I've had my new Z97 Extreme 6 board for about two weeks now, and it has worked fine. I was able to try a M.2 SSD in the M.2 slots this board has, and it worked flawlessly. I've been using the 1.20 UEFI/BIOS version since I started using this board, and it worked fine.
I noticed the new UEFI version 1.30 last night (5/30) and although it seemed to only adds support for the new Intel "Devil's Canyon" processors and also had a VBIOS update, I decided to update to this new version. I don't have a Devil's Canyon (DC) CPU (who does?), but in the past my ASRock Z77 and Z87 boards have all accepted every UEFI update perfectly (using Instant Flash only as the update method), and the version 1.30 update's description did not state the need to have a DC processor to use the 1.30 version.
So I download version 1.30, extracted the file and copied it to a USB flash drive. I had the USB flash drive in a USB 2.0 port, the same one I used to update to 1.20. I started Instant Flash, which recognized the 1.30 version fine (as well as versions 1.00 and 1.20, that are on the flash drive). I selected version 1.30 and started the update. The update seem a bit slower than 1.20, but there may have been more going on with this update than a typical update. The update to 1.30 finished normally, prompted me to press enter to restart, which I did.
That is the point when things went wrong. The PC would start for about one second, then turn off for about two seconds. It would then start again for one second, and again turn off. It continued in this cycle endlessly, the Boot Failure Guard option having no affect. I can't call this behavior a boot loop, since the PC was no where near booting. So this "POST loop" behavior continued over and over, until I switched off the PSU with its power switch. When I switched the PSU on again, and pressed the PC's power button, the one second on, two seconds off behavior started again. I never touched anything on the PC besides the PSU's power switch as I described above. I did not clear the UEFI/BIOS, as that is not the correct procedure when updating the UEFI.
Fortunately, I was able to use the back up UEFI to start the PC, and used the UEFI recovery procedure to restore UEFI version 1.00 to the main CMOS chip. I have since then flashed to UEFI version 1.20, which works fine and the PC is working normally now.
It's possible I had a bad download of the 1.30 UEFI, but the file was not rejected by Instant Flash. No checksums are provided to check the UEFI download, so I can't check the copy of 1.30 I have. The file size is the same as the two other UEFI versions, 8,196KB.
I would be very interested to know if anyone with a Z97 Extreme 6 board has had success using UEFI version 1.30, or if they experienced the same issue that I did. I'm reluctant to try flashing to 1.30 again. I'm using an i5-4670K processor.
I noticed the new UEFI version 1.30 last night (5/30) and although it seemed to only adds support for the new Intel "Devil's Canyon" processors and also had a VBIOS update, I decided to update to this new version. I don't have a Devil's Canyon (DC) CPU (who does?), but in the past my ASRock Z77 and Z87 boards have all accepted every UEFI update perfectly (using Instant Flash only as the update method), and the version 1.30 update's description did not state the need to have a DC processor to use the 1.30 version.
So I download version 1.30, extracted the file and copied it to a USB flash drive. I had the USB flash drive in a USB 2.0 port, the same one I used to update to 1.20. I started Instant Flash, which recognized the 1.30 version fine (as well as versions 1.00 and 1.20, that are on the flash drive). I selected version 1.30 and started the update. The update seem a bit slower than 1.20, but there may have been more going on with this update than a typical update. The update to 1.30 finished normally, prompted me to press enter to restart, which I did.
That is the point when things went wrong. The PC would start for about one second, then turn off for about two seconds. It would then start again for one second, and again turn off. It continued in this cycle endlessly, the Boot Failure Guard option having no affect. I can't call this behavior a boot loop, since the PC was no where near booting. So this "POST loop" behavior continued over and over, until I switched off the PSU with its power switch. When I switched the PSU on again, and pressed the PC's power button, the one second on, two seconds off behavior started again. I never touched anything on the PC besides the PSU's power switch as I described above. I did not clear the UEFI/BIOS, as that is not the correct procedure when updating the UEFI.
Fortunately, I was able to use the back up UEFI to start the PC, and used the UEFI recovery procedure to restore UEFI version 1.00 to the main CMOS chip. I have since then flashed to UEFI version 1.20, which works fine and the PC is working normally now.
It's possible I had a bad download of the 1.30 UEFI, but the file was not rejected by Instant Flash. No checksums are provided to check the UEFI download, so I can't check the copy of 1.30 I have. The file size is the same as the two other UEFI versions, 8,196KB.
I would be very interested to know if anyone with a Z97 Extreme 6 board has had success using UEFI version 1.30, or if they experienced the same issue that I did. I'm reluctant to try flashing to 1.30 again. I'm using an i5-4670K processor.
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