No luck recovering from Secure Boot with an iGPU-free CPU on a Z390 mobo. Keep trying or upgrade sooner than planned?

[NewbieOne]

I have (or had) an i5-9600KF @ Aorus Z390 Pro and a discrete 1070ti.

 

Turned PTT on and CSM off, so far it worked. Turned Secure Boot on, and it didn't work. No video signal. I've done my research and tried the solutions, but nothing works (such as trying different GPUs, removing hard drives and plugging a bootable USD stick directly into mobo, etc.). The only thing I haven't tried is using a CPU with an integrated GPU in the hope that it will get me to BIOS. Or I could RMA the mobo and wait a month, or maybe try and get the bios chips replaced (this Aorus doesn't have the physical primary/secondary switches from the highest-end models) and forfeit warranty. And neither of these two solutions is guaranteed to work. Or I could indeed buy the cheapest 8th/9th gen CPU with an iGPU just to try to enter BIOS with it, though that could be a waste of time and money.

 

Or I could accelerate my platform upgrade. I was going to upgrade anyway but holding off till later this year because of all the upcoming releases from Intel and AMD, which would either be worth buying (the 5800X3D in particular more likely than not) or at least make current tech significantly cheaper by end year than now. My existing rig was sufficient for work and quite good for gaming, especially considering that I was going to play older, less demanding games for a long while (Divinity: Original Sin saga, Pathfinder: Kingmaker, NWN:EE modules, etc.) and nothing from my wishlist is releasing any time soon (Dragon Age and Mass Effect continuations, Fallen Order 2 and KCD2, essentially).

 

So, here are my options:

 

1. Be a patient little boy. RMA the mobo, wait patiently and hope they don't ignore my explicit request to hard-flash the BIOS. One month from now l'll probably be fine and 5800X3D will probably be out anyway, so I'll be selling my existing CPU and mobo some time after it comes back.
2. Be an impatient but resourceful little boy and get the BIOS chips replaced somewhere downtown. Much hassle, probably not that much cash to pay, and likely forfeited warranty.
3. Grab a cheap-ass used z490 mobo and 11700K or 11900K.
4. Overpay for a z690 mobo (the prices are scandalous!) and get 12700K because it seems often to be at least 10% faster in side-to-side gaming benchmarks on YouTube than 11700K and 12600K. Where 11700K and 12600K alternate places, 12700K is uniformly better by a somewhat small but noticeable margin. Like 10%. Which is incidentally the difference between 55 fps and 60 fps, so it obviously can matter.
5. Get a z690 mobo but look for a 12600K (a little bit of a shortage/price spike right now where I live), later to sell it and buy a 13900K when that comes out, hoping that it will still support DDR4 when running off of a z590 board. Slot out and forget for a while.
6. Wait for 5800X3D. Should be less power-hungry than Intel, and with my Corsair RM750 CPU an overclocked 12th gen Intel plus an overlocked 3000 or 4000 series GPU could be tight-squeezed for juice.
7. Wait for the first thing AMD releases on a new slot, buy DDR5 and look forward to the platform's slow process of aging compared to Intel.
8. Be a thrifty little boy, buy a 11600K and a cheap used flashed z490 mobo, sell the 9600kf, then sell the Aorus after it comes back from RMA, for a minimum monetary loss but not a very noticeable upgrade either? Put the money in the GPU jar, OC the heck out of 11600K with ALF II 420 if needed and continue to hold out waiting for new releases?

The problem with long-term scenarios is that you never know what's gonna happen in global economy with the war in Ukraine, let alone if something brews between Red China and Taiwan. Or another pandemic, or some sort of 11th wave of Covid on steroids. It might be prudent to buy a mobo and CPU while they're still there, before the same thing happens to them as to GPUs.

 

Speaking of GPUs, an 12th generation rig would cost me 50+ extra on top of a 11th generation rig, with a 10% gain. So maybe it would be better to go for the more modest platform upgrade and put the rest of the money in the GPU jar?

 

There are a bit too many variables here to sort the riddle out without much first-hand experience with anything newer than 9th gen.

 

WWYD?

 

 

 

[Guest]

I skimmed the book... TLDR it all....

 

Did you try and clear cmos?

[Pandur]

And you have properly cleared CMOS? I mean; AC plug out, battery out, touch the magic pins with something metal. Go eat dinner. Watch a movie. Whatever. Try again some time later.

 

This should default back to settings with vga output from the graphics card. A 1070ti is uefi/secure boot compatible. So it should not just stop working after enabling that.

[NewbieOne]

Unplugged AC. Removed battery for 10 minutes. Touched pins with screwdriver for half a minute. Left a jumper on them for 10 minutes.

 

According to some forums I found via google clearing CMOS rarely helps with this.

 

Could be something with the system, I guess. Like wrong disk partition format or whatever. But I also tried without hard disks.

 

Edit: My situation is like the last guy's in [url=https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/no-display-after-enabling-secure-boot-and-fast-boot.3711720/]this thread[/url], except using an old graphics card (8800GT) didn't help.

 

Edit2: Left the mobo unplugged, with battery removed and cmos_reset pins shorted for an hour. No improvement. Also made a GPT system USB / bios flash disk, but apparently that's not helping either. So it looks like I'm out of options other than having the bios dies flashed with professional equipment, but I've already filed the RMA, so I expect a courier to show up on Monday or Tuesday and be back a month later. So back to considering my upgrade options.