Any chance of damage from test boot?

I got my hands on a refurbished ASUS Z87-A motherboard and have no idea what the BIOS
version is. The original board sticker indicates it's earlier than will support the
CPU I have to go in it, but I'm thinking the BIOS was likely updated when the board
was refurbished. The only way I know to check is to install the CPU in the board and
try to boot. Any chance of doing damage if the two aren't compatible? I'd hate to
jump through all the hoops I'll have to in order to flash to the current BIOS (long
story) only to learn the installed version was recent enough all along.

Larc

Larc larc notmyaddress.com wrote:

I got my hands on a refurbished ASUS Z87-A motherboard and have
no idea what the BIOS version is. The original board sticker
indicates it's earlier than will support the CPU I have to go in
it, but I'm thinking the BIOS was likely updated when the board
was refurbished. The only way I know to check is to install the
CPU in the board and try to boot. Any chance of doing damage if
the two aren't compatible? I'd hate to jump through all the
hoops I'll have to in order to flash to the current BIOS (long
story) only to learn the installed version was recent enough all
along.

If it doesn't support your CPU, it just won't boot.

On Sun, 10 Aug 2014 00:09:16 +0000 (UTC), John Doe
wrote:

| Larc larc notmyaddress.com wrote:
|
| I got my hands on a refurbished ASUS Z87-A motherboard and have
| no idea what the BIOS version is. The original board sticker
| indicates it's earlier than will support the CPU I have to go in
| it, but I'm thinking the BIOS was likely updated when the board
| was refurbished. The only way I know to check is to install the
| CPU in the board and try to boot. Any chance of doing damage if
| the two aren't compatible? I'd hate to jump through all the
| hoops I'll have to in order to flash to the current BIOS (long
| story) only to learn the installed version was recent enough all
| along.
|
| If it doesn't support your CPU, it just won't boot.

Thanks. So no chance of doing any harm then? My reason for testing would be to see
if it would boot (hopefully) or not (more or less expected). If I have to update the
BIOS, it will involve finding a compatible CPU and installing Windows 7 to an extra
HDD (the backup box I would do it on has XP installed on its C drive and this board
doesn't support XP). The BIOS update would have to be done using the ASUS Update
tool (a one-time requirement for new 4th generation CPUs) and that can be done only
from within the OS. No simple booting into the BIOS and doing it from there with EZ
Flash 2.

Larc

Larc wrote:
On Sun, 10 Aug 2014 00:09:16 +0000 (UTC), John Doe
wrote:

| Larc larc notmyaddress.com wrote:
|
| I got my hands on a refurbished ASUS Z87-A motherboard and have
| no idea what the BIOS version is. The original board sticker
| indicates it's earlier than will support the CPU I have to go in
| it, but I'm thinking the BIOS was likely updated when the board
| was refurbished. The only way I know to check is to install the
| CPU in the board and try to boot. Any chance of doing damage if
| the two aren't compatible? I'd hate to jump through all the
| hoops I'll have to in order to flash to the current BIOS (long
| story) only to learn the installed version was recent enough all
| along.
|
| If it doesn't support your CPU, it just won't boot.

Thanks. So no chance of doing any harm then? My reason for testing would be to see
if it would boot (hopefully) or not (more or less expected). If I have to update the
BIOS, it will involve finding a compatible CPU and installing Windows 7 to an extra
HDD (the backup box I would do it on has XP installed on its C drive and this board
doesn't support XP). The BIOS update would have to be done using the ASUS Update
tool (a one-time requirement for new 4th generation CPUs) and that can be done only
from within the OS. No simple booting into the BIOS and doing it from there with EZ
Flash 2.

Larc

The initial conditions for the processor, are established by hardware
control signals. It should be safe to test, even if the computer
was crashing because the RAM was bad. The BIOS itself might be
quite willing, but if the RAM was bad and it crashed, the BIOS
might no longer be executing. And that means the hardware must
be stable "without help".

What would be bad, would be loading a BIOS from some other
motherboard design, and the GPIO control signals don't line up,
the hardware is different and so on. To give an example of this,
my Asrock LGA775 board, the BIOS code has code for the wrong
clock generator in it. If you don't overclock, all is fine, because
the clock generator defaults without programming are quite
stable. But if I enter the BIOS and select 101MHz instead of
100MHz, that requires the BIOS to program the clock generator,
which fails miserable and leads to a crash. So that's an example
of an actual mis-match between hardware on the board, and what
the BIOS is trying to do. Your situation isn't like that.
Your situation is safe.

Paul

I think the easy rule in this situation is...

If all you might need is a BIOS update, it won't hurt the CPU.