?

blckgrffn · Sep 11, 2024

In2Photos said:
What revision is the board? What firmware was on it and what version did you install exactly? Have you tried installing an older BIOS back on it?

1. REV 1.0

2. F41a (no longer listed) to F68d

So, that was like 5 years of firmware updates in one go. SMH.

B450M DS3H WIFI (rev. 1.0/1.1/1.2/1.3) Support | Motherboard - GIGABYTE Global

Lasting Quality from GIGABYTE.GIGABYTE Ultra Durable™ motherboards bring together a unique blend of features and technologies that offer users the absolute ...

www.gigabyte.com

3. This board has only one bios and only supports Q-Flash (bios flash) and the in Windows flash. It doesn't have, near as I can tell, a hidden flash back feature but of course the forums going away wiped that all of the Internet. So.... no.

Maybe its telling that there has been 5 revs of this board, with 1.4 and 1.5 having their own bios pages.

In2Photos · Sep 11, 2024

blckgrffn said:
1. REV 1.0

2. F41a (no longer listed) to F68d

So, that was like 5 years of firmware updates in one go. SMH.

B450M DS3H WIFI (rev. 1.0/1.1/1.2/1.3) Support | Motherboard - GIGABYTE Global

Lasting Quality from GIGABYTE.GIGABYTE Ultra Durable™ motherboards bring together a unique blend of features and technologies that offer users the absolute ...

www.gigabyte.com

3. This board has only one bios and only supports Q-Flash (bios flash) and the in Windows flash. It doesn't have, near as I can tell, a hidden flash back feature but of course the forums going away wiped that all of the Internet. So.... no.

Maybe its telling that there has been 5 revs of this board, with 1.4 and 1.5 having their own bios pages.

Well based on that it appears you had a new enough BIOS to go all the way. The only required step was from F32 to F40. After that you should have been able to do any BIOS.

I didn't realize no BIOS flashback button.

I would opt to either part it out, or find a used board either here on the forums or ebay if you want to sell it complete.

blckgrffn · Sep 11, 2024

Yeah, I think I'll go with this:

I have an older PCIe wifi card chilling in a box, should be good enough for this effort.

Not an ASUS fan but hard to buy a new version of a board that just died during a standard firmware update.

But now I am stuck wondering if a new PSU would be a good idea, as the 650W Thermaltake is an aging component. It should be plenty overspec'd for the job, though. Bah, I'll just leave it and move on.

tcsenter · Sep 11, 2024

rev. 1.0/1.1/1.2/1.3, 1.4 or 1.5

I see Gigabyte's revision control still unhinged after all these years....

I have the ASRock B450M Pro4 and none complaints thus far.

DAPUNISHER · Sep 11, 2024

blckgrffn said:
Ranting just because.

Took in a older PC as part of a new buildout.

Old PC had a 8GB RX580, 16GB of DDR4 3200, 2600/wraith and a Gigabyte DS3H Wifi board. I had recommended this concoction years ago as a budget build and it boomeranged back to me.

Last week, I got ready to sell it again. Added a 1TB SSD and checked the firmware page. It listed out a lot of options, it was just short of being W11 ready but had been updated past some "apply these first and in order" updates available.

So like an idiot I used the latest and greatest update, something like 3 years newer than what was available.

I do it from in the bios, it completes, reboots.

Turns out that was the end. Dug out the troubleshooting speaker. Now I get either 3 beeps repeated twice or 6 beeps with a gap in the middle. Memory or keyboard. Tried different memory, no dice. Also telling is it doesn't beep at all if it has no ram, which is a bad sign too.

Since the Gigabyte forums are gone there is hardly any info out there about troubleshooting these things, but I did read about some people desoldering and programing the bios on this very board (lol) and then reattached the chip and having it be good, but that's nuts. Another support thread indicated that support for older CPUs are not as well supported with the latest firmware, so I tore down my work PC that has a 5800X in it to try that - I had a new heatsink to install on that anyway. Same beeps.

Now I am like 3 hours into it, and I thought I would be able to slap W11 on it and flip it for $200 or something on Craigslist. SMH.

