Help with Asus X99-A II 6800k compatibility?

Silly Ducklings · May 3, 2017

I know that the BIOS on this may not support the 6800k, but i'm in a bit of a pickle. So I'm helping a friend build a PC, and he's buying all the parts over the course of like a year, most of which are purchased, CPU and MB included, so returning things that don't work as intended probably isn't an option at this point. If we find out that we got an old one that doesn't support the 6800k, what can we do? Send it off to asus? I know of 0 people in the area who have a haswell e cpu, let alone people that would let us borrow one to update the bios. Any help would be appreciated.

Simon771 · May 3, 2017

Not sure if you can just send it back to ASUS just for BIOS update ... But you can ask vendor to update BIOS for you.

At least that's the option with mindfactory and caseking, where I order my hardware.

DrMikeNZ · May 3, 2017

That board has USB BIOS flashback, which is supposed to allow the BIOS to be updated without a CPU installed.

There is a very good chance that it will support the 6800K out of the box as it is a second gen X99 board that was released with the BW-E processors and its earliest validated BIOS supports BW-E.

Silly Ducklings · May 3, 2017

2 minutes ago, DrMikeNZ said:

That board has USB BIOS flashback, which is supposed to allow the BIOS to be updated without a CPU installed.

There is a very good chance that it will support the 6800K out of the box as it is a second gen X99 board that was released with the BW-E processors and its earliest validated BIOS supports BW-E.

I read you could only update the bios with a CPU installed from another thread about this on another site, but if I can just update it with a USB stick that would be awesome. Hopefully I don't have to though.

DrMikeNZ · May 3, 2017

Just now, Silly Ducklings said:

I read you could only update the bios with a CPU installed from another thread about this on another site, but if i can update it with my computer through USB or something that would be great. Hopefully I don't have to though.

Normally, in order to update the BIOS, the system needs all hardware installed so it can POST, and boot up. Then while in the BIOS, DOS or windows, you would run the flash program, this requires CPU, RAM, GPU, etc, so is unhelpful when dealing with compatibility issues.

The USB BIOS flashback feature bypasses this, and a separate chip reads the BIOS file (which has to be named in a certain way for it to detect) off a USB storage device connected to a specific labelled USB port, and it flashes the BIOS directly without the system needing to turn on. This is an extremely useful feature for motherboards to have. Even though I have never actually needed it, it is a feature I always look for in a motherboard.