Time for BIOS upgrade

I tend to avoid reflashing BIOS unless absolutely necessary ... and have never found it absolutely necessary. But maybe now?

A bit over a year ago I replaced and aged MB, CPU, and memory in an old PC with an ASUS Prime H370-Plus, an Intel i5-8400 CPU, and 16GB of RAM. All has worked well except that POST takes about 90 seconds. That's not critical but it's frustrating so I searched the web and found something suggesting updating BIOS. Since I've never done a BIOS upgrade I'm reluctant to dive into this (feeling that a 90 second wait is preferable to a bricked MB due to a BIOS upgrade failure).

I looked on the ASUS website and found that there have been 7 BIOS versions for this MB since the one I am using. 7 versions in 14 months. Correction: 12 months; the last one was 2 months ago.

Is this "normal" for a relatively new MB or is ASUS struggling to fix a lemon? Should I get off the old BIOS right away, or should I way until ASUS puts out a more stable version? Except for the slow POST I haven't have any obvious problems, but I suspect ASUS has not been working on new BIOS just for fun. (Some of the upgrades contain new Intel ME firmware and some contain new microcode for new Intel processors. It isn't just fixing problems in the BIOS.)

It should tell you what each update fixes or upgrades. Bios upgrade now is normally bomb proof but when updating there is normally an option to first save current bios and you should do that so you can role back. Normally they dont issue updates for no reason

The descriptions of the updates were, um, terse. Several of them mentioned "performance improvements" with no mention of the type of improvement and under what circumstances. I think I'll give it a try.

I think I have the option of saving the current BIOS, but I'm not how to recover using it. I mean, if the MB is bricked, how to I tell it to use the old BIOS. Makes me realize I have no idea ow this all fits together. There must be some micro-basic I/O system - unchanged by a BIOS update - that decides which BIOS to use. I think I need to learn about "Dual BIOS".

In 30 years of computer use and dozens of BIOS flash and upgrades, I've never had one brick.

Well, that was a thoroughly unenjoyable experience. I could find no way to create a BIOS backup - either in the ASUS BIOS functions themselves or in the ASUS tool that supposedly has the function. (Maybe it is just well hidden.) As an alternative, I downloaded a copy of the BIOS I was on plus a couple intermediate level versions. Then I proceeded to flash the latest version. The flashing went quickly and flawlessly, but when rebooting I got a peculiar (and not quite grammatical) error message:

Please enter setup to recover BIOS setting [followed by instructions to enter BIOS]
After setting up Optane memory or the RAID configuration was built, SATA Selection must be changed to RAID mode to avoid unknown issue.

I don't have Optane or a RAID configuration but the latest BIOS added (or updated) Optane support so I assume there was a connection.

The SATA options were AHCI or Optane (with some verbiage that meant nothing to me). It was set to AHCI so I tried Optane (knowing it would fail) and rebooted. No boot device was found. So I changed it back, rebooted, and got the previously stated error message.

Time to revert to the old BIOS. But when picking any of the back level copies I got the message

"Selected file is not a proper BIOS" .

Either ASUS or AMI does not support downleveling, or there was something in the new BIOS that prohibited it.

Panic set in.

There is supposedly an ASUS (or AMI) function that recognizes a specially named BIOS file on a CD or USB device and will immediately enter the BIOS update function and load the BIOS. I renamed my old BIOS to the magic name. But there were no instructions on how to invoke this function. (If it is supposed to automatically happen during POST, it didn't work.)

However, on my 3rd feeble attempt to get that automatic function to work - with the flash drive in a different USB port - the boot was successful. Not the recovery function - I was still on the new BIOS. But Windows came up. It went into recovery so I guess it may have started to initialize at least once during the many boots. Recovery failed, but Windows came up with no obvious problem. On the new BIOS.

<Sheesh>

I never did check to see if POST is faster. I'll check that later.