I should have taken the release that was about two newer than what was installed instead of getting greedy and going to the latest and greatest all at once and saved myself all this trouble.

Do I sell the GPU/CPU, buy a CPU/mobo combo and move on? Dig out a $80 matx bargain board? Put it all in a dumpster and walk away (I don't think I can do this!)?!?

The cherry on top of all this? The best option to replace this board, IMO? THE SAME DARN BOARD. Darn it.

/rant

That was a bold move Cotton.

Pop the battery and let it sit for a day or 2. If it still won't boot with one stick, I'd cut my losses and move on. It was always a trash board, it simply went from trash can to trash can't. It wasn't even worth 3hrs of your time unless you are the stubborn dog with a bone type.

tcsenter · Sep 11, 2024

tcsenter said:
I have the ASRock B450M Pro4 and none complaints thus far.

On second thought, the VRM heatsinks are secured by plastic non-reinforced push pins, a bit flimsy. And the thermal goo they used is paste rather than a material like pads. I've been meaning to revise/mod them but haven't gotten 'round to it.

I remember reading several months ago on Reddit, don't have a link but someone had bricked their board after a BIOS flash. After troubleshooting and trying to recover e.g. resetting CMOS, they got busy with something else and ended-up kind of forgetting about it, left it overnight. They got up the next morning, system had a display stuck at POST halted with no boot device (they had disconnected all drives). Leaving it on for HOURS, recovered itself somehow.

blckgrffn · Sep 11, 2024

DAPUNISHER said:
That was a bold move Cotton.

Pop the battery and let it sit for a day or 2. If it still won't boot with one stick, I'd cut my losses and move on. It was always a trash board, it simply went from trash can to trash can't. It wasn't even worth 3hrs of your time unless you are the stubborn dog with a bone type.

I did sit the battery out for several hours, manually shorted clear pins, and all that.

Man, once you cycle through some ram (different ram, different slots), GPUs, swap in a CPU from another PC, unhook all the non essential connections, reseat power pins and between each step you are plugging it back in turning the PSU back on the seeing if it posts, suspicious amounts of time fly by.

It’s not unusual for me to get stuck on something like this and I will be the kind of guy who starts a simple flash and OS install at 9 pm and then it goes south then it’s 1 am. Professionally this has been a super power, most people give up but I was known to truck through and own getting things working well enough at least to get us to the next outage window - and do the scope of work I said I would do, not more and not less.

Personally it’s not always the best decision!

New board shows up tomorrow. Provided it “just works” the old board is going in the trash.

Well, after I pull the PCIe wlan card and figure out if I can pull out the antenna assembly! PCIe riser cards for wifi are pretty cheap if you have the bits to make them work.

DAPUNISHER · Sep 11, 2024

tcsenter said:
On second thought, the VRM heatsinks are secured by plastic non-reinforced push pins, a bit flimsy. And the thermal goo they used is paste rather than a material like pads. I've been meaning to revise/mod them but haven't gotten 'round to it.

I remember reading several months ago on Reddit, don't have a link but someone had bricked their board after a BIOS flash. After troubleshooting and trying to recover e.g. resetting CMOS, they got busy with something else and ended-up kind of forgetting about it, left it overnight. They got up the next morning, system had a display stuck at POST halted with no boot device (they had disconnected all drives). Leaving it on for HOURS, recovered itself somehow.

That is the type of juju magic I have experienced over the years. I am no IEEE dude, so the technical reasons for why that would happen are over my pay grade. I just know there are rituals I can perform that might resurrect the dead so they can zombie on.

DAPUNISHER · Sep 11, 2024

blckgrffn said:
I did sit the battery out for several hours, manually shorted clear pins, and all that.

Man, once you cycle through some ram (different ram, different slots), GPUs, swap in a CPU from another PC, unhook all the non essential connections, reseat power pins and between each step you are plugging it back in turning the PSU back on the seeing if it posts, suspicious amounts of time fly by.

