Considering Purchases of Faulty or Used Motherboards: Worth It?
Considering Purchases of Faulty or Used Motherboards: Worth It?
I'm checking out the Asrock Fatality B250 Gaming K4 for my gaming PC build. It looks like it might be too expensive, possibly due to past issues. The seller didn't clarify what was wrong, which is a bit concerning. I'm exploring other options since similar models from the same seller are also faulty. From what I see, there are various ways to repair or replace a motherboard if needed.
If the assumed owner doesn’t explain the reason for the damage, keep your distance. He likely didn’t care about the cause, but what occurred before the failure is important. It’s possible he caused the issue by damaging the circuit or corrupting the BIOS update.
This board doesn't have a BIOS Flashback option or any corresponding button. If you can't even access the BIOS, then updating it isn't possible through a standard BIOS flash or update. You'd need to directly modify the BIOS chip on the motherboard itself. Unless you work with a manufacturer that produces custom motherboards.
Back then, old motherboards rarely had BIOS Flashback or special buttons. My ROG STRIX Z390-F for the 9900k wasn’t equipped with that feature. It was quite a premium setup.
doesnt matter if it has bios flashback or not if the seller isnt telling you what the issue is nor even has an explanation of what happened before it died then avoid at all costs and from personal experience with like 40+ boards by this point even if the seller has an explanation and heck the board even posts but has issues you can still get screwed over anyways, youll have the best chances with boards that post but have issues like random restarts resets and whatnot as those usually just need a deepclean but even then still can het screwed anyways as ive even found an asus h61 that just has inexplicable restart issues even after ive rinsed it multiple times to make sure its clean though only happened once though bios flashback isnt neccesary to flash your bios in a non working state, board has a 9 pin spi header located above to the left of the front panel header so you just need some jumpers a ch341a and the pinout which can be found by just looking up spi pinout header and going to the elmorlabs forum for it (too lazy to link), worst case youll have to desolder the bios chip but a couple irons and some good flux + solder wire should make that quite easy