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Bios issues with MSI B450i Gaming Plus AC?

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trents

trents

Senior Member
​
Joined
Dec 27, 2008
First,

It seems the DC mode for the CPU fan header does not work properly. I have my water cooler pump connected to it. If I set manual percentage in bios it seems to initially serve to reduce my pump speed but within a few seconds while still in bios it ramps back up to full speed. If my pump runs at full speed a get a tick sound and if I only reduce the rpm by about 10% the noise goes away. Right now my workaround is an inline resistor.

Second,

In the Overclocking section of bios, I am having difficulty comprehending what the CPU voltage "Offset" mode does and how it works or even if it is working properly. There is a + or - value assignment and then there is an option to leave the amount on Auto or assign a numerical value. One thing that I find annoying is that everytime I change from Override to Offset voltage it resets my CPU ratio to the stock 3200, even though in the ratio assignment box the ratio still shows 40. I have to manually reenter that 40 value before hitting F10 and rebooting. Even so, the offset voltage seems to always wind up the same (about 1.407v) upon reboot no matter whether I enter + or - or whatever numerical value I assign to the offset. How does this thing work and what does it do? Is it buggy or something or am I just not using it correctly? What I want it to do is to allow me to lower the boot voltage but then supplement the voltage under load. That's how it's worked with other motherboards I have owned down through the years.

I am running bios version A.60 which I updated to immediately upon setting the system up. I think the board shipped with A.20. A.60's change description was only that it made the board compatible with the upcoming Ryzen gen 3. Is A.60 buggy? Using the R7 2700 overclocked to 4.0 ghz with manual voltage setting of 1.35.

Thanks for any help or insight you can give.
 
Last I understood the "offset" was unavailable in MSI Bios. Sorry to link videos, but it's discussed here. That said I think if you enable cool n quiet and c6 etc, it should run the voltage down at lower loads. I'm not certain though as I don't use a manual overclock for daily driving, so I never looked at what it does under idle. I'll check next time I bench.

It seems like many BIOS have difficulty controlling a WC pump. One of the reasons I went with a D5 Vario instead of a PWM. Is there a WP setting vs fan? Sometimes boards won't adjust the speed on the WP setting.
 
Thanks for your reply. I'll check that link out.

No, there is no WP setting per se for the CPU fan header. Just PWM and DC. The pump has a three wire lead so PWM is out of the question and the DC mode in bios seems, as I said, not to work properly.

- - - Auto-Merged Double Post - - -

Zerileous, this was all I found in the thread from that link: "Latest MSI bios on x370s are shipping with offset voltage." Maybe I missed something. I have an Offset choice in bios but it doesn't behave like I would expect.
 
I had a similar issue with an MSI Intel board and my AIO recently and had to leave it on PWM, not DC because the pump only ran half speed. Using the pump header I still had to use the AIO SW to actually control it. Drove me batty at first.

Your other issue could be BIOS-specific. Different AM4 AGESA would sometimes mess with the voltage/speed dialing back in Windows that's why I am using an older BIOS on my CHVI. In the beginning once you change the multi on AM4 it goes into "OC" mode and would not let the voltage or speed drop in Windows. Later (2xxx) this was fixed somewhat but that really depended on the BIOS used. I found that for the most part with MSI if you have C&Q enabled it worked.
Going back to our previous discussion on that board the voltage control now sounds the same as it was then, not so good!
 
Not sure about the thread, just the point in the video where he states that it doesn't do negative vcore offset. They may have released updates since then in order to address that.
 
Zerileous said:
Not sure about the thread, just the point in the video where he states that it doesn't do negative vcore offset. They may have released updates since then in order to address that.
Click to expand...

Oh, you were referring to the video. I didn't watch that because the title seemed to indicate the content was about something else. In the thread someone stated that MSI had introduced a negative offset. It's there now in my bios but just doesn't seem to work like it should. These modern processor power algorithms are so complex it's hard to change one thing without it changing others, especially in a bios that lacks detailed options.

I wanted to try going back to the previous bios version but MSI doesn't permit backward flashing. Someone has come up with a hack workaround to permit flashing back to an earlier version but the hack was pretty involved and there is risk of bricking the bios. And it might not also fix anything even if done. So, at this point I'm just living with the quirks. Hopefully, once the gen 3 Ryzens are released MSI will begin issuing bios updates again and fix some of these things.
 
Well when I want to do that to my old Asus boards, I boot from original disk for the motherboard and use the bios recovery tool from that and the bios contained on the disk which is the one it ships with. You could try that maybe. No idea if MSI has that feature or not.
 
Shrimp, I have done that with Asus boards too. I looked for something like that on the MSI optical disk that came with the motherboard but I didn't look like there was something like that on the disk.
 
Ok looking through the disk and booting from it are 2 different things. Slap in the disk, boot from it and find out. You can always abort the operation. Wont hurt to try Trents.
 
Okay, I back flashed the bios using the tool referenced in this thread: https://forum-en.msi.com/index.php?topic=302638.0 It worked just fine and now I'm back to A.20. Don't see that it made any difference, at least not in the fan speed control issue. But in fooling with the fan speed tool in bios I can see now that if you choose PWM mode or DC mode it will apply to both the CPU fan header and the sys fan header. I can't separate them like I could on my ASRock board. That's kind of a bummer when your pump is not PWM. So I guess I'll have to keep my inline resistor hooked up.
 
Found this.

“Precision Boost Overdrive will receive more fine-grained control at the BIOS level, and AMD is making significant changes to this feature to make the boost setting more flexible and improve the algorithm. Early adopters of AGESA Combo 0.0.7.x on AMD 400-series chipset motherboards noticed that PBO broke or became buggy on their machines. This is because of poor integration of the new PBO algorithm with the existing one compatible with "Pinnacle Ridge." AMD also implemented "Core Watchdog", a feature that resets the system in case address or data errors destabilize the machine.”

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.te...als-new-options-for-overclocking-tweaking?amp
 
That's confusing to me because PBO is for Threadripper, not Pinnacle Ridge. Why would they put it in the bios of non Threadripper boards?
 
There is a feature on my board called "Precision Boost Overdrive." I believe it was initially supported with TR, but is also available to the X series Pinnacle Ridge chips. According to this (about 1/3 of the way down) it is supported only on the x470 chipset as well.

Bustos, not sure if this should have it's own thread though, how is it related to trents' issues?
 
Trents said how his latest bios update mentions compatibility with Ryzen 3000 chips. I thought PBO is related to offset voltage. Thus the relevance of the article I posted. If I am wrong about PBO being related to offset voltage, nevermind me then. 😁

Edit: Okay Zerileous explained to me in a different thread how this doesn’t apply to Trents since he’s manually overclocking. Nevermind me.
 
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