It’s not unusual for me to get stuck on something like this and I will be the kind of guy who starts a simple flash and OS install at 9 pm and then it goes south then it’s 1 am. Professionally this has been a super power, most people give up but I was known to truck through and own getting things working well enough at least to get us to the next outage window - and do the scope of work I said I would do, not more and not less.

Personally it’s not always the best decision!

New board shows up tomorrow. Provided it “just works” the old board is going in the trash.

Well, after I pull the PCIe wlan card and figure out if I can pull out the antenna assembly! PCIe riser cards for wifi are pretty cheap if you have the bits to make them work.

Checkout how explicit the directions are for every update on this board I had - https://www.asrock.com/mb/amd/fatal1ty x370 gaming k4/index.asp#BIOS

That's how to do it. No ambiguity, proper guidance.

tcsenter · Sep 11, 2024

DAPUNISHER said:
That is the type of juju magic I have experienced over the years. I am no IEEE dude, so the technical reasons for why that would happen are over my pay grade. I just know there are rituals I can perform that might resurrect the dead so they can zombie on.

The closest I have come is updating a Dell board for Precision 3650. Progressed like normal with a display and then rebooted, came up with display indicating some 2nd phase updating an EC or something, rebooted and came up with no display, fans spinning and a power LED but no sign of activity. So I waited a minute because I had seen something similar before where it took about 30 or 40 seconds and reboot. I waited another minute, and another. By this time I'm going 'ruh roh' this is not normal. I almost powered the thing off by holding the power button down, but resisted and waited some more. At least FIVE MINUTES in this state with no display or indicator of activity, then it beeped once so loudly that it actually startled me before it rebooted again to a display with normal (thorough) POST and checksum error prompting to enter BIOS. Everything was good.

DAPUNISHER · Sep 12, 2024

Warhammer 40K lore wins in our house. My son and I have become Cult Mechanicus and praise the machine god/Omnissiah. 🤖

On topic: Perhaps one of the downsides to a platform with such incredible longevity is what happened here. You can't just update to the latest firmware; you have to update incrementally. Maybe there is code for checksum errors that otherwise gets nerfed or something?

mikeymikec · Sep 12, 2024

blckgrffn said:
Yeah, I think I'll go with this:

View attachment 107349

I have an older PCIe wifi card chilling in a box, should be good enough for this effort.

Not an ASUS fan but hard to buy a new version of a board that just died during a standard firmware update.

But now I am stuck wondering if a new PSU would be a good idea, as the 650W Thermaltake is an aging component. It should be plenty overspec'd for the job, though. Bah, I'll just leave it and move on.

I've used that board a tonne of times without issues.

Seba · Sep 12, 2024

Althogh that motherboard does not have Dual-BIOS, you could try the reset procedure used to force the Backup BIOS anyway. Maybe it forces some kind of a Reset on single BIOS boards, too (different than the Clear CMOS reset/removal of the CR 2032 battery). Nothing to lose at this point.

With PC turned off, short the BIOS chip pin 1 and pin 6 (pin 1 is indicated by a dimple on the chip; pin numbering is anti-clockwise; so short top pin on the left side and second pin from the bottom on the right side). BIOS chip is the 8 pin chip labeled M_BIOS (on Dual-BIOS boards there is a second BIOS chip, labeled B_BIOS). Use a metal tweezer for this (with pointed/sharp tips).
While continuing to short pins 1 and 6, power on the PC.
If you are lucky, you will hear a beep. Remove the short.
Reboot the PC and check if it worked (but probably won't work).

I think you should have RAM installed while doing this.

blckgrffn · Sep 12, 2024

Seba said:
Althogh that motherboard does not have Dual-BIOS, you could try the reset procedure used to force the Backup BIOS anyway. Maybe it forces some kind of a Reset on single BIOS boards, too (different than the Clear CMOS reset/removal of the CR 2032 battery). Nothing to lose at this point.

With PC turned off, short the BIOS chip pin 1 and pin 6 (pin 1 is indicated by a dimple on the chip; pin numbering is anti-clockwise; so short top pin on the left side and second pin from the bottom on the right side). BIOS chip is the 8 pin chip labeled M_BIOS (on Dual-BIOS boards there is a second BIOS chip, labeled B_BIOS). Use a metal tweezer for this (with pointed/sharp tips).

While continuing to short pins 1 and 6, power on the PC.

If you are lucky, you will hear a beep. Remove the short.

Reboot the PC and check if it worked (but probably won't work).

I think you should have RAM installed while doing this.

Thank you so much for this detailed reply. I followed your directions carefully.

I was not lucky. There was no beep. It did not error beep, it simply did nothing. I did this twice completely with testing it between each time, the second time I waited some long seconds.

The error beeps remained the same, 3 beeps repeated twice. I stubbornly tried three different ram sticks, including a HP OEM DDR4 stick and always the same beeps.

I noticed my ARGB fan changed from Rainbow (as configured before) to just Red (what it did right after the flash) so at least it configures the lights? Ha. This just tells me that that the flash took, to some degree.

*edit* because I am dumb and stubborn. Pulled a 4GB DDR2133 stick out of a Dell I had kicking around here. Same beeps. I don't think it matters what ram I put in there or in what slot, still going to get a ram error.

tcsenter · Sep 12, 2024

There is beep code? Toss in a fresh CR 2032 battery (CMOS), power on a leave it for several minutes.

Hail The Brain Slug · Sep 12, 2024

tcsenter said:
There is beep code? Toss in a fresh CR 2032 battery (CMOS), power on a leave it for several minutes.

I second this. Have you just let it sit powered on attempting to post for a long time? Something like half an hour. Just power it on and walk away, come back later and check on it.

blckgrffn · Sep 13, 2024

Alright, against my better judgement to invest more time in this I pulled the battery from the new Asus board, put it into this one and then powered it up with intention of letting it think about what it has done for 3+ hours.

Seba · Sep 13, 2024

blckgrffn · Sep 13, 2024

I've read about folks fixing this board in particular by manually flashing the chip - it must be fairly terrible in that regard - but you have to physically remove the chip to program it, everyone that tried to program it in place failed.

That's definitely a step too far for this guy! If it isn't completely dead now, it would be after I used a soldering iron to write my initials into it.

tcsenter · Sep 13, 2024

Seba said:
View attachment 107486

Look for the Black Edition. 🤣

Hail The Brain Slug · Sep 13, 2024

blckgrffn said:
I've read about folks fixing this board in particular by manually flashing the chip - it must be fairly terrible in that regard - but you have to physically remove the chip to program it, everyone that tried to program it in place failed.

That's definitely a step too far for this guy! If it isn't completely dead now, it would be after I used a soldering iron to write my initials into it.

Can't reprogram it with a clip-on? I botched the bios on a mini PC I have with a similar rom chip and picked up a CH341A + clip-on wire and was able to reprogram it and it works fine now.

I even accidentally hooked it up backwards to the rom chip (the clip -> chip junction was correct, the wire -> CH341A junction was backwards) and the CH341A got flaming hot - I thought I had cooked the rom chip.

Nope! After I let it sit with the bios battery unplugged for a couple days I tried again and it programmed fine.

https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256806343976194.html

I picked up the "1 Set" variant for $6.40. Beware, it's designed incorrectly and provides 5V on the data pins (it should be 3.3V). You can just send it anyway (I did and many other have, without issue) but of course there's the possibility of cooking the chip with over-voltage like that. There is a mod you can do to it to hook the data pins up to the 3.3V source onboard, but I was too lazy and figured either it works or it doesn't.

https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256806602598549.html

There's this variant that has a functoning switch to set the voltage, but it doesn't come with a clip - you'd just have to order a clip wire separately.

blckgrffn · Sep 13, 2024

Nah, several threads on other sites for this board confirm that in place flashing is a no go.

I pronounce this board dead at 4:26 pm cst, September 13, 2024. Cause of death: complications from firmware updates and in general being a Richard. Power terminated.

In2Photos · Sep 13, 2024

Question Rant - Firmware Update on DS3H B450 WIFI